“Middle age is really all about maintenance.” — Eula Biss, or rather, Eula Biss’s mother
We have this giant backlog of mending projects: clothes with various holes, missing buttons, too-long inseams. We want to be the kind of people who care for our things rather than discard them and replace them, but it is difficult to be that kind of person. We have spent the past couple of years, therefore, letting the gap between who we want to be and who we actually are accumulate in a basket in our living room, reminding us who we aspire to be, reminding us to make the time.
It is very irritating to look at the overflowing mending basket, and so we have been making more effort. One difficulty is that the sewing machine that we own has some kind of trouble, it doesn’t work in some way that I can no longer remember and none of us, not having a definite habit of using sewing machines, knows how to fix. So we must make all our repairs by hand, which is fine for replacing buttons but can become arduous, depending on the repair. And we do not even do that very often, so we do not become faster or more skillful at it. We do not yet have the skills and habits we need, in other words, to be the kind of people we would like to be. But we are making more effort.
Lately I have been working more on my sewing and my embroidery, to acquire greater skill and ease with the tools. I do not always have time to do it for very long at a stretch, but regular practice is paying off. I am already beginning to feel certain stitches and ways of handling the fabric become part of my habit, become more smooth.
Today, after I hurt my knee, I needed to spend time resting it anyhow, so I chose three of my son’s shirts from the basket and gathered up my mending tools. The repairs they needed were not too difficult, even for a novice like me. He is very hard on clothes, this son of me, and I often find the holes in his clothes mystifying: how is it physically possible, or likely, to tear this in this way? Well, I don’t have answers, because he doesn’t know either, but nevertheless the holes are there.
I got them done, not expertly and not invisibly, but I think they will hold. He has three of his favorite shirts back now. I could have sent them to my mom to have them done expertly but one does not become the kind of person one wants to be by having one’s mom always doing things for them.1 Now that I am trying to become this person, a person who takes care of things rather than discarding them, I have started to like visible mending. If the mess of the mending basket is an uncomfortable reminder of who I aspire to be but am not quite yet, the visible mends are a reminder of the becoming.
There is a part of Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered where the daughter is talking about Cuba and about having dinner in a restaurant where they were using very fancy antique china for the dishes. She says since the Cubans don’t have money to replace things if they break or wear out, they take better care of them than we do, we who can easily afford to replace a shirt or a broken plate. Maybe she’s right but I know an awful lot of people who say this kind of thing and yet don’t take care of their stuff, either. It’s as if they want to be forced to live up to their ideals by circumstances , government, embargoes.
Individuals might place value on maintaining specific things they care about, but there is no general cultural value here of maintaining things, or even, often, of having the kinds of things that can be maintained and repaired rather than disposed of. We often replace things, in fact, even when there is nothing wrong with them; we just do it because we moved, maybe, and some things had to go but now we need new things for the new place. Or because we’re updating the look of our clothes or our home decor. Or simply for convenience.
We use cloth napkins exclusively, and many people who have eaten here have said they don’t need the fanciness of cloth napkins; they would be perfectly happy — and one often infers from the way they say it, even happier — with paper napkins. They don’t want you to have to go to the trouble of washing napkins for them. The sentiment is very modern, very American, and I admire it and dislike it in equal measure. For me, personally, the cloth napkins are less fancy than a thing I must buy, then throw away, then buy again. To me, that is a great luxury, and the cloth napkins are just the everyday thing. I do not iron them, but I wash them and hang them in the sun to dry, and I enjoy doing it. I enjoy standing in the backyard, chatting with the chickens and the neighborhood cats while I hang the wash in the sunshine; I enjoy the continuity and knowing these napkins have shepherded us through many messy dinners together, and, indeed, even our wedding dinner.
As I have moved so many times, I have disposed of (at used book stores and the like, not the trash) many books that I had read and couldn’t justify hauling to a new state. I have often regretted their absence — perhaps not all of them, but some, more than I would have thought. I recently purchased another copy (used, as my first one probably was as well) of Ian McEwan’s Saturday. I didn’t think I would want to re-read it at the time when I finished it, but there are scenes in it I have never forgotten and I do find, now, that I would like to revisit them.
Lately, realizing we are not going to move again, that I can really settle in with my many cloth napkins and my many books and can keep all the books I care about, I have begun digging into organizing them in ways that really please me. I have a shelf now where all my books about Japan and by Japanese authors are gathered. I have a shelf for American classics. I have decided to make a shelf of books that belong paired: a copy of King Lear next to a copy of Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres; a copy of Hamlet next to a copy of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle; The Stranger and The Fall by Albert Camus paired with Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation. And, yes, I am working on a rainbow shelf.
Once again, I come back to the idea that the moral grounding of our lives is in the small things, the little habits. Keeping things that matter to you and keeping them in order, such that they may be used and enjoyed, is small work. It is not work that brings glory. It feels almost stupid to do these things in our culture. Spending an hour mending shirts you could easily afford to replace doesn’t contribute to the economy. Going back to re-read books you have already read doesn’t feel like progress. It is not glorious, but it is satisfying.
They always say no one ever wishes they’d worked more on their deathbed. I’m sure no one ever wishes that they had spent more time organizing their books by color, either. But I do want to orient myself and my days and my habits toward taking better care, toward visible reminders of care and intention, toward creating an environment in which we feel satiated, that we have truly enough. I tend to live in my head too much, which is how I always trip and injure my knee, by not noticing the world around me enough. For me the deathbed fear is not that I will have spent too much time on doing big things at work, on gaining glory or working my way up a corporate ladder (which I have not done at all), but that I will be leaving my children a world that has not been cared for, a world in disrepair. If I am to leave as my legacy a world that was cared for, then it falls to me to be a caretaker. It is not glorious, it is not progress; it is hardly even noticeable.
My son thanks me for mending his shirts. He does not need to say more; his satisfaction at having them repaired is evident.
She did try to teach me, but I was an impatient and irritable student.