A Bed Laid for the Coldest Month
January, and the water froze in the jug.
She tied the knots two fingers deep,
then a third for luck,
and the whole family slept on the red.
In the month when the water freezes in the jug by the door, a Beni M'Guild family does not sleep in beds. They sleep on the floor, together, on the thickest rug the house owns, with the blankets over them and the embers banked in the corner, and the children in the middle where it is warmest. This was that rug. She tied it deep, two fingers and then a third, with the pile facing up for the cold months, because a rug this thick is not a floor covering at all but a mattress with a pattern on it, and the pattern was for the daytime, when the blankets were folded away and the red could be seen.
The pile is still a good two and a half centimetres, soft and heavy under the hand, and the red has settled into itself over forty years without going dull. In its new life it lies in a bedroom with pale walls and a low bed, and the first thing a bare foot finds in the morning is wool that was made for exactly that.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.