AN ENDLESS BALL OF YARN

This sounds like a fairy tale, and maybe it is; I’ve read so many stories in my long life that it’s possible I’ve turned into one of the characters.
It happened like this:

I bought a skein of yarn in many beautiful colors—soft blue, soft green, soft pinky salmon, soft gold—all in one skein. The colors run into one another and repeat over and over.

From this beautiful skein of yarn I made a baby hat to be given to folks who had no hats for their children. The one little hat used up scarcely any of the yarn, so I began to knit a blanket. It’s a simple blanket, about the size that will fit over an infant carrier. The pattern is also easy to do—every row is knitted, and the multiple beautiful colors weave in and out and around and about. It is a blanket I can pick up and work on whenever I have a few moments.

When I began to find the skein had changed size, I decided to rewind the yarn into a ball, starting at the end of yarn that poked out of the skein. I wound and I wound, twisting and turning the ball as it grew so that the yarn would hold together. The ball grew bigger, but the pile of yarn on the floor seemed to grow no smaller.

A long time later, I finally wound the last of the yarn into the ball and put the ball into a bag so it wouldn’t unravel. The blanket grew larger with each row I added. The ball of yarn stayed the same. I knitted more rows. The ball of yarn never changed.

After many months (in a fairy tale this would be years, but the universe is speeding up, you know)--as I say, after many months, I began to lose sight of the beautiful colors; they blended together and became "the project." All I could focus on was that da---- ball of yarn that never got smaller.

There appears to be no ending to this story. The ball of yarn continues on.

Does this resonate with you? That ball of yarn could well be my daily and weekly chores: dishes, cooking, laundry, cleaning . . . . They never end. The only variants I can work in are exercise classes, sewing projects, and—you guessed it—knitting. Oh, and DVDs of Masterpiece Mystery. Like the lovely yarn that grew into a little blankie, my daily life was in danger of losing its beautiful colors, because my focus was on life's daily-ness, not on its many and varied possibilities.

I’m trying to avoid evolving into Sisyphus—he’s the Greek guy whose sinful nature earned him a particularly rotten eternal punishment in the underworld: pushing a great boulder up a steep hill, only to have it roll back to the bottom where he had to trot down and start over again. Ad infinitum.

When I reach the end of the yarn--I'm thinking positive here--I'll show you the finished blanket. If I never reach the end . . . well, I've had a happy experience with many beautiful colors.

In the meantime, I'll see if I can find the colors of my life again. I know they're around here somewhere . . . .