My daughter Abby got a how-to cat’s cradle book for her eighth birthday. She had asked for one, intrigued after watching string designs dart back and forth among the hands of her classmates.

The book came with two plastic, glow-in-the-dark strings – one pink, one green, each a single loop spanning nearly 3 feet when stretched taut. Abby wasn’t sure how to begin. I’d played when I was about her age, but I wasn’t sure, either.

While she read the instructions, I picked up the pink string, absentmindedly winding it around my fingers, pulling and stretching it this way and that, enjoying the feel of it. Without thinking, I slid my hands into the string and stretched them wide, palms facing each other. The smooth plastic felt a little odd, but the sensation of a string looped around the back of each hand was familiar. Suddenly, my hands remembered what to do. With a few quick moves, I’d formed the first figure in the game.

I’ve been hooked on it ever since.

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There is something mystical about cat’s cradle.

It can be done anywhere, with any material that can be fashioned into a loop. People all over the world make the same figures, and call them different names.

String figures have an ancient history. People have played string games and made string art for centuries. In fact, according to the California-based International String Figure Association, some string designs are believed to date back to the Stone Age. Anthropologists believe they’ve been used by native inhabitants all over the world, and not just to kill time. In some places, they were an art form, with competitions for the most interesting design. In other locations, string figures were used by tribal storytellers as illustrations; elsewhere, they served as good-luck charms for the harvest or hunt.

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There is something both exhilarating and therapeutic about the tactile experience of string art. It’s a sort of acrobatics for the hands, and once you’ve learned it, it stays somewhere in your brain, ready to be retrieved the moment you pick up a string.

When you play with a partner, there’s a rhythm to the moves as the string is transferred back and forth: fingers pinching, hooking, twisting, diving, stretching.

String figures connect people. Through the common thread of shared experience, they offer a link to cultures around the world and to generations that have come before.

As for Abby, well, she’s always had me wrapped around her little finger. But when we play cat’s cradle, we’re connected by multiple loops, and our shared passion for the game.

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Abby learned very fast. We got through the first six figures without consulting the instructions. And then we got maddeningly stuck, and the instructions did not help. No matter what we did, we couldn’t get from Cat’s Eye to Fish in a Dish. We kept ending up with a dead-end design the book calls Two Royal Crowns.

It wasn’t the first time I’ve been frustrated by a piece of string. With limitless design possibilities, there’s always the lure of another, more-complicated figure — and the knowledge that if you mess up just one step along the way, the design will tangle or fall apart, and you’ll have to start over.

I learned cat’s cradle during a summer day camp. The strings were made of fabric, and there were no how-to books, just older girls with fast fingers.

Only a few could make Jacob’s Ladder, a design that can be created without a partner and looks like four diamonds side by side. I always wanted to learn it but never made it that far.

There was no mention of Jacob’s Ladder in Abby’s book, so I Googled it and found instructions. But my clumsy fingers couldn’t get past Step 8.

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Perhaps the most mysterious thing about cat’s cradle is the way the game perpetuates itself. Generation after generation, kids learn it and teach it, allowing this oral tradition to endure even as we’ve become a society that shares its stories by e-mail.

In an increasingly high-tech, battery-powered world, I find it comforting that kids are still drawn to the same simple game that passed lazy summer afternoons for generations before them.

It’s nice to know that, should the power go out, my daughter will have more to do than read or play board games by candlelight. (In fact, thanks to modern technology, she won’t even need the candles, with her glow-in-the-dark strings.)

Mostly, though, I’m just hoping that with an eager young string player in the house, I’ve got another chance at the elusive Jacob’s Ladder.

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Lisa Miller is a freelance writer who lives in Oneonta. She can be reached at lisamiller44@hotmail.com.