A Kettle's Worth of Copper
The kettle on the fire, worn bright at the handle,
the one thing in the room that shone.
She dyed the wool to match it
and the room had two.
In a Boujad kitchen the kettle is copper, and it is the one thing that shines. It sits on the fire all day, worn bright where hands have held it, and when the light is low it is the warmest colour in the house. This rug is dyed to that kettle. The ground is copper and rust, deeper where the dye pot ran strong, and the shapes across it are drawn with the free hand of the Tadla plains, a little askew at the edges, as the rug itself is, slightly out of true the way hand-built things are. We took it for the colour, which is rare, and for the pile, which at two centimetres is unusually deep for a Boujad.
It has worn well, soft and thick, with the honest marks the photos show. It lives now in a canal house in Amsterdam, in a reading corner with one leather chair and a window onto the water, and when the lamp goes on in the evening the rug does what the kettle did.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.