The Black Sheep's Winter Coat
Every flock has a few dark ones.
Their wool is kept apart, for the lines.
She kept it for the whole rug instead,
and made the night itself into a floor.
In every Beni M'Guild flock there are a few dark sheep, and their fleece is usually set aside for the lines and the borders, a little black to draw with on a field of colour. It takes a stubborn woman to do the opposite, to gather the dark wool from years of shearings until there is enough of it for a whole rug, and then to tie it two and a half fingers deep across three metres so that the floor becomes the colour of the night outside. This is that rug. It is not a flat black. It has the brown of the animal in it, warmer where the light falls, and the lattice is there if you look, a shade darker still, like a thought in the dark.
It is heavy, eighteen kilos, and forty years have given the pile the soft give of a good wool coat. In a contemporary house it is the rug that makes everything around it look brighter, a pale floor, white walls, a single wooden chair. Designers reach for a dark rug for exactly this reason, and this one was reached for first by a woman who simply liked her black sheep.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.