Charcoal Lines on the Morning
The fire is out and the ash is grey.
She takes a stick from it
and draws the first line of the day
on a field of nothing but wool.
Morning in a Beni Ourain house begins with ash. The fire has gone to grey in the night, someone rakes it, and in the light coming under the door the floor is a long pale field of cream wool with a few dark lines running across it, as if the day had been sketched before it started. That is the whole idea of these rugs. The seventeen tribes of the high Middle Atlas kept their sheep white and their patterns few, and the lines are the dark brown of the one brown ewe in a hundred, spun separately and used like a pencil.
This one is heavy, twenty kilos, which tells you the knotting is dense, and the pile has worn to a close centimetre and a half over forty years. The lines have the slight waver of a hand not trying to be straight. The modernists put these under their steel chairs; it is just as happy under an old oak table with nothing else on the floor.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.