I volunteered to help at the Spånga scout group’s annual “autumn fixer day” where parents and other engaged folks help out with various maintenance tasks. This time around the task list included everything from deep cleaning the freezer and disassembling old desks so that they can be transported to the recycling centre, to removing thistles from the yard and mending tents.

It won’t surprise any of you to hear that I signed up for mending tents. However the notes about tents needing attention were hard to interpret, and much time and attention went to figuring out what the problem even was. That task required a fair amount of expertise and experience with the tents themselves, so the mending crew spent a lot of time just sitting and waiting. Whenever an actual rip was found, there was almost a queue of us waiting.

Looking back at my blog post about the scouts’ mending day two years ago, the situation was the same. Maybe someone could learn something from this experience. Who knows.

All in all I felt that I contributed much less than I had hoped. When I came home, dissatisfied with my morning, I picked up my own pile of mending and fixed up six pairs of tights. And felt much better about the day afterwards.

All this mending reminded Adrian that he had a list of homework tasks from his home economics class, one of which was to mend a small hole or sew on a button. My backlog of mending was now empty – except for a shirt waiting for a sleeve button to be re-sewn! He came just in time; had he mentioned the homework an hour later, I wouldn’t have had anything for him. I guess we could always cut off a button and reattach it, but it would have felt like a waste.