You’re looking at a pair of Hideaway moccasins that were purchased somewhere in the dim mists of time, at least five years ago. My wife purchased them for me through one of her on-line sale sites (not Amazon). As soon as I put them on I immediately wanted to wear them just about everywhere. When they were in better, newer, shape I would use them to take the girls out for short walks. As they got older I kept them indoors, preferring to slip into them at night before I finally went to bed.

It was thus with great annoyance when the seam on the left shoe unraveled and the right top half lifted away from the shoe proper. I wore it that way, curling my left foot, toes down, to keep from losing the shoe as I walked around the house. I finally asked my wife, who’s quite an accomplished seamstress[1], if she could somehow find a way to sew it back together. Within 30 minutes she’d found the right needle (some big, curved, dangerous looking needle like you’d use to fish for Great Whites) and the right type of thread to sew it all back up. When I put it up it fit perfectly, which is to say, just like it had before the original threading broke.

I have to take a moment and say just how good my wife is at tailoring interesting and very well-made clothing. She has multiple machines, from the simplest to a complex behemoth called a Viking, and a weird little machine with four spindles called a serger. She owns multiple sewing machines the way I own multiple cameras. But she’s not afraid to work directly with her hands. When the machines won’t quite do what she wants, she finishes the work by hand; there’s no way I can tell the difference, it’s all excellent. Granted, it didn’t take much to stitch the shoes back together. But still, I stand in awe of my wife’s creative sewing abilities. What’s more significant, and saddening, is my wife is practicing both skills and a high level of competency that is disappearing from this society. Her clothing that she makes for herself (and lately for me) is better quality by far than anything I can get at any of the big box stores or on-line.

Which brings me to my final thought. I could have easily just thrown those shoes away and bought new ones. But I didn’t. There’s nothing wrong with them that a little time and materials couldn’t fix. And there’s the little bit more I would have added to humanity’s near-infinite garbage dump, which buying new shoes that have their own carbon footprint in manufacturing and shipping. My desire to fix rather than replace has been growing over time. I’ll fix it if I can, and if I can’t, I’ll take it to someone who can. Even my Apple hardware is getting a bit long in the tooth. And we know how notorious Apple is about building devices that are nearly impossible to repair. And yet, if the screen gets cracked or the battery eventually dies, I’ll take it in and have it replaced rather than buy a new iDevice.

You could say that my desire to fix rather than replace is part of my heading into retirement, and you’d be right. I won’t be able to afford to just drop wads of cash when the mood strikes. But there is something even more fundamental going on. I feel responsible (I am responsible) for adding to, and to continue to add to, the carbon and plastic and other junk that is slowly choking the life out of all life on Earth. You have to start somewhere to cut that back, and this is one of the many ways I’m trying to make up for the oblivious destruction of the Earth I’ve participated in over my many decades of life.

[1] Except now they call that person a sewest. Whatever.

[2] Why didn’t somebody tell me that moccasins is only spelt with one ‘s’?