A repaired corner can extend usefulness while adding another person’s place in the object’s history.

A mend does two things at once. It buys the object more years, and it writes somebody new into what the object is, so the thing you keep using is now partly the work of whoever sat down with glue or thread on a particular afternoon. Repair is not a return to the original state. It is an addition, and the visible seam is the record of it.

If something you own is broken and worth keeping, mend it rather than replacing it, or ask someone who can. And when you use an object that was fixed before you had it, it is worth knowing who did the fixing.