The Ewe Before the Dye Pot
Before the purple, before the red,
there was the fleece as it came off the animal.
She kept this one as it was,
two fingers deep.
Every Beni M'Guild rug begins with a fleece on the roof and a woman picking the burrs out of it; the dye pot comes into the story later. Now and then it never does. This rug was tied in the wool's own colours, the creams and greys and browns of the flock, which among a people famous for their purples was a quiet decision and a confident one. The lattice is there, drawn in the darker fleece, but the eye goes first to the pile, two centimetres, dense and springy, made for a house where the snow lies on the roof from December to March. These are the rugs the modernists put under their steel chairs, and they were right.
It has aged softly, the cream warming a shade, with honest wear in the photos. It lives now in a flat in Oslo with white walls and a fjord in the window, under a pair of low chairs, and in the long summer evenings it holds the light an hour after everything else has let it go.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.