Yesterday I went up to my grandmother’s old attic, rummaging among trinkets, dust, and nostalgia. I love going back there, because that’s what old attics do: they stir a feeling suspended somewhere between longing and melancholy. It’s like standing for a while between past and present, between the smell of age and the new light coming through the window. In the age of artificial intelligence, you suddenly find yourself holding a dusty, broken landline phone.
Every object in an attic tells a story, and among those stories I found something that, besides a trip into the past, took me on a small philosophical journey: a bedsheet. Pale yellow, thin, and worn-out, and one detail gives away how much it has been used: a square patch, carefully sewn, just a shade off from the color of the sheet itself.
My grandmother never threw anything away. She sewed, reused, mended: not out of poverty, but because she knew the effort behind things. It wasn’t just thriftiness for its own sake; it was an unconscious kind of intelligence, a quiet respect for what existed. The value isn’t in the sheet itself, but in the way she saw objects, that’s what strikes me.
Even when she was older and receiving a good pension, she could have easily bought new sheets. But she kept mending everything, saving a little month by month like a tireless ant, not for herself but to give to others: to her children, her grandchildren, everyone she loved.
Who today would sit down to mend an old bedsheet or worn-out trousers? It’s a way of doing things we’ve almost completely forgotten. In my town there are now more cars than people, the houses are packed full and the wallets are empty: the most modern contradiction of all.
I think that’s the real difference between having a lot and knowing how to use what you have. That’s why wealth doesn’t depend on a high salary: the rich person isn’t the one who earns much, but the one who knows how to use well the little they have.
When my uncle was a child, he wore his older brother’s shoes and the pants my grandmother adjusted for him each year. Today, children change shoes before they even get dirty, and a simple birthday has turned into a small ceremony of excess: we no longer celebrate life, but quantity.
We’ve mistaken abundance for security and lost the sense of what’s truly necessary. And yet, sometimes, it takes very little to keep things together: just a carefully sewn patch that helps us hold on to what really matters.
