I’ve unearthed an old yarn stash. Before the advent of the internet, yarn, in the UK at least, was known as wool even if it was made from neon nylon. I’ve been busy de-cluttering the attic again, a task I take on once a year or so, bask for a few weeks in a tidy room and then suddenly realise that the clutter has built up again and you need safety gear to venture up there. After the recent experience of going through my Father’s things after his death I decided to try and save my Daughter a job in the, hopefully distant, future. This urge to de-clutter is not because my dad had a lot of clutter, he was of a generation that “made do and mend” and only kept practical things, as his drawer full of electrical plugs will testify. The fact that all appliances now come with a moulded plug fitted didn’t matter. Should anyone need a plug, he could have provided one. No, the urge to de-clutter the attic was born of the realisation that one day my poor Daughter would have to go through my mountains of “stuff” and struggle with it because she is very sentimental. I know that if I pre-decease my partner it will be our Daughter who wants to go through my things as left to his own devices he would just hire several skips and a chute out of the window or leave it all for her to go through along with his own stuff when he died. Anyway, the point of this morbid entry is that I found a wool stash.
When we moved into the house, twenty years or so ago, we built some false walls in the attic to create storage space – AKA clutter hiding. Most of the stuff that was put behind those walls has remained pretty much untouched for all those years until now, as I had previously confined my de-cluttering efforts to the visible areas of the attic and not ventured into the secret world behind the walls. There were some ridiculous things behind those walls, and I haven’t finished yet, I’ve probably only investigated and purged about a third of the space. Examples include old brake shoes from a car scrapped long ago, a curtain rail that was so long I can’t imagine where it came from, the entire house could have hidden behind any curtains intended for that rail; clothes with such tiny waists I must have once been quite emaciated, letters written but never posted, bubble bath – for goodness sake, imagine the terrible skin condition that could result from using twenty year old bubble bath by accident. Of course there were some treasures found too, an old perfume atomiser that still smelled of my Mother who died when I was in my teens, bits and bobs of old journals and paintings, the list goes on but back to the wool. This was a box of actual wool, straight off a sheep, spun but not treated or dyed. It looked perfectly fine, though a little rough but I could not shake off the idea that in the heart of it there might be a little ball of dead moths and grubs. As I write this I am tempted to go out to the skip and have a dive about for it but I reason that if I never made anything with it in however many decades I owned it I am unlikely to do so now, and I can’t really pass it along to anyone – in case of the ball of moths and grubs you know. Perversely I have kept some yarn that must have been from a time when “bright!” was in fashion. Startling yellows and greens, zinging pinks, goodness knows what I imagine I will do with it. The only reason it has not shared the same fate as the wool is the fact that it is mothproof and also could easily be examined. There is a picture of the de-cluttering in progress here, it's not for the easily shocked.
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