Petals on the Wedding Floor
Rose petals thrown from the roof,
landing on wool already the same colour.
Seven days of dancing,
and the pink did not come out.
At a Boujad wedding the rugs go down in the courtyard and the rose petals come down from the roof, thrown by the women leaning over the parapet, and for a week nobody sweeps. A rug like this one would have been laid out for that. It is big, well over three metres by two, the size brought out for the occasions that matter, and the colour is the wedding itself, peach and rose and a pink that deepens in places as if the petals had stained it. The shapes across it have the loose, happy, improvised look that Boujad weavers are loved for, and that other tribes, with their careful diamonds, never allowed themselves.
It is heavy, nearly fifteen kilos, dense wool under a short pile that forty years of feasts and ordinary Tuesdays have worn soft. It lies now in a bedroom in Provence, on pale limestone, with the bed in the middle of it and the shutters half closed, and it is still, when the light is right, faintly the colour of petals.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.