How much of the world can we still mend?

The sofa in my sitting room is worn now, thin across the seat and frayed where the arms meet the cushions. The frame under it is sound, so I went looking for covers online a few weeks ago, a particular weave in a colour I spent longer choosing than I would admit to anyone. The order was cancelled this week. The latest escalation closed the route the covers would have travelled, and the notice arrived in the flat language these messages always use, a line about circumstances beyond anyone’s control.

The cancellation sent me back to my grandmother’s sitting room, which looked like no other room I have been in before or since. A cushion had been recovered in a cloth that did not match the chair. A cracked dish wore a seam of repair she had made by hand and never bothered to hide. Each thing she owned carried a mark of her attention somewhere on it, and those marks were the reason the room looked like her and like nobody else.

I have been trying, without quite admitting it, to reproduce something of that room, and I was going about it by placing an order. There is a small absurdity in that, chasing a room that could belong to no one else by adding another identical thing to a cart. We give our things one life and then a landfill, and we have agreed to call it convenience. Replacing is easy now, and cheap, and fast, and ease has a way of making an old skill look like a hobby.

With the covers gone, I have started looking closer to home, at upcycled fabric with a history already worked into it, choosing in a way a checkout page never asked me to. One remnant I keep going back to carries a faded block print, the kind of pattern that was somebody’s curtain or somebody’s dress before it was mine. There is a whole way of living folded into that remnant, one in which a thing is never finished, only between uses, kept in circulation and remade into whatever is needed next. Oman’s first Omani-owned thrift store you can walk into is opening soon, started by two Omani women, and its arrival feels like a small sign of it returning. The habit is finding its way back into the country through a side door, one reused length of cloth at a time.

Here is the part I find hard to write. The sofa I end up with is going to be better than the one I ordered, more clearly mine. I will have arrived at it because a war closed a shipping route, and I cannot hold that small improvement in one hand while pretending I do not know what put it there.

The route will reopen, and will carry covers again before long. Some of what this same escalation is breaking will not come back at all. My grandmother could mend a chair, a dish, the small ruptures of a household, and she lived as though nothing was meant to be thrown away. I can mend a sofa, apparently, when a closed border leaves me no other choice. The larger repairs, the ones that decide whether a way of living holds, sit at a scale neither of us was asked to work at. So I am left with a question I cannot put down. How much can we still keep and remake and pass on, and how much have we only been using up and discarding?

Rumaitha al Busaidi

The writer is environmental strategist and advocate for sustainable development