Dark Plum, Walked to Velvet
Twenty kilos of wool and forty years of feet.
The pile went down, the colour went deeper.
What is left is the plum at the bottom of the bowl,
the one everyone wanted.
Some rugs get thinner with age and some get better, and the difference is in how they were made. This one weighs more than twenty kilos, which for its size means the knots were tied close and the wool was packed hard, and that is why forty years of walking have not worn it down so much as polished it. The pile is a finger and a half now, where it was probably three, and what it has lost in height it has gained in surface. It has the sheen of velvet and the colour of the darkest plum in the bowl, the one that has been in the sun all afternoon, and the lattice shows through it the way a pattern shows through old silk, present without insisting.
Three and a half metres long and not too wide, it is a rug that was made for a big room and has spent its life in one, and it carries itself that way. It suits a house with a sense of proportion, a long room with a stone floor and a fire, a library, somewhere the dark colour can hold the ground while everything else in the room stays light.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.