Walking the Length of the Dusk
Long as the path from the spring to the door.
Purple from end to end, the colour of the hour she walked it.
Diamonds set along it like stones to step on.
She never once lost her way.
There is a path the Zaïan women walk twice a day, from the spring to the house, and in winter they walk it back in the dusk with the water on their shoulders and the whole valley going violet around them. This rug is that walk. Three metres and more of it, narrow as a path, purple from one end to the other, with the strong Zaïan diamonds set along its length like the flat stones you step on where the ground is wet. The Zaïan are cousins of the Beni M'Guild and tie their rugs the same way, deep and dense for the cold, but they draw harder, with a surer line, and you can see it here in the way the diamonds hold their edges after forty years.
The pile is still high, nearly three fingers, and the purple has gone the colour of a late plum in shade. It wants a hallway, or the long side of a bed, or any room where people walk from one end to the other and would rather do it on wool.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.