Care and repair

I love fixing things. For example, there’s a wooden side table in my house that keeps getting wobbly. It stands on a spindle, and the spindle screws into a tripod at the base, and for some reason it always gets loose.

Every month or so, I have to screw the spindle harder into the tripod. The table stops wobbling. It’s easy to do, and so satisfying.

I love to tighten cabinet knobs, put broken clothespins back together, replace vacuum cleaner belts.

Even cleaning can count as repairing. I remember Peter Bigfoot, out at Reevis Mountain School, talking about when he was in the Army and had the job of cleaning trash bins. Peter talks about seeing them full of garbage and how satisfying it was to transform them back to clean again, and the lesson he learned from that: Sometimes something looks so bad you think you have to throw it away, when really all it needs is some soap and water.

I have an old wool braided rug, a family heirloom from my mother’s side. It’s handmade — my great grandmother started it, my grandmother worked on it, and my mother finally finished it and gave it to me.

Right now, it’s sitting folded up in a plastic tub, waiting to be made useful again. With so much wear and moving around, the threads have pulled out in many places, and the braids are loose.

What it’s really waiting for is me.

That rug doesn’t deserve to sit folded up in a plastic tub, and it doesn’t deserve to be thrown out either. It needs time, attention, patience and someone willing to mend it. Me.

I didn’t make that rug, but it’s up to me to set it right. In a way, that’s how it will become truly mine — by me setting my hand to it.

It’s not only physical objects that get damaged and need repair. Other things get frayed, or wobbly, or broken too: relationships, friendships, families.

A sharp word. A silence that lasts too long. Trust can loosen, like that spindle.

Just like with physical objects, the way to fix these things isn’t usually a grand gesture. It will be in small stitches. A few words of apology, a sincere conversation. Showing up again and again. Small actions that little by little bring people together again.

Then the relationship can become like kintsugi — the ancient Japanese art of reassembling broken pottery with seams of gold. The relationship becomes stronger and more beautiful where it had broken.

And sometimes it’s whole towns, cities, or nations that need attention. Not because they’re broken, necessarily, but because even strong structures — bridges, roads, communities — need tending. They need people to show up — voting, serving, participating, paying attention.

No grand gestures necessary, just everyday civic responsibility and integrity, day after day.

Whether it’s a clothespin or a rug or a democracy, anything can be fixed and made like new again, or at least good enough — I’ve always believed that.

Maybe I got that idea in childhood, from watching my father repair things around the house. He seemed to be able to fix anything, and maybe that made me believe anything can be fixed.

Maybe I got it as a deep, almost genetic inheritance from my mother’s side, a family line that survived the Depression by making do and making things last.

I know it isn’t always true. Sometimes things get beyond repair. But I’d rather assume the best than give up too soon. Good things deserve care, and repair.