That waited for the years that were certain to come

My accountant told me how, in her holidays as a child, she and her brothers had been made by their grandmother to tie the small lengths of string left over from the paper bag bundles in their shop -- tying these hand-length pieces of twine to each other and then rolling them into balls that waited for the years that were certain to come, when the mirage of this life in a benevolent city had come to its end and, instead of laying reeds in the soil for the necessary months to make home-made twine, they might spool their way out from the labyrinth of poverty with the long, knotted string that once, in their childhoods, they had very nearly chucked as the Anglo children did.