Untangled

Yesterday I was sick and atypically just "gave in" to the symptoms and stayed home all day, lay in bed, ate and drank tea. I can never nap and couldn't read because the headache was so bad until afternoon. This is all just a viral type thing; it's been making the rounds in the family and few are left unscathed. I'm on the mend today.

What I did do yesterday because I obviously had the time and because I needed pure diversion was untangle the mess I had made of my beautiful skein of hand dyed yarn from Uruguay. I now appreciate that there are clever ways to avoid having the yarn end up in a convoluted, near impossible-to-undo mess (comments on 1/3/08 post) and will definitively heed this advice in the future. However, working on this yarn for hours (at least 3-4) was a form of therapy for me. In between curses, I was able to forget about most everything else and concentrate on the present moment with the endless length of yarn, painstakingly teasing out inch after inch into freedom. By late afternoon and several breaks from the task, I was almost to the point of surrender and contemplated cutting off the free ends of yarn and ridding myself of the last hour or two of work. But then, Denny came home and I knew there would be a willing participant. If there is one thing that draws him to challenge it is stuff that is "all knotted up". He is most persistent and took on the last twenty percent of this job. By mid-evening he proudly presented me with a single ball of yarn, tamed and ready for use. I could tell he was as lost in the process as I had been all day. Diversion.

Although I should have probably let this ball of yarn sit and breathe for awhile, I decided to knit. Despite the interval of several years since my last go at knitting, my fingers and hands moved in the right direction and the first inch of my simple, plain scarf is underway. That Uruguayan skein has been tamed and will gradually become a warm and wonderful piece that I'll wear around my neck. And, when I do, I'll aways remember how much work it took to even get to the first stitch.