The Red Road to the Summer Pastures
In May the whole village moves uphill,
sheep, children, the loom in pieces on a mule.
She wove the road they walked
four metres of it, red as the dust.
Twice a year the Beni M'Guild move: up to the high pastures in late spring, down again before the snow. The looms travel with them, dismantled and strapped to a mule, and the long rugs are woven in stages, a stretch at each camp. This one is four metres and more of red, three centimetres deep, twenty-five kilos of wool, with dark and cream motifs marking it the way stones mark a path. It covered the floor of a tent in summer and a house in winter, and it has come through forty years of both with the kind of wear that only improves a rug: the pile dense and yielding, the red gone from bright to deep.
It needs length, and rewards it. A country kitchen with a long refectory table, a converted barn, a wide corridor in a house where everyone comes in through the same door.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.