By Lucille Arbogast, Narthex and Clipboards Correspondent

MARROW SPRINGS — Every sign-up sheet at Willow Bend Chapel hangs on the same brown clipboard on the same nail by the narthex coat rack. Every one of those sheets has twenty lines. And for 24 years, only seventeen of them have ever been filled.

The reason, church members say, is a ballpoint pen tied to the clipboard with a length of green yarn that is exactly four inches too short to reach the bottom of the page.

"You can get to line seventeen if you lean in and hold your breath," said church secretary Bernadette Kimsey, 68. "Line eighteen, you're writing upside down from the side. Nobody has ever reached nineteen or twenty. We think of them as decorative."

The yarn was tied on in the spring of 2002 by a former member, the late Ruth Ellen Dabney, after the church lost what Kimsey called "an alarming number of pens" during the Easter ham sign-up. Dabney cut the yarn from a skein in the craft closet, measured nothing and tied a double knot that has since survived three clipboard replacements, two coats of paint on the wall and one attempt with fingernail clippers.

"Ruth Ellen tied knots for the Navy," Kimsey said. "Or maybe her husband did. Either way, it holds."

The short yarn has quietly shaped church life ever since. Potluck sign-ups top out at seventeen dishes, which members say is why the chapel has never had enough desserts. The nursery schedule has three permanent empty Sundays every quarter. The 2019 church picnic ran out of folding chairs for exactly three families, all of whom had tried to sign up last.

"I tried to bring a pen from home once," said deacon Floyd Haskins, 74. "Somebody saw me do it and gave me a look like I'd brought a fiddle to a funeral. You use the yarn pen. That's the system."

Over the years, a few solutions have been floated. In 2010, the women's circle proposed adding more yarn, but the committee could not agree on a color. In 2016, a youth group member suggested printing the sheets with only seventeen lines. The idea was rejected as "giving up." In 2021, a visiting college student turned the clipboard upside down so the yarn could reach the bottom lines, which worked until everyone realized the top lines were now out of reach.

"We had a whole Sunday where the first three people couldn't sign up for the hayride," Haskins said. "It was chaos. We turned it back."

Children's director Maribel Ochs, 41, said she has started printing her sign-up sheets with the important events at the top, "where the yarn lives," and the optional ones at the bottom.

"If something is listed on line nineteen, that's the church's polite way of saying it's probably not happening," Ochs said.

The trustees have placed "pen situation" on next month's agenda, between "front step handrail" and "the mystery key in the offering plate."

At press time, a first-time visitor had reached line twenty by standing on a folding chair, and three members were quietly discussing whether that counted.