Pink Washed Down from the Roof
Dyed on the roof, rinsed on the roof,
the pink water running down the drain to the street.
The neighbours knew what she was making
before they saw it.
In Boujad the roofs are where the work is done. The wool is dyed up there in a tin basin over a brazier, rinsed up there in buckets carried up the stairs, and spread up there to dry on the warm tiles, and when a woman dyes a whole fleece pink the water runs down the drainpipe and across the street and the neighbours know before they have seen a thread of it that someone's daughter is getting married. This rug is that pink, a good three metres of it, laid down loose and free in the Boujad way, the shapes drifting across the field like the pink water finding its own path down the roof, nothing squared off, nothing explained.
It was a bride's rug and it has been a family's rug since, and the pile has gone short and soft with the years, which is how the Boujad women like it anyway. The pink has settled to the colour of the inside of a shell. It lives now in a room with white walls and a lot of books, and it is the thing people notice first and talk about last, because by then they have sat down on it.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.