The Burrow had always been full of frantic energy. With all the children, how could it not be? There was rough housing, squabbles, and shrieks of laughter always ringing through the house. Even when the kids started growing up, going off to school and weren't home for most of the year, Molly Weasley still felt that something was not clean enough, or there weren't enough pies cooling on the window sill, or the garden needed pruning. Arthur tried convincing Molly that she was trying to make noise on purpose, to make up for the fact that she was home alone. Molly refused to hear it; it was simply that there was too much to do during the day.
It was at night, with the crickets chirping and the fire roaring, that Molly allowed herself to sit and relax over her knitting.
When she and Arthur first got married, Molly couldn't knit to save her life. Cross-hatching, crocheting, sewing, any of the sort. Once Bill was born, however, and he needed blankets and pinafores and nappies, she decided to try her hand at it. At first it was dreadful. She concentrated too hard and ended up kitting her own fingers in. A simple stripe would end up zigzagging from one end to the other, and it was all full of gaps. It wasn't until one night, when Bill was almost a year old and the wind was howling and rain was lashing against the windows that she started to get the hang of it. Molly was fretting over the fact that Arthur was over two hours late home, so she picked up her needles and yarn to calm herself, and by the time her husband arrived she realised she had a decent start of a blanket in front of her.
Ever since then, whenever Molly needed time to think or worry, she picked up her knitting and let her mind wander. As time went on she found herself needing to sit and knit more and more, with the return of You-Know-Who, and Percy refusing to speak with any of the family, and her little Ron running off with Harry and Hermione all the time, getting in heaps of trouble. Even Ginny, her only daughter, got dragged in with all the mischief that went on at that school… She found herself knitting so much she had no idea what to do with it all.
But nowadays was different. Molly set down the washcloth she was wiping down the table with and walked into the sitting room. Ginny and Hermione were home for the winter holidays, and they were playing a card game against Ron and Harry. Arthur was sitting in his armchair, resting his eyes and listening to the wireless. She knew her older sons were safe and warm in their own homes, with plenty of food on their tables (though they did occasionally pop in for pudding, which Molly didn't mind at all).
Molly went to sit in her own armchair, and bent down to pick up her needles. This time, however, instead of thinking about her family with worry and grief, she thought of their happiness, and their thriving futures. And at the end of the night, when she looked down to her lap, she was not surprised to see not a single stitch was finished.