A Tray Left Out in the Sun
The tea tray forgotten on the roof wall,
copper going from bright to warm as the day went.
By five it was the colour of the rug
she had been trying to make all month.
Someone left the tea tray out on the roof wall after breakfast, and nobody went up for it until evening. By then the sun had been on the copper all day and it had gone from the hard shine of the morning to something warmer and deeper, the colour of a rooftop at five o'clock, and the woman who went to fetch it stood looking at it for a while before she picked it up. Weavers notice things like that. This rug is a Boujad in that copper, a warm orange-brown laid across the field with other colours set into it in the loose, unplanned way of the plains, and with cotton in the weft among the wool, the way the Boujad women like to work.
It is a heavy rug for its size, close-knotted, with a low pile that forty years have brushed smooth. It has gone to a sitting room with black steel windows and white walls, where the copper is the only warm thing in the room and the room is grateful for it.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.