The Quiet After the Shearing
The shears are put away.
The wool lies in heaps like small clouds.
She takes the cream and the one brown fleece
and begins to make a floor.
The shearing is in May, when the snow has gone from all but the highest ground, and for a week the whole village smells of lanolin and river water. Then the quiet comes. The fleeces are washed and dried on the rocks, the best cream set aside, the single brown fleece from the dark ewe kept apart for the lines, and the loom goes up in the shade of the house. This rug came out of one of those summers: three centimetres of undyed pile, lozenges drawn in brown with a steady, unhurried hand.
It has the softness that only Beni Ourain wool reaches after forty years underfoot. The cream has warmed, the brown has held, and the pile gives under a bare foot and rises again. It is a rug for a bedroom, or for the room where the morning light comes in first: pale floor, a chair, a plant, and this.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.