My bracelet’s leather strap broke a few days ago, so it had to be mended. I received this bracelet, which has a skull pendant, from someone who is much more than a friend in my life, so I was glad I felt it slip off my wrist in time to catch it before it reached the ground. I have a difficult time finding things once they’ve dropped, and this was outside, so chances of retrieval would have been slim, as I was alone. But I caught it, and put it in my pocket, and went searching among the odds and ends in my fire tender’s bag for something to replace the strap. I love tinkering and mending, and I love mended things more than new things. There’s care in mending, an eye to the long term, to handing things down. Mending speaks of a willingness to accept change and of making do with whatever it brings. I have a few ends of rawhide in my bag, that I use to repair the khana-walls of my ger. The “hinges” of these are small leather straps that are fed through the khana’s lattice work. I reached in my bag and pulled out a strand of leather and cut it to size. It was too thick to do the fancy knot-work of the original strap, but I knotted the closing bit in the same way, and it functions fine. On seeing it, D. commented that I had used a dyed strand of rawhide, in red. From the same strand I had used to make a swan feather fan for the friend who gifted me the bracelet.