SNACKS

ere is the way you get yarn out of my stash: You tie one end of a rope to a doorknob, and the other end around your waist, tell a friend where you’re going so they don’t worry, and leave a note for your family telling them that you love them. Then you dive in and hope for the best, since you can’t know how long you’re going to be in there. I like to delude myself into believing that the stash has order, or some sort of organizing principle, but mostly I think I’m just telling myself that so that I don’t have to try to figure out how to come up with an order or an organizing principle. It can be a little hairy in there, both literally and metaphorically. I do try to have it make some sense. If I have a whole bunch of a particular yarn, I bag it together for sweaters, and all those sweater bags are (mostly) in the same spot. The spinning stash is (mostly) not mixed in with yarn stash, and once last year when I was overwhelmed by a problem I couldn’t sort out that was unrelated to knitting, I went on a rampage in there and put all the silk in one area. A similar urge a time before that put all the laceweight at least near each other, but I’ve since contaminated that by firing some stray yarn into there in an emergency that concerned itself more with getting things put away than putting things away in a sensible fashion. (Likely someone was coming over. I probably stuffed all that yarn in those bags moments after shoving the dirty dishes into the oven and after stuffing the dirty laundry in a closet while planning to wipe out the bathroom sink with a pair of tights from the floor. I may not be tidy, but I am bold.)

No matter what happens when I dive into the stash that way, there’s one thing that I have to face up to. I have rather a lot of yarn in there that has no plan nor destiny, and occurs in really strange amounts. I speak here of the single skein phenomenon. I have a ton of single balls, skeins, and hanks that I really can’t explain. There are skeins in my stash that are there because I simply thought they were pretty, or because they are souvenirs of places I’ve been, or knitters I met. (I refuse to be judged because of that. I used to think it was strange, until I met someone who buys a shot glass everywhere they go and lines them up on shelves in the family room. If they can do that, then I can do this.) There are other skeins that are samples, or stuff I was going to test to see if it felted nicely. There is even some yarn that I bought because I had a plan that made sense before I remembered that I’m not a supermodel, or yarn I own because I wish I looked better in blue than I do, and I keep buying it because hope springs eternal.

All of that yarn, though, has a purpose, as misguided as it may be, and I love it all. The single-skein phenomenon doesn’t include any of that yarn. These are freestanding skeins that I have bought for… really no reason at all. I don’t think they’re going to be hats; there isn’t enough yardage for socks; they aren’t something I’m even planning to use as inspiration or a woolly desk ornament. They are there for no reason. None. I apparently bought them while I was in a trance state in a yarn shop—just picked each one up with no purpose at all, gave the shop my money, and walked out clutching another purposeless skein of yarn to add to the gajillions already at home. It’s behavior that’s entirely erratic and unmethodical, and while I admit to having a thousand weaknesses involving yarn, I like to believe that there is at least fleeting consideration given to my purchases. I might have a lot of yarn, but at the very least I want to be able to say it’s there for a reason. The presence of these desultory skeins says that maybe that’s not true. These yarns are there for no purpose, and I admit that I didn’t even have one when I bought them. I worry sometimes when I think about this, that my relationship with yarn isn’t healthy—or that it has hypnotic qualities or fumes that overcome me.

I was thinking about this a lot when I visited a friend who was on a diet. We were having coffee when her timer went off, and she got up, counted out twenty almonds, offered me the same, and then plunked back down. “Hungry?” I asked, confused about the timer.

“Not yet.” she said. “It’s a preemptive strike. If I have something now, before I’m hungry, then the theory is that I won’t hoover down twenty-three cookies an hour from now.”

“Good thinking,” I agreed, and I accepted the almonds. Somewhere in the back of my mind, a light lit.

Preemptive eating seems like a fine strategy. It’s a good way to avoid one of those episodes where you’re starving, take temporary leave of your senses, and only recover in time to have a postmortem chat and debriefing about the appropriate role of chocolate in one’s diet, or how wrong it is to eat whole cakes in single sittings. If you’re never starving, then you won’t ever eat like you are, at least theoretically. If you were trying to keep from eating a whole cake, I can see how a couple of strategically timed carrot sticks might take the edge off. All at once, I realized what’s happening in the stash.

My self-control around food is rather good, but we all have our weaknesses, and my self-control around yarn is notoriously bad. Legendary, in fact. I’ve gone to a yarn shop with the absolute intention to buy nothing, and walked out twenty minutes later with a whole sweater’s worth and the deflated feeling of having lost a little self-respect. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with buying yarn. I like buying yarn, but it should at least be intentional, and that’s not what happens when you go in there and make snap decisions. It’s impulsive and a little weak, and it’s totally like deciding you’re not going to eat any junk at a party and then lying in bed four hours later wondering what the hell you were doing when you stationed yourself by the chips and refused to give up the territory like it was a key holding in a world war. At first that’s what bothered me about the single skeins in the stash. I thought that they were the result of those spasms in the yarn shops. I thought that I have all those hanging around because they’re the symptoms of a yarn disease. I was looking at that stack of single skeins and feeling like they were the products of a yarn binge. I was wrong.

They are snacks. They aren’t the disease; they’re what I’m using as a treatment and prevention. It’s like taking methadone instead of straight up using heroin—to draw a rather crass analogy. I can see what happened now. I was in the yarn shop, I started to get weak and feel a whole sweater’s worth of yarn coming on, and I reached out for a carrot stick, the first little skein that I could find, and I bought it, and held it, and took it home. Those snack skeins are part of an instinctive protection plan. Without them, things could have been a lot worse, and that changed my attitude about them a little, made them more of a point of pride. They aren’t random; they aren’t there for no reason; and they might not have any intention of becoming mittens, but they’re still serving a tidy little purpose. I’m okay with that, mostly. The only thing wrong with the system is that, just like other kinds of snacks, skeins can really add up.