Pink Enough to Be Heard
Not the pink of petals. The pink of a shout.
A diamond in the middle, wide as a door,
and the colour going on past it
as if it had somewhere to be.
There is a loud pink, and the Tadla plains are the only place in the world that make it in wool. This rug is that pink, four metres twenty of it, raspberry and magenta knotted in the 1970s, with one enormous diamond in the centre outlined in cream and a second colour of pink inside it, as if the weaver had to raise her voice to be heard over her own ground. It is not a shy object. It is the kind of rug a room is built around.
Fifty years have taken the sharpest edge off the magenta and given it the softness of a thing that has been walked on by people who loved it. The pile is two centimetres and even. It belongs in a big white space, a loft, a converted chapel, a dining room with nothing else in colour, where it can be the whole story.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.