Makeshift

Everything on Drummond is makeshift. Metal things rust and break, lines fray, material rots and decays, so you are forever fixing things with spare parts and tools that themselves are anything but new. There’s a hardware store on the island that sells pretty much anything you need, and over on the mainland there’s a huge Walmart with a Do It Yourself section where you can get a far wider variety of tools and parts at about half the price. But fixing things is a matter of being consistent and staying with the project until it’s done, and you never really know how long it will take, so you might find your repair job only half finished by the time you have to leave. So the next person to come here finds “projects” lying around. I’m used to it, after all, this is what we’ve been doing for years, but I’m not sure if Helmut is all that happy with it. We’ve had fun on Adam’s sailboat, but Helmut is rather sceptical of the material, and tends to err on the side of safety.

I hate it when things break, especially things that were bought to match other things, because it’s often so hard to find a similar replacement. This morning it was the sun umbrella, which must be 30 years old now. Mike repaired it last year, in fact it’s been repaired many times. Now Adam is fixing it and it looks like the old umbrella might have yet another lease on life. But even that life won’t last forever. It’s an eternal cycle of makeshift.

(I’d like to upload pictures, but the internet connection is too slow.)