I was working out my options as I knitted. I will have three 150 g cones of the Willow green when the new one arrives. It is being worked across the back of every stitch outside of the waterway when it’s not actually being knitted itself. I used twelve (correction: 15) cones on Carolyn’s afghan. Um.

Those fruit trees. Andy’s Orchard, my own out back, and…

Our family went to pick-your-own farms every summer when we were kids. Our bomb shelter–we didn’t have a basement, we had a Cold War bomb shelter built into the house–was full of row after row after row of jars. We would drive early in the morning to a farm, then spend the afternoon sitting around the kitchen table hulling strawberries and pitting cherries and the like. So many times we would start with a pun and then stretch it like taffy to forever and back as we worked, Dad at the head egging the wordplay on, the six of us around the table, one sibling I won’t name who would groan and wish we’d stop because that one was sounding pretty ridiculous by now and Mom at the stove (one potato two potato, with peaches lowered into boiling water briefly for peeling) or the blender, throwing in zingers herself. Wordplay was our verbal knitting equivalent against the tedium of the task.

There is nothing in the world like huge dead-ripe peaches that you climbed into the trees for being served up in a pie in January.

We discovered Catoctin Mountain Orchards and ended up going there the most.

Which was near our favorite Catoctin Mountain State Park. If you hike the trail from the picnic area for long enough, you come to a beautiful waterfall coming down and feeding into the creek you’d just been walking beside.

New idea. I could knit it that way. I could turn it into browns and grays and a picnic table and blue tumbling waterfalls over the near-vertical gray rock; not having enough Willow wouldn’t have to matter much.

I checked Colourmart yet again because you never know when someone’s reserved cart might release one. Nope. Ravelry stashes. Nope. They had 8-plied this line of lace weight for me. (The Rusty Custagno is my tree trunks. Gloriously soft stuff but not on sale anymore, sorry, but this is doubled the weight of it and $22.)

Sometimes, just sometimes, they have an unlisted cone or two. They’ve been known to rescue people caught up short.

Sue over in England must have been the person who filled my order yesterday because when I sent a message today asking if by wild chance there might be any more and how I’d goofed and why I was asking, she answered, I.am.sure. that we do, and said she would check in the morning for me.

Hopefully she’ll find some. Good folks there.

No pressure, Sue.

So either way it’s going to work out but I can only guess at how this picture is going to go from here. It’s hiking its own trail and taking me along for the sight/seeing.

(Update: she found two. Wonderful! They are on their way.)