All Wound Up by Stephanie Pearl–McPhee Read Free Book Online

need? Didn’t that, she cannily noted, apply to merino? From there, things went downhill, as Joe spotted the opportunity for a little sport.
    “We don’t store duplicates,” Joe said, “and thirty skeins of sock yarn are all sock yarn. That’s duplicating.” His eyes practically twinkled. “If I can’t have five caulking guns, then you can’t have thirty skeins of sock yarn.” Now he was playing with me. He knew damn well that there was a snowflake’s chance in hell that even one of the skeins was leaving; he was just enjoying watching me justify it. All I could think was “Keep laughing, buddy, because the ‘resistor collection’ that you’re saving ‘just in case’ and is practically all duplicates is next, and I’m going after the five amplifiers after that.”
    “He’s right,” said Megan, but she didn’t seem very sporting. “This closet is family space, and the other day when you were in here, you said that you couldn’t imagine what you were thinking when you bought those five skeins of linen. If that’s true, then shouldn’t they be sold or donated?”
    The kid had a point. They all had a point, but the longer I stood there, the more convinced I became that I wasn’t wrong. How would I explain to them how the stash was different? That their things didn’t deserve to be here, but mine did? How did I find a place where taking this much space for my stuff was more worthy and valid than whatever stuff they were attached to? They were right about a few things. I do have a lot of yarn. That much I can’t argue. A lot of that yarn might never get knit, and if I got rid of the yarn, I could always get more—easily, even. I stood there and tried to come up with my justification. I thought about telling them that knitting is not just my stuff; it’s me. I thought about telling them that none of it was really replaceable. I thought about telling them this: That the stash was not just stuff taking up our meager closet (and shelf) space. The beauty and the necessity of it all was that every skein of it was pure potential and inspiration. Where Sam certainly wasn’t going to use the outgrown T-shirts (and I certainly wasn’t going to let her use the skanky one), I might use the stash. Maybe, and that “maybe” made all the difference. I could haul off and knit all that sock yarn, every skein of it, and they aren’t duplicates. They’re all different and unique and most of them are handpaints and that, my friends, that fact makes them unique all by itself. They’re art, and they haven’t even been knit yet. Do people ask you why you have art in your house, even though it’s unnecessary? Do people question painting your walls a color, even though having white walls serves the same purpose? Did people ask Renoir why he was keeping all those canvases around? No sirree, they did not, and if his family had gotten all uppity about the paint in the closet, he would have told them all that there were lots of paintings inside those paints, and that all he did was release them, and therefore it stands to reason that he needs all those paints and canvases because the art couldn’t exist otherwise. Well, that’s how I feel about the sock yarn. All those skeins are larval sock art, and while we’re at it, this family is standing here in front of the closet all looking pretty damn smug, going after the stash that put those cozy handknit socks right on their feet. Do you—I thought about saying—do you wanna slap a pair of crappy store-bought socks on your feet before you challenge me on this, you bunch of ingrates?
    Those are all things that I thought about saying, but in the end I went another way. I stood up, wiped any look of shame off of my face, plunked down my box of yarn in its rightful space, turned to face my kids, and said the most important thing.
    I own the closet. You’re screwed.

A LITTLE DEMORALIZING
    bout 12:30 one night, as I sat trying to make knitting headway on a little sweater