Cedar Bark and Morning Frost
Grey bark, white ground, the forest at seven.
Nothing moving but the breath of the mules.
She wove the two colours she could see
and left the rest to the day.
At seven on a winter morning the cedar forest above Khenifra is two colours, the ground white with frost and the trunks grey, and nothing has woken yet except the mules, whose breath hangs in the air. The women who walk through it to gather wood see that a hundred times a winter, and this rug is one of them setting it down. It is undyed, the cream and brown of her own flock, tied deep, two centimetres, because warmth is the first job of a Beni M'Guild rug and beauty the second, and it is the kind of rug that went down in the main room and stayed a generation.
The pile is thick and has worn softly, with the honest marks of a long life in the photos. It lives now in a timber house in the mountains, on old larch planks in front of a stove, and when the snow is on that roof as it was on the roof it was made under, it is where it should be.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.