Wool blankets woven to be worn, not folded away at the foot of a bed

Fifty years on the same corner of Ficksburg

My grandmother opened this shop in 1974 with two bales of cloth and a trestle table, and it has been on the same corner of Voortrekker Street ever since. We are not the mill. The cloth is woven for us to our own banding, and the cutting, the binding and the finishing are done in the back room here by four women, two of whom have been at it longer than I have been alive. What we actually know is which blanket a person wants, which is not always the one they walk in asking for. A blanket like this is not bedding. It is worn — over the shoulders, pinned closed at the collarbone, and kept on for the whole of a cold day. That is why the weight and the length matter more than the pattern, and why we will ask who it is for and how tall they are before we sell you anything. Buy the right one and it goes to a wedding, then to a funeral, then to somebody’s daughter, and it is still going long after both of us have stopped counting.