December 10

It’s been a cold clear winter day today, the 10^th day of December, with its own kind of beauty.  There’s a dryness to the air, and the sun never gets very high in the sky, or very warm, as we approach the solstice and the official beginning of the next season, namely winter.  It was nice to be out in today’s air, to feel the lawn frozen hard and to understand that the bright green of the grass, which a couple of days ago was like what you see in Vancouver when you make a snowman from the good thick wet snow they sometimes get and see the brilliant lawn underneath, will fade to straw and dun and stay locked in that winter hardness for a few months.

When the sun dropped and the daylight dropped (as it does), I came inside because I wanted to vacuum around the entry and in front of the woodstove.  It was getting darker in the house, not ideal for vacuuming, but I persevered, completing the entry room, kitchen, and living room, not just the area by the woodstove, but the whole of our living room carpet.

And that’s what this post is really about, not working outside or early December sun or the change in the colour and texture of the grass or vacuuming under low light conditions, but the carpet.

In the summer the carpet is rolled up, put away, and replaced with jute mats so that the high bright sun doesn’t have a chance to fade it.  So every fall when we bring the carpet down and unroll it again we are consistently taken by its beauty.

We were first taken by the beauty of this carpet the first time we saw it.  We had looked at lots of carpets and kilims after we first moved to Istanbul and resolved at the time that we wouldn’t buy anything for at least a year because there were so many to see and so much learn about them.  Finally we did buy a lovely Armenian carpet that Lorraine found at Adnan & Hasan in Kapalı Çarşı (aka Grand Bazaar) and that we agreed would work well in our living room once we returned to Nova Scotia and our house.  But it wasn’t the one we ended up bringing home.

We first saw this carpet in the showroom at the Bella Hotel in Selçuk.  Nazmi told us that it had come from his village near Kayseri from a young couple who had inherited it from their aunt and wanted something more contemporary.  We were immediately taken by the unusual soft and subtle green of its background colour, the touches of rust and blue, the wonderful intricacy of the centre medallion and flowers in the border, the faint smell of wood smoke it carried, and all the touches of the hands that had made it and given it such a happy character. 

Words can’t capture the nature of this carpet – you just need to be with it, look at it for a while, and keep discovering all the subtle and wonderful new aspects and details in it.  Unfortunately I can’t supply a daylight image of it until tomorrow, so the image you have at the head of this post shows it being washed on our deck the way we watched the young guy in the courtyard of the Umayyid Mosque in Damascus do it, with squeegee, soap, and a hose. 

It’s wet and soapy in the image but it’s still beautiful and continues to give us pleasure every time we see it or walk on it or even just vacuum it.