Marigolds Along the Whole Floor
October, and the dye pot ran orange
for three days without stopping.
She wove the colour of the last warm week
so January would have one too.
There is a week in autumn, up where the Beni M'Guild graze their flocks, when the light turns the colour of marigolds and everyone knows what is coming. A woman with twenty kilos of wool and a long loom decided to keep that week. She dyed deep, tangerine and rust, and knotted it two fingers thick across nearly four metres, with a lattice running through it like the lines of a field seen from above. The rug was a hearth before there was a fire. Decades of bare feet have brushed the orange to a glow rather than a shout, and the wool has that softness only time and use can give.
Today it belongs in a pale room that needs one warm decision: oak floors, white plaster, a single long sofa. Lay it down and the whole room comes to the table.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.