The copper cauldron sits upon three soot-blackened bricks in the angle where the courtyard wall catches the noon sun. Beneath its rounded base, the vine prunings crackle and collapse, releasing an ash that smells of fermented sugar and dry loam, while steam rises in slow, white braids through the boughs of the quince tree.

My mother works with her sleeves turned up to the elbow. Her arms are thin, corded like the dry root of liquorice, her palms dyed a permanent, bitter umber from forty autumns of crushing green rinds between two field stones. She stirs the dark brew with a peeled fig bough: in and out of the black liquor, turning the heavy fleece of raw mountain wool until the fibers surrender their native pale grease, drinking the acid stain of the kernel down into the core.

Watch closely, Reza, she says, not looking up from the vat. The walnut rind does not bargain with the thread. It leaves no room for the wool to remember the pasture, nor the milk of the spring ewe, nor the clean rain that washed the fleece upon the slope. Once the skin takes the tannin, it carries the dark ground into the loom forever.

Behind the blue wooden gate, the alley stays watchful. The oil merchant’s donkey brays against its rope; a neighbour sweeps dust into the open stone channel; yet above the terracotta eaves, the sky is already emptying. The swallows have assembled on the telephone wires, facing south in disciplined, unbroken ranks, waiting for the sudden cold from Damavand to strip the branches of their gold.

I reach into the wicker basket to fetch another handful of hulls. The green husks are split, bruised with black rot, weeping a juice that stings the small scratches on my knuckles. How quietly the house prepares its colours! As though the carpet being plotted on the upright loom could outlast the hand that sets the warp; as though an honest dye, steeped in an ancestral basin, could anchor a family to these baked paving stones when the watchman blows his whistle at the corner of the lane.

She lifts the skein out upon two wooden rods. The yarn drips heavy, dark, and steaming onto the gravel— a spool of twisted shadows, holding the fragrance of mountain soil, wood-ash, and crushed husk. She sets it upon the low brick parapet to dry in the wind. And there it sits: an inheritance wrung out beneath an indifferent autumn light, steeped in an earth that is already slipping away.