Matching a Thread to Sixty Years of Sun

The rug arrived folded four times inside a plastic sheet, and the man who carried it did not want to stay for tea. A Baluch, maybe sixty years old, its brown fields eaten into powder — iron mordant does that; it keeps corroding the wool long after the dyer is gone. I opened it on the floor and let it breathe for a day before I touched it.

Matching the brown took eleven days. Madder gives red, walnut husk a softer brown, pomegranate rind something in between. I dyed small skeins and hung them on the roof, then brought them down and held them against the rug under the bulb. None of them agreed with each other.

Light Is Part of the Material

In this city the electricity comes and goes, so I learned to work by the window and to judge color in the morning, when the light has not yet decided what it wants to be. A restorer in a bright studio would finish faster. I finish slower, and the rug keeps its own weather.

A thread that matches under a bulb will lie to you on the roof.

Rebuilding the eaten field meant knotting around warp that had thinned to almost nothing in two places. I retied the warp with cotton, not wool, because cotton holds when the air dries. Eight knots to the centimeter, the same count the old weaver used, though I could not tell you his name or his village.

What I Leave Alone

Not every worn place is damage. Where the pile is flattened at the edge, someone knelt there for years; where the fringe is short, a child cut it, or a goat did. I replace the structure and leave the traces. A rug that looks new has forgotten everything it was asked to carry.

Some worn places are not damage. They are where a house walked.

He came back on a Thursday, looked at it a long time without kneeling, paid what I asked, and said the brown was right. That is the whole review. I swept the floor, put the leftover skeins in the drawer with the others, and started on a Senneh kilim that has been waiting since spring.