That “Darn” Sock

The other day I had to throw out a pair of socks for extreme wear. Then I realized that many of my socks were in disrepair, so I added them to a long growing list of clothing items I needed to replace. As a mother of two I often dream I could indulge a bit more into fashion and shopping, rather it usually goes on a list until things get really unsightly. Well as it so happens (a small tangent here) my wonderful husband and generous friends had all conspired to gift me a shopping spree for my 30th birthday. Their overwhelming generosity allowed me to pick up all the things on my growing list and then some.

When I returned home from shopping I quickly went to work putting the new clothes away and creating a pile of clothes to donate. When I came across my favorite pair of sock, overall they were in decent shape, but they had a very annoying hole in the toe (the kind of hole that when worn surrounds your big toe and then proceeds to strangle it all day, annoying). As I went to toss them in the trash a light bulb went off… If you like the socks so much FIX THEM YOU IDIOT. What…fix a pair of socks…who does that…

Well this thought threw me into a spiral of thoughts. But the end result is this… When did we stop fixing things? I hear tell of women darning socks, patching pants, fixing hems. When did our society stop doing this? I know the answer, when women started working. But seriously it took me less than two minutes to sew up the hole in my sock, are we really that busy? It took me all of ten minutes after that to fix a hem in a pair of pants, Grey’s Anatomy is much longer than that.

Expanding on our throw away culture. There are other things that break in our lives and we just toss them out for the next best thing. There are even things that aren’t broken that we replace (cell phones, anyone). Our culture has gotten complacent in replacing things that don’t need replace, and I am a part of that. So here is my pledge. I will attempt to fix the things that break in my life. If I break it worse (which is quite possible, no harm done). Who knows it could be a new skill, but I know my carbon footprint will be smaller because of it!