The Womanly Art of Making Do

Home from school in the afternoon, I would find my mother in the dining room, sitting close to the balcony of our apartment in the Art Nouveau quarter of Barcelona. One of my aunts was with her, as well as the maid Maruja, who was from Andalucía, way in the south of Spain. Maruja would be telling stories of the Holy Week processions in Málaga while she turned a bottom sheet, cutting the sheet lengthwise  through the worn part in the center, then stitching the edges together to form a new middle. It takes a lot of nights to wear a hole in a sheet, but after decades of service, sheets, towels, and pillowcases became family members of sorts, not to be discarded because of old age or disability.

My aunt was updating a blouse by exchanging its old buttons for little pearl ones, while my mother turned the collar of one of my father’s (handmade) dress shirts. The three women huddled close to the spring sunshine filtering through the glass doors. “Come here,” my mother said, and turned up the hem of my uniform. “Thank goodness,” she said, “there is still enough fabric to let down for next year.” At eight or nine years old, most of my growth was upward rather than outward, so my dresses, once the hems were let down, were good for several years. I have photos of myself wearing the same dress over subsequent summers, the waistline creeping ever closer to my armpits.

Those mending afternoons were cozy, peaceful times. Ripping and stitching, cutting and hemming, patching and darning, a quiet rhythm would settle over the women. Faced with a gloomy, rainy day, my mother would announce, “This is good weather for mending socks!” She would pick up her wooden darning egg, her thick darning needle, and go to work. The only item that my mother and her sisters did not mend was their precious silk stockings. When a stocking developed a run, it was rushed to the stocking mender, a woman who, as far as I could tell, spent her life seated behind the window of a little kiosk, making runs disappear.

Every year, after endless perusal of magazines, heated discussions, and many trips to the fabric store, my mother and her sisters would have two dresses made in the latest fashion (l’última moda), one for summer and one for winter, the latter in heavy wool to keep them warm in our mostly unheated apartment. These dresses were kept for going to church, concerts, and art galleries, while the dresses from the preceding year were worn on weekdays. I remember my mother’s amazement when, after my first week in an American high school, I told her that the girls in my class wore a different outfit every day, and I needed to do the same.

Although she disapproved of this dress extravagance, my mother did fall in love with American paper napkins. “So hygienic,” she enthused, “so pleasant to have a fresh one at every meal!” But she studiously saved our used napkins to clean the greasy spills on the stove, for which, I’m sorry to say, I used to mock her. Because life runs in endless cycles, I gave up paper napkins for fabric ones decades ago, but now my last set of linen serviettes have developed holes. Part of me says, throw them out, or use them for rags. But the part of me that remembers those placid afternoons by the balcony, that feeling of satisfaction in making things if not new, at least respectable, says, darn them and they will last you the rest of your life.

I don’t need to explain why in the present climate the urge to mend is gaining ground. Darning and mending and making do is more than a way to save money. It is an act of resistance against the consumerist ethos that has all but sucked our souls dry, and against the oligarchs and politicians who hold the welfare of millions in their fat and grasping fingers. So in this chilly, rainy spring I sit in the sunroom in the presence of my plants, hemming my husband’s frayed pant cuffs, and considering putting a patch on the elbow of his favorite flannel shirt.