opening and closing doors

I do not have a photograph of the messy tangle of blue yarn I shoved in my messenger bag Monday morning just before I traipsed off to Indiana (I place I had never been before until this week).

nor do I have a photograph of the calm, perfect, untangled little ball that the yarn was wound into on my way across the country and around certain bits of the snowy-but-delightful Indiana countryside.

however, at some point I may take a photograph or two of the blue beret that all this yarn is slowly becoming.

on the plane from here to Houston, the scruffy-looking man next to me noticed the crochet hook in my hand and the pool of tangly yarn in my lap and had to ask, "what the heck are you making?"

I said to him "I think it will be a hat. if I can sort out this mess." and as I tugged at said mess, the scruffy-looking man chuckled. he asked how far I had to go. upon my answer, he told me it might take me the whole flight to get all that knotted yarn under control.

and it did. it took the whole flight and then some.

in Houston, the scruffy-looking man departed for his connection to Central America, and I trundled into the depths of Gate B84. the last time I was in Houston I was leaving the country for spring break. three years ago? yeah.

but now is not then and this week I had totally different things to think about while I untangled and retangled all that blue yarn.

I thought about the mess of yarn on my lap as the universe. I thought about entropy. I pondered that my relentless interventions with the mess of yarn were both increasing and decreasing its entropy at the same time.

and I thought about being lucky enough to buy plane tickets. alive enough to feel tired and curious, insignificant and sad and angry and grateful, awesome and lost and loved and wanted. smart enough to read books and ask questions and write these probably very silly blogpost things. prepared enough to embark on crazy psycho graduate school adventures in new places.

my universe makes as much sense as a tangled skein of yarn sometimes. remembering the marvelous potential of difficult tangles isn't always easy.

the slow and long-awaited moment when all the twisted tightness of that hopeless, floppy yarn-mess gave way to lovely, large, loose loops happened in a delightful coffee shop called Greyhouse. four of us--graduate students past present and future, sat at a table in the back next to the piano, quietly soaking in all the glorious and pleasurable pressures of academia, me having just set aside the laptop and the notebook and the Spinuzzi to finish winding the yarn-mess into a ball.

then I had to traipse (somewhat hurriedly) off home again, with a beret-to-be in my bag and a lot of detangling thoughts and hunches and decisions in my head.