What the Dusk Left on the Floor
The sun goes behind the cedars at five.
For a quarter of an hour the snow is purple.
She had been waiting all day for that colour,
and she took it inside with her.
In January above Khenifra the light does a thing at the end of the afternoon that people who have not lived there do not believe. The sun drops behind the cedar ridge, the sky goes the colour of a bruise healing, and for a quarter of an hour the snow on the roofs is purple, and then it is dark. The Beni M'Guild women have been dyeing their wool that colour for as long as anyone can remember, and nobody has ever needed to explain why. This rug is that quarter of an hour, tied two fingers deep across three metres, with the lattice drawn so softly into the ground that you see it only when you kneel.
Forty years of feet have brushed the pile to the sheen of a plum, and the purple has gone deeper rather than paler, the way a good red wine does. It lies now in a bedroom with pale walls and nothing on them, and the room does not need anything else.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.