The Wall the Evening Painted
Ochre walls at four in the afternoon,
pink by six, and nobody surprised.
She knew the colour by heart
and tied it down before it went.
The walls of Boujad are the colour of the earth they were built from, a dull ochre at noon that nobody looks at twice, and then towards six in the evening the sun drops and the whole town goes pink, every wall at once, for about twenty minutes. The women who grew up here could tie that colour with their eyes shut. The ground of this rug is that evening wall, peach going to rose, and the shapes across it are set down with the looseness of a hand that was not trying to prove anything, the Boujad habit that makes these rugs look like paintings when every other rug in the room looks like a rug.
The pile is short and has been walked soft over forty years, with honest wear you can see in the photos. It lies now in a farmhouse on Mallorca, on old terracotta tiles in a room with one deep window, and in the evening the two pinks, the wall's and the wool's, find each other again.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.