The Lattice She Drew in Rust
Four and a half metres of winter sheep,
and one brown ewe for the lines.
She did not measure. She remembered.
The diamonds came out even anyway.
High on the Middle Atlas the Beni Ourain keep sheep whose wool is the colour of fresh milk, and once in a while a brown one is born, and its fleece is kept apart for the lines. This rug used almost a whole year of that brown. The lattice runs the full length of it, a net of lozenges drawn in rust and walnut across a cream so deep the hand sinks into it, five centimetres of pile knotted for a floor where a family of seven slept side by side with their feet to the brazier. It is a big rug by any measure, longer than most rooms, and it was made that way on purpose: a tent floor, a whole household.
Forty years later the cream has warmed to the colour of old linen and the brown has gone soft at the edges, the way ink does on good paper. In a tall room with a long table or a wide bed and nothing on the walls, it does what it was made for. Everyone ends up on it.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.