WHAT I TREASURE
My grey rug by Sophie Pirouet
We’d moved in together and now, with a bit of spare cash in our pockets, we’d started picking the items with which to furnish our first shared home. We settled on a cheap grey rug to cover the bare wooden floor to make our lounge a little bit cosier. I ordered it online and when it arrived, I hated it. The thick cableknit cords of wool that made up the rug reminded me of lots of women’s plaits, cut off their heads and sewn together. It looked ugly and bulbous, not to mention that it reminded me that my own grey hairs were starting to proliferate and grow in earnest.
It was too late to return it, so the rug stayed rolled up behind our sofa for months. I tried to forget about it until I could get it to the charity shop. Some friends of ours came over from California to stay with us and, one day, one of them spotted the rug and, in her lovingly bossy manner, insisted that we roll it out and give it a go for a while – she thought it looked comfortable and couldn’t understand why I’d taken such a dislike to it. I reluctantly did as she asked.
That first night a group of our close friends came for dinner and stayed for hours of silly party games. A few chose sitting cross-legged on the rug instead of on our hard wooden chairs. I remember peels of laughter as we swapped cards and stories into the small hours. The next morning, the rug had inexplicably soaked up its share of white wine spills and crisp crumbs, without a trace. After that night, it looked a little less ugly to me and it remained in place.
The rug has become the preferred sitting place of pals who visit, the thick cables providing a soft and spongy grounding for chat and cups of tea. As weeks and months have ticked by, the rug has gotten tatty and worn, its once neat cables less well defined and more smudged together. Every now and again, little tumbleweeds of wool – like the bobbles on a jumper – detach themselves and roll across the wooden floor when a breeze catches them. I find them stuck to my socks and, every week, I pull them stringy and sodden from the washing machine.
Our rug is now the quiet spot I sit every morning to meditate. I sit there listening to the rumble of the city traffic and I can feel the cables through my legs. It makes me feel peaceful and grounded, connected to the people we love who have sat there too. I couldn’t imagine our home without it.
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