The Fire Did Not Need Lighting
Three fingers of red across the whole floor.
The children slept on it in a row.
In the morning the frost was on the inside of the window
and nobody had noticed.
This is a rug for a family, and a big one. Three and a half metres by more than two, tied three fingers deep in a red the colour of embers when the blaze has gone and the heat has not, it would have covered the whole floor of the main room in a Beni M'Guild house and the children would have slept on it in a row, feet to the wall, with the blankets over them and the wool under them doing more than the blankets did. On a morning when the frost had formed on the inside of the window, nobody on this rug would have noticed. That was its job and it did it for forty years.
The pile is still deep, the red has mellowed from a shout to a glow, and the lattice runs through it in a darker thread you see best from across the room. It is a lot of rug. It wants a big room to match, a long living room with a sofa that seats six, a family kitchen with a table in the middle, somewhere with children in it, ideally, because that is what it knows.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.