The Orange of a Lamp Through Wool
Walk past a Beni M'Guild house after dark
and the window is this colour:
a lamp behind a woollen curtain,
the whole winter kept inside.
If you walk through a village above Khenifra after dark in winter, when the shutters are closed against the cold and the snow has stopped, you see this colour in the windows, a lamp burning behind a woollen curtain, an orange with the warmth of the room in it. It is the colour of being on the inside. She knew it, because she had seen it every night of her life, and she dyed a whole fleece to match and tied it two and a half fingers deep so that the floor would glow the way the window did. It is nearly square, which is unusual for the Beni M'Guild, who weave long, and it suggests a room with the loom set across it rather than along, a woman making a rug for one particular floor.
Forty years have warmed the orange towards tangerine and softened the lattice until it is more a rhythm than a line. In a contemporary house it is the rug for the room where people gather in the evening, under a long table or in front of a wide sofa, where it does what the lamp did and makes everyone look well.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.