Bark-Brown and Deep as Moss
Under the cedars the ground is soft all year.
Needles, moss, the brown of a thousand autumns.
She made the floor of the house
feel like the floor of the forest.
Walk into a cedar forest above the snowline in summer and the first thing you notice is the ground. It gives. Centuries of needles and moss have made a floor so deep and soft that the cold cannot come up through it, and the Beni M'Guild, who live at the forest's edge and cut its dead wood for their fires, know that floor better than anyone. This rug is a memory of it. Brown as bark, three centimetres of pile, seventeen kilos of wool, tied for a shepherd's house where the floor was earth and the winter was six months long. It is not a decorative rug. It is a rug that was asked to do a job and did it, for forty years, without complaint.
The pile has kept its depth, and the brown has the soft, even warmth of wool that has been walked on by generations of bare feet. It lies now in a bedroom with white linen and a wooden bed, and the room is quieter for it, the way a forest is.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.