Ekeing

This blanket can be finished.   I believe that now.  I’ve been knitting like a demon on it, and after putting in some solid work, I think the end is in sight. The problem now is that the end of the yarn is in sight as well.  It’s looming actually, the little half ball remaining to me sitting there and looking leaner with every repeat.  Last night at knit night someone looked at how much I had to go, and how much yarn I had left and gave me a worried glance.  "Do you have a plan for what you’ll do if you run out?" they asked tactfully. 

"Do you have a plan for what you’ll do if you run out" is knitterese for "You’re never going to make it – you see that don’t you?" and I’ve been friends with knitters for long enough to make the translation straight away.  I mumbled something about how I’d had two balls, and the first ball did half so the second ball should do the other half – but in the back of my mind, I wasn’t really worried.  I was convinced that somewhere in this house there was another ball of that yarn. When I got more, I’d put the old lot of yarn into one bag, and the new in the other, and set aside three balls to do the edging, because I wanted to use all one lot for that. I’ve used one, I’m knitting the second, so upstairs should by my ball remaining.

I just trotted myself upstairs to dive into the little paper bag sitting in the stash room that held the insurance ball, and it’s not there. Odd, I thought, but things have been a little hairy here, so I checked another couple of likely places.  Then I checked some unlikely places, and now I’ve been checking really super unlikely places and it’s stopped being "checking" and is now right on the edge of  just ripping the house up – and that ball isn’t here. It’s nowhere. I thought maybe I left it in the Dominican – but I know I didn’t.  I remember putting it really carefully in my suitcase, because the blanket was too important to screw up.  Same thing for when I was at Madrona, and besides it stands to reason that if I had it at Madrona, I couldn’t have left it in the Dominican.  I know it was here, I know it was. I’m absolutely positive – and now it’s just gone, which is making me a total crazy person.

It really isn’t that big a deal.  If I run out tonight, I know where to get more, and it’s not a big trip and it can be easily handled.  It won’t even put off finishing the blanket by much, it’s just that I feel like I need an explanation for where it has gone.  It can’t have disappeared.  It has to be here somewhere. I know that I haven’t had a lot of sleep since I got home, and I’ve been all over the place, but I’m just not the kind of person who misplaces something as important as this yarn – and that means it’s somewhere, or something happened, and try as I might to just sit down and knit, I keep thinking of another place it could be – or another thing that might have happened.  I’m so disturbed by it that a few minutes ago I checked the fridge and a suitcase I haven’t used in two years. I’ve spent more time looking for it than it would have taken to get on the streetcar and get more, and that means I have to let it go.

There’s one explanation that makes sense, and for the sake of my sanity, I’ve decided to accept it.  This blanket is now so big, and has so much yarn in it, and it’s been run in at such a great rate of speed over the last few days, that the blanket is now working like a yarn siphon, or a black hole.  It now has so much yarn mass squeezed into one spot that it has started generating its own gravity, and because like attracts like, out of all the balls of yarn in this house, the blanket has already reached out on a molecular level to the stash room, and sucked in the ball that I was going to feed it.

It’s that or I lost it, but in all seriousness I think the black hole is more likely.