The road to Naomi's workshop takes almost four hours from Nairobi, and the last of it is not really a road. You leave the tarmac at a turning that is only a turning because someone painted a stone. From there the truck climbs, and the Rift Valley unfolds beneath you like a page turned slowly.
The workshop is a single long room, high-roofed, opened to the light on both ends. Six looms, four of them working, the fifth being restrung, the sixth waiting. It is the quietest place we have visited in a year.
On Patience
'The linen decides,' Naomi says, when we ask how long a piece takes. She has been weaving for twenty-two years, the last nine of them here. 'You can rush the thread but the thread will show it. Then someone lives with the cloth and every day it reminds them you were in a hurry.'
“You can rush the thread but the thread will show it.”
She lets the sentence settle. Outside, a hawk is turning in a wide slow circle, and we find ourselves watching it too, because there is nothing here that asks you to hurry.
On Thread
The linen is spun by a co-operative two valleys over, from flax grown on land that has been in the same family for six generations. Naomi keeps a small notebook in which she records the batch number of every warp she strings. 'So the cloth knows where it came from,' she says.
On Lasting
We ask what she thinks of things that are not made to last. She takes a long time to answer. 'It is a kind of loneliness,' she says finally. 'For the maker and for the person who buys it. Nobody remembers anything.'
We drive back down the escarpment in the last of the light, and the folded linen on the passenger seat feels heavier than it should. The way a good book does, we think. The way something intended to be kept always does.