What the Dress Became
A cotton dress, worn to the thread.
Too good to burn, too thin to wear.
She tore it into strips at the kitchen table
and it went into the rug, pink on pink.
Nothing is wasted on the plains. A cotton dress that has been washed so often it has gone soft as paper does not get thrown away; it gets torn into strips at the kitchen table one evening and wound into a ball, and when the next rug goes onto the loom the strips go in with the wool, in the weft where they will not show as cloth but will show as colour. The Boujad women have always done this, which is why their rugs sometimes have a pink no dye pot in the region could have produced. This rug has cotton in it, among the wool, and a pink that may well have been someone's dress once, laid across three and a half metres in shapes that lean and wander the way Boujad shapes do.
The pile is a little over a centimetre and lies flat and light, and the colours have the ease of forty years of sun. It has found a bedroom with a brass bed and pale pink walls, which sounds like too much pink and is, in fact, exactly right.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.