The loom remembers what the village forgets.

Three winters in a Bukovyna farmhouse, one half-finished shirt, and the quiet argument between a grandmother and her granddaughter over which red is the right red.

Baba Hanna keeps the unfinished shirt folded inside a pillowcase on top of the wardrobe, and she will not tell me how long it has been there. Forty-some years, I think, because the linen at the cuffs has gone the colour of weak tea, and the marigold-dye thread she used for the inner border has softened from blood-orange into something closer to a fox's coat in November. The red on the shoulder band, though — the cross-stitched berehynia figures her mother worked in 1958 — that red has not moved a shade.

Two reds, one argument

Her granddaughter Olesia wants to finish it, and she has bought a skein of DMC 304 from the haberdashery on Holovna Street to do it. Baba Hanna will not let her. The new red, she says, is too clean — it sits on the cloth instead of inside it. The old red was boiled three times from madder root grown behind the cowshed, set with whey, and the difference is not nostalgia. Hold them side by side in the kitchen window and you can see it: the old thread has dust in it, the new thread does not.