My mending basket is full. Not as full as it used to be when I had kids and all their activities underfoot, but full. A missing button here, a small tear there, a toe hole in a handknitted sock, a falling-down hem. A mending basket is a handy place to park those items that you can’t use in their current state but aren’t so far gone that you can throw them away without feeling wasteful or frivolous. For most of my life, my mending basket has been an aspirational accessory — like my gardening tools and ice skates — for when I become a different person. Mending clothes is often a time-consuming and challenging business. Sewing on a button can be satisfying, yes, but I wouldn’t call it fun or exciting.
And yet, in a pandemic world where options for novelty and entertainment are limited, a lowly mending basket offers useful distraction. In mid-2020, I pulled mine out and pawed through the layers of disrepair, which ranged from Empty-Nest COVID all the way down to my daughter’s favorite socks from the Middle School Era. My first thrill of satisfaction came from making decisions, Marie Kondo-style, about which repairs weren’t worth my time and which buried items offered a spark of joy. Some things, like a long-sleeved T-shirt with a fixable hole, were beyond saving because they also had other issues. Things that no longer fit could be discarded, too, unless the repair was easy, in which case I could mend and donate the item. The rest of the pile I sorted into two categories: Quick and Heavy. Not surprisingly, Quick went quickly, and soon enough, all I had left was the gnarly pile of Heavy.
Mending has been much on my mind during the pandemic because so many things now feel so broken. There are the big things, like the health care system, the economy, the environment, the concept of communal responsibility, the hope of social justice. Those are overwhelming and beyond any one person’s ability to fix, though we must all put some form of energy into repairing them. The big things send a tremor into my day, like distant thunder, but it’s the smaller, not-so-small things that rattle the windows. I worry about my isolated, octogenarian parents, and worrying about them has brought our troubled relationship into sharp focus. Is that something I can mend? Early in the pandemic, I left my part-time job for health reasons and spent the lockdown thinking hard about my aspirations. There were things in my life that had been neglected or had gone undone. Did I want to go on neglecting them because they didn’t matter, or were there some that could be healed and improved? The big question: How much time and energy would this kind of mending take?
And so, everything brings me back to the waiting pile of Heavy. I am a prolific knitter, so most of this mending involves knitwear: threadbare socks (MANY of them); sweater cuffs to be removed; a button placket that won’t stay closed; ripping out a sweater that never fit quite right. Even the simplest of these, darning a pair of socks, might take four to six hours to complete, depending on the damage. It’s less time than it would take to knit new ones, but there’s little excitement in getting back a pair of old socks (unless you’re a house elf in a Harry Potter book). It’s like putting a new roof on your house — nothing feels any different except the wind whistling through your empty wallet. The added value is difficult to gauge.
In recent months, as I slowly tackled the Heavy tasks, my experience of mending began to shift. Mending became a creative challenge. Every item to be mended presented a unique problem to be assessed and solved. Do I use a yarn color that matches or contrasts? Do I want the mending to be visible or undetectable? How should I approach this mess? Unlike other handcrafts or knitting itself, muscle memory has no role in mending. You can’t go on autopilot — meaning you can’t relax into a comforting rhythm of movement, and you can’t get away from what your hands are doing. You must be fully present to mend something, to restore order, to make whole what has been torn or exhausted. It takes more patience than you think it ought to take. It resets your understanding of how things fit together and what solutions to pursue.
And so, my mending basket is full. It will always be full. The friction of living comes to bear on everything in my life. Socks wear through, buttons pop, jobs don’t fit, relationships fray and tangle. Some are a quick fix and some take months to achieve, but I keep going. I find satisfaction in mending because it’s an act of care. It’s the opposite of consumerism, of consumption. When I’m looking for a way to short-circuit those feelings of being a walking dollar bill or a meta product to be data-mined, I sit with something broken and give it my full attention. I use my creativity to mend and restore. Then I repeat as needed.