Where the Red Goes to Rest
Coral at the edges, red at the core,
diamonds nested one inside the other
like the rings in a cut tree.
She was counting years, not knots.
Look at the centre of this rug and you are looking at nested diamonds, one inside the next inside the next, drawn in ivory on a ground of red and coral, the way the rings show in a cut cedar. That is the Zayan way of saying time. It was knotted around 1980 by a woman who counted her rows the way her mother had, and the result is a composition as steady as a pulse: the red deepening towards the middle, the coral lightening towards the edge, the ivory lines holding it all in place.
Three centimetres of wool and forty years of use have given it the softness that only thick rugs reach, and the surface has the glow that good red wool takes on with age. It is almost square, which makes it the rug for the centre of a room: under a round table, between two sofas, in the middle of a bedroom where the bed can sit on it like a boat.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.