Mending Life by Nina Montenegro

Author:Nina Montenegro [Montenegro, Nina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sasquatch Books
Published: 2020-05-19T00:00:00+00:00

Note It can be helpful to turn the garment inside out and examine the back side of the hole and roving. This way, you should easily be able to tell whether the hole’s perimeter is entirely covered.

My friend Madeline is an organic farmer who is hearty, bold, hardworking, visionary, and not the least concerned with wearing the latest fashion. She isn’t worried about getting dirty, she chooses not to be dainty or delicate, and she throws herself into any physical task with gusto. When the weather cools, she dons a patched-up down coat, casually—the only word that feels right to describe the way she wears everything—as if it doesn’t matter one bit. But it does; it matters to her that the coat is still doing what it’s supposed to do: keep her warm in the chilly fringes of a long day in the field, no matter the tears in the elbows, flanks, and pockets from snagging on blackberry brambles or errant nails in the toolshed. She needs that coat.

The coat is red. The patches are yellow. I catch glimpses of her out in the field, surrounded by a lush sea of green—kale, chard, peas, bok choy, collards, celery, broccoli. She shimmies backward down the path with a scuffle hoe, her yellow elbows flashing as she weeds. She looks like a colorful sailboat adrift on a vast sea where sky and ocean are the same silver color. She looks like the first spring flower to bloom deep in the forest, the first star to appear in a dusky evening sky, a bold flag proudly announcing what it stands for. She is an Henri Matisse painting, a Romare Bearden collage.

Before I saw Madeline’s coat, the thought hadn’t even crossed my mind that it was possible to repair a busted down jacket. If it had been my unfortunate luck to spring a leak in my jacket, resulting in a slow bleed of down feathers, I would have lamented the hole, thinking: These jackets cost an arm and a leg, gah!…Why in the world did I lean on that?!…So much money down the drain!…Such a tiny hole now, but it’s going to get so big!

Then I would have reluctantly handed it off to the thrift store to become someone else’s problem, most likely to never keep anyone warm again but be sent straight to the landfill. But when I saw Madeline’s mended jacket, I sort of, kind of, just a little bit, wished my own coat had a hole or two, just so I could fix it. When the first hole does appear, I’ll be ready. I’ll mend it with a colorful patch and wear my coat with pride. Undoubtedly, someone else will see my mend, and mend her jacket too.

–Sonya

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