416

Fruits and vegetables

My partner and I invited his father and stepmother to visit us in our new home. I was fascinated by this couple even before I met them, and when I met them, I fell in love with them. He is in his 70s, and she is in her 80s. Their love story is beautiful, and both of them are wise persons from whom I learn a lot. 

We were looking for some local flowers to decorate our home for their visit, but we couldn't find any. When we returned home, I noticed that the fruits and vegetables looked wonderful and already served as decorations. 

These days, it is possible to get unpackaged courgettes and peppers (they come from Spain), Danish tomatoes in cardboard packaging, Danish strawberries in cardboard packaging, Danish cucumbers in plastic, unpackaged Danish spring onion, unpackaged lemons and mushrooms in cardboard packaging wrapped in thin plastic film. 

When we buy fruits and vegetables, we prefer to buy local, seasonal and organic ones. But we also consume imported fruits and vegetables, so our practice is not perfect. 

415

 Repairing 

I live with 10 or so items of clothing. Two of them are linen shirts. Because I live with so few items, I wear each one of them a lot, and they do wear out. When they wear out, I continue to wear them to normalise wearing old and worn-out items of clothing in our society where everything new is so desirable. I was not going to repair this shirt. I was planning to let the hole unfold naturally in the fabric. It would not make the shirt less functional, but it would make it beautiful, imperfect and my own, as if it has a story. And it actually does! I invited it into my life when I still lived in Finland and have worn it almost every day. I've worn it for walks, grocery shopping, meetings, teaching. The shirt was there with me in the very bad moments and happy ones too. 

But recently I changed my mind and decided to repair the shirt. It's been raining so much here in Copenhagen and I had some time to dedicate to more manual activities. I appreciate activities such as repairing, looking after my space and the objects I live with (i.e., cleaning), and cooking because my work entails mostly reading and writing. 

There are many ways to repair an item of clothing. For this hole it would perhaps be better to use a small piece of fabric and make a patch because the material around the hole has become very thin. I didn't have a spare piece of fabric, so I decided to repair the shirt as socks used to be repaired in the old days. When I was young, my mother and grandmother used to have what is called a darning mushroom, a wooden tool for repairing socks and perhaps other things too. I don't have this tool, so I held the fabric stretched to the best of my abilities. It was a messy process, as the thread itself was perhaps too thin for the job. But in the end it worked out, and I was pleased with the raw, imperfect result. 

When my partner saw my repaired shirt, he mentioned that perhaps a better way would be to use a thread in a different colour (visible mending). I think it's a very good idea, but at home we only have white thread.