Cut Narrow for the Tent Wall
A tent floor is long and not wide.
She wove to the shape of her summer,
purple, a little crooked at one end,
the way the ground was.
The Beni M'Guild spent their summers in black tents on the high pastures, and a tent floor is a particular shape, long and not very wide, with the sleeping places along the wall. A rug made for it comes out long and narrow, like this one, nearly three and a half metres by a metre and a half, and because a tent is pitched on a slope more often than not, the loom was never quite level and the rug is not quite straight. It is a little wider at one end than the other. The women did not mind and neither should you, because it is the honest shape of a thing made for a real floor on a real hillside, and it lies down flat and true.
The purple is deep and the pile is still high, two and a half fingers, and forty years have taken the sharpness off the diamonds and left them like shapes remembered rather than drawn. It is the rug for a long room, a corridor with a window at the end, the stretch of floor beside a bed, anywhere a narrow run of colour can do more than a square of it.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.