Four Metres of Evening
Purple to the edges, then a little pink,
the way the sky goes after the sun has gone.
She made it long enough
to walk the whole evening on.
Four metres is a long rug, and a long rug in the Middle Atlas means a long room: the family room, the one where everyone sleeps in a row in winter with their feet to the fire. This one was knotted for that room around 1980, purple from end to end with a lattice of pink and cream drawn across it like the last light on snow. The diamonds are small and many, so from a distance the whole thing shimmers rather than patterns, and the eye travels down its length the way it travels down an evening.
The pile has settled to two centimetres and gone soft as a cardigan. Forty winters in, and better for every one of them. It is the rug for a hallway with a view at the end of it, or a bedroom large enough to let it run under the bed and out the other side.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.