Lunch Under the Olive Nets
November, the nets spread under every tree.
Olives falling like slow rain.
At noon the red rug came out of the cart
and the whole grove sat down on it.
The olive harvest on the plains around Boujad is a family affair that goes on for weeks, and at noon it stops. The nets stay spread under the trees with the morning's olives in them, the ladders stay leaning where they are, and the red rug that has come out in the cart with the bread and the tagine is unrolled on the flattest bit of ground in the shade, and everybody sits down on it, grandmothers and children and the men with their arms still aching from the beating poles. A rug for this has to be big and tough and a colour that does not mind a stray olive. Red, then, two centimetres of it, three and a half metres long.
It was woven around 1990 and has had thirty years of exactly that kind of use, which has softened it without wearing it. It has come indoors to a dining room with a long walnut table and sage walls, where the red looks as if it had been chosen for the paint rather than the other way round.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.