Image from the Maastricht Hours, early 1300s.

We’ve eradicated diseases like polio, but we still haven’t figured out how to keep our cats out of our yarn.

Actually, scratch that about polio, and every other horrible disease we’ve conquered. They’re making a comeback, along with flared jeans and macrame. I propose a return to medieval hairshirts for those debunking vaccines and Tylenol though they themselves couldn’t Just Say No to cocaine or chloroquine.

This nun isn’t using a spinning wheel. I believe she’s using a distaff to spin flax into linen, judging by the puff-ball thing (to use a technical term) on her left. I have no idea how this is done, but, since spinning flax looks like torture, it is one fiber-arts temptation I quickly eschewed once I consulted Dr. YouTube. It’s like controlling cotton candy in a high wind.

(Did you know that machine-spun cotton candy–also called Fairy Floss, which I love–was invented by a dentist in 1897? Do you ever feel like you’re caught in a cruel wheel of exploitation and manipulation that’s spinning faster now than ever?)

We do have one weapon available to us today that the nun didn’t have in the Middle Ages:

the cardboard box.