Violet Between the Olive Rows
Five o'clock in the grove, the sun gone low.
Every shadow under every tree turns violet.
She walked home down the row
and had the colour by the time she reached the door.
There is an hour in the olive groves outside Boujad when the sun drops behind the ridge and the shadows under the trees, which have been grey all day, turn violet for no reason anyone has ever explained. It lasts long enough to walk home in. A weaver who walks that row every evening of the picking season sees it a hundred times a year, and this rug is what one of them did about it. A lavender purple, soft rather than deep, the colour of the shade and not the fruit, laid down long and narrow like the row itself, with a pile a good two centimetres thick so that it has something of the softness of the ground under the trees.
It is a corridor shape, three metres by a metre and a half, and forty years have made the colour gentler and the wool softer without taking the pile. It runs now down a hallway with white walls and a black front door, and the hour between five and six, when the light comes in low, is its hour.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.