The Weight of a Mountain Night
Dark wool, deep as a well,
wide as the room the whole family slept in.
Twenty-six kilos she carried to the loom
and the night lay down on it.
Twenty-six kilos. Before it was a rug it was a flock's worth of fleece, carried down in sacks, washed in the cold river, combed, spun by firelight over a whole winter of evenings. Then she dyed it dark, the colour the cedar forest goes an hour after sunset, and began. A rug this size, over four metres by two, was the floor of the big room where the family slept together through the snow months, children in the middle, elders by the wall. Three fingers of pile between them and the stone.
It has aged into something quietly magnificent. The dark ground has taken on the faint sheen that only decades of wool on wool can give, and the pile is still deep enough to lose a toe in. In a modern house it becomes the floor of the whole living space: a long room with a fireplace, a wall of glass, one large sofa and almost nothing else.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.