Small Wire Eyes

The loom in the back room has a warp of forty threads to the inch, and I spent the morning threading heddles - a hundred and sixty heddles, each one a small wire eye that must take its thread in order. The pattern is a simple twill, nothing ambitious, but the counting is absolute. One thread misplaced and the whole drawdown shifts. I have been at this since the light was gray and now the light is yellow and slanting through the west window onto the frame.

What surprised me was not the tedium. Tedium is a known quantity. What surprised me was the forty-first thread.

I had counted the warp twice. Forty threads to the inch, twelve inches wide, four hundred and eighty threads. The count was clean. But when I began to sley the reed - two threads per dent, sixty dents - a thread remained. One extra. It had been wound onto the beam with the others, indistinguishable, and now it hung there, a fact without a place.

I could cut it. That would be the sensible thing. One thread among four hundred and eighty will not alter the cloth in any way the eye can detect. But it is there. It is a thread. It went through the counting and came out the other side, and now it demands a dent, a heddle, a place in the pattern.

The reed has sixty dents. The warp has four hundred and eighty-one threads.

I have not cut it.