A Whole Night Without a Pattern
No lattice, no diamond, no border to keep her in.
Just the colour of the sky at the end of the day,
three fingers deep, from edge to edge,
because that night that was all she wanted.
Most Beni M'Guild women draw as they go, a lattice, a row of diamonds, a border to hold the field together, and the drawing is half the pleasure. This one did not. She dyed the whole fleece the purple of a January dusk and then she tied it, three fingers deep, from one selvedge to the other, and she let the colour be the rug. It takes a certain nerve to do that across more than three metres, and a certain confidence in your dye pot, because a plain field forgives nothing. Hers did not need forgiving. The purple is even from end to end, deep where the pile stands, lifted to plum where forty years of use have brushed it, and the only pattern is the one the light makes as it moves across the room.
It is heavy, nearly twenty kilos, the weight of a rug meant to keep a stone floor warm all winter. In a house today it does the opposite of shouting. Under a dark wooden table, or across the floor of a bedroom with white walls, it is the quietest big thing in the room, and the one people keep looking at.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.