Where the Sun Went Into the Wool
The flock came down at dusk, slow,
and the whole hillside was the colour of embers.
She kept that light in a sack of wool
and spent a winter tying it down.
Shearing comes in spring, but the colour comes in autumn, when the Beni M'Guild bring their flocks down from the summer pastures and the whole slope above Khenifra goes orange at dusk. This weaver had more than twenty kilos of wool and a loom long enough for four metres, and she used both to keep that light. Three centimetres of pile, rust and orange, with darker motifs set into it like the shapes of the sheep against the hill. It is a rug built to carry a household through the cold months, and it has done so for forty years, each one leaving the wool a little softer and the colour a little more like a memory of itself.
It will take a large room without flinching: a kitchen-living space with concrete floors and a long wooden table, or a wide landing in an old house where nothing else is needed.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.