A small child, skating at the speed of light, is streaking toward the span of yarn that connects our heroine and Darling. Realizing that they are jointly going to clothesline the little sweetie, Darling lowers his end of the yarn, essentially turning the clothesline into a tripwire. (Why he didn't raise it above the kid's head has never been satisfactorily settled.) The kid hits the yarn (white on white, remember?) going about a zillion miles per hour. He falls down and begins a long slide.

Ever watch curling? No? How about bowling?

Our heroine's thirteen-year-old daughter is standing with a gaggle of her preteen friends about 10 feet off, trying to look cool (and succeeding, since they are all too cool to wear hats), oblivious to the child whom our heroine has innocently turned into a projectile.

They never see it coming. (Except for that perfect Brittany ... how does she do it? All this, and shell-pink lip gloss too.) Helpless, our heroine and Darling watch the six-year-old spin as he slides. To her grave, our heroine will swear that he maneuvered himself so as to knock down as many of the girls as possible. The six-year-old hits the preteens the way a toddler hits the block tower his sister has been working on for the last two hours.

Our heroine and Darling gasp in horror. They rush toward the scene. As they do, our heroine skates to the left of her eleven-year-old and the eleven-year-old's buddy, and Darling goes around on their right. Our heroine is still holding her knitting, and Darling is still holding the ball of yarn. The eleven-year-old, like any child her age, loses interest as soon as she realizes that no one is really hurt, and she turns to skate away.

Little does she know that her loving parents have wrapped her skates in deadly yarn.

Since they have tied her left skate to the ice, she doesn't get too far. As their daughter heads iceward, she grabs her friend's arm, taking her with her.

It is at this point that our heroine realizes that days like this are probably why she isn't taken very seriously at school parent council meetings.

Badly rattled now, Darling and our heroine realize that he must hand her the yarn before they actually strangle someone. He glares at her as she takes the ball. Clearly, he thinks this is all her fault.

They crouch on the ice to tend to various shocked children. Our heroine puts her knitting down on the ice to brush snow off kids and to wave reassuringly at the stunned parents watching from the sidelines. She has to admit that she sympathizes with these parents. From their perspective it must have seemed that their children were thrown to the ground by a viciously wielded invisible force field.

Remarkably, none of the children is hurt. In fact, the projectile six-year-old looks dazzled. His comments cause our heroine to wonder if this episode has given him ideas for some G.I. Joe-style sabotage of his own.

"Was that on purpose?" he asks Darling, who is checking him over.

"No way," says Darling, who would never hurt a fly.

"It was pretty cool," says the six-year-old, and off he skates, clearly trying to figure out how he can do that all over again.

Darling stands and shakes the snow off his clothes. Our heroine can tell that he might be a little upset. It is not often that our heroine's knitting plans end with disaster on this scale. Her mind is racing. In her own defense, she'd like to point out that this is not solely her fault. If the yarn had been wool, not acrylic, it would have snapped long before it could have done that kind of damage; moreover, if it hadn't been white and perfectly camouflaged by the ice, the victims might have stood a chance. She pores over all of this in her mind. How could anyone predict something like this? Pulling herself together, she decides that her best defense is a good offense ... she is going to point out, that despite the 3-foot height of the juvenile missile, Darling had opted to lower, not raise, the yarn. After all, if he had raised the yarn, none of this would have happened. Our heroine has now been knitting for thirty years, and this is the first time that nine people have been knocked over in under three minutes as a result of her habit. This (she plans to say) was a freak accident, and not anything that you could blame on her, or on knitting. It was an act of God, like a tornado, a flood. It says nothing about combining knitting with skating. If people had given up trying to make planes when the first one didn't fly ... well, where would humanity be? Finally (she intends to say) innovation and the creative spirit are often unconventional. You have to try new things to stay young... .

She is going to tell Darling all this when suddenly he is no longer in front of her. He is down on the ice. He has tried to skate over her knitting, which she has forgotten to pick up.

She picks it up now, and humbly goes to sit in the car.

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Copyright © 2004 by Edited by Linda Roghaar and Molly Wolf. Excerpted by permission of Three Rivers Press, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Tags: Creativity

About the Author

Linda Roghaar is a literary agent and an obsessive knitter based in Massachusetts. More

Molly Wolf, writer, editor, spinner, and frequent sock knitter, is the author of White China: Finding the Divine in the Everyday. She lives in Kingston, Ontario. They are the editors of KnitLit and KnitLit (too). More