Nearly Square, Like the Courtyard
Four walls, one square of sky,
the tea tray in the middle of the floor.
She measured the rug by the room
and the room by how many could sit.
A Boujad house is built around its courtyard, a square of packed earth or tile open to the sky, where the tea is poured and the guests are seated. Most rugs are long, because most rooms are long, but now and then a woman wove one for the courtyard itself, near enough to square, big enough for everyone to sit around the tray with their backs to the walls. This is one of those. Its tones are the quiet ones, cream and sand and the warm brown of the wool as it came off the sheep, and the shapes move across it loosely, the way Boujad shapes do when nobody is telling the weaver what to do.
The pile is short and even, with the settled feel of a rug a great many people have sat on. It lives now in a loft in Brooklyn, under a low oak table with cushions around it, which is to say that forty years later it is still doing exactly what it was made for.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.