Mist on the Cedar Line
The cloud comes down to the trees at dawn
and the forest stands in it to the knee.
Cream below, dark above,
and the day deciding.
On the high slopes the cloud comes down at dawn and sits on the cedar line, so that for an hour the forest stands knee-deep in white with its dark crowns above. The women see it from the roof as they shake out the bedding. This rug is that hour. It is undyed, cream below and the dark brown of the fleece drawn across it in the lattice the Beni M'Guild have always tied, and dense, seventeen kilos of wool over three metres by two, made for a floor and a winter and not for a shop. The pile has worn to a centimetre, soft and level, the way a rug wears when a family has lived on it for forty years and been kind to it.
It lives now in a Vienna apartment with high white rooms and honey-coloured parquet, under a round table by the window, and in the mornings, when the city is grey, it is the one pale and certain thing in the house.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.