Is That a Rug?

It’s Monday. We just arrived in Santa Fe. After lunch yesterday, Mark and I took a bit of a nap. My feet were killing me—that happens a lot more as I get older—and I was fighting a headache—also an increasingly frequent occurrence—too much screen time and inadequate pillows. I guess we slept for about an hour and then walked over to the Old Town Plaza. It was less open than I expected, but a lot bigger.

As you’d expect, there were some junk shops, but there were also some decent restaurants and cafés and some nice galleries and boutique shops. We looked at some art, bought a small watercolor (of course), and were on the verge of buying a piece of Acoma pottery by a noted potter named Melissa Concho Antonio (I think). It was similar to the one below, but it had more of a vase top, and the pattern was more intricate.

We had a really nice conversation with the retailer (I thought he was going to be an old crank) and thought about it, but decided we would get it when we returned to Albuquerque at the end of the week.

Here’s the watercolor.

We wandered a little more, and Mark stopped in front of store called Oaxacan Zapotec House that, frankly, I thought was going to be just another junk store. From the outside, it looked to me like a Mexican version of a Spencer’s Gifts. I know, I should know by now not to judge a book by its cover. We stepped in and immediately went in different directions. I saw a lot of Día de los Muertos stuff along with racks of kitschy knick-knacks and was getting ready to leave when I noticed Mexican textiles in a second room at the back of the store. “Hmm,” I thought. “Maybe I’ll find some cheap table runners or place mats.” Boy was I in the wrong place.

Hanging on the walls of this “back room” were dozens of large, beautiful, hand-woven wool rugs. Thinking he’d like the colors and patterns too, I called Mark back to show him one I particularly loved. Now, our home is not decorated in Southwestern style, and we don’t want it to be, so there was zero danger that we would buy it. Mark snooped around and found a couple more designs that he really liked, too, and looked at me and said, “You know, we have been looking for a rug for the dining room for seven years with no luck. This would look great in there.” Suddenly….

The salesman came to check on us, and Mark pointed out the rug he liked most. Unfortunately, it was the wrong dimensions. “Let me show you another one, just for the size.” [Un huh. Just for the size. Sure.] He dug down through a stack and pulled out a rug with a sort of contemporized Zapotec design, and Mark fell in love. To make this long story short, we’ll have a new rug waiting for us when we get back to Columbus, and the Acoma pottery was off the table. The rug looks very much like this, but this isn’t a great photo. Ours has a bluer background, and the colors are bright than they appear here.

We walked around the plaza a little more, then we stopped at a Mexican restaurant to get a bite of dinner and ignore the Super Bowl playing on the TV behind me. It was dark by then, and cooling off, so we walked home—after Mark bought a T shirt—and just crashed.

I’ll tell you about what we did today when I pick this back up tomorrow.