In the 'Repair Cafe', it is not just appliances that are broken

WEAVERVILLE, N.C. — Doris Millet pulled the cover off the Brother sewing machine. It was nearing 60 years old. The outside was yellowing. But otherwise there was little doubt it had been cared for and loved.

It had belonged first to her grandmother, Lida, a force of nature who taught Doris to sew, and who stitched dresses for her as a child in Upstate New York. Later, it belonged to her mother, Lucille, and came along when they moved to the North Carolina mountains in the 1990s.

When her mother died more than a decade ago, the sewing machine remained with Doris, now 72. She brought the machine on Thursday evening to WNC Repair Cafe, which like similar events around the country is run by volunteers who offer to help neighbors fix just about anything that is broken.

On this night, the room buzzed with the sounds of drills and hammers, and of the chatter of people who had poured in with items in need of repair. A faulty KitchenAid mixer. An antique clock. A nail gun that wasn’t firing. A tea kettle that wouldn’t heat. One woman with a broken floor cleaner showed up with her parrot, Wrangler, on her shoulder.

Millet’s problem was a beloved sewing machine — that had crafted pillowcases, reupholstered furniture and mended countless clothes — was no longer making clean stitches. They were sloppy, too loose, and she had given up trying to figure it out.

Across the table sat Erin Perry, 31, who also had found her way to these mountains years ago after most of a life spent elsewhere. She was a sewing teacher whose own machine had a sticker that says, “This machine kills fascists.”

Let’s have a look, she told Millet.

The repair cafe movement began an ocean away in 2009 in Amsterdam, as a way to help people keep waste out of landfills, reuse household items and learn from skilled volunteers how to fix whatever breaks. The gatherings have proliferated around the United States in recent years.

In that sense, the chapter in western North Carolina is merely one of many places that have embraced the ethos of resisting the country’s disposable culture.

Except that there is a deeper thread here, where so much was left broken by Hurricane Helene in 2024. In the days after the storm, with much of the region cut off, Dan Hettinger and a gang of volunteer mechanics, electricians, sewers and fixers showed up to help people who needed so much.

By the end of that first month, they had fixed roughly 500 chainsaws and 60 generators. Hettinger recognized the cafes for what they were: community repair as an intimate and critical form of disaster relief.

“What we are doing actually is resilience,” said Hettinger, 42, who has continued to spearhead the growing gatherings ever since.

In the months after, people showed up with air-conditioning units and other appliances that had been compromised by floodwaters, and family keepsakes mired by mud. Some folks, Hettinger believes, just came to talk and to commiserate.

The items that show up these days tend to have little connection to Helene, Hettinger said, but still the memory of it looms large.

Even now, there is so much that a dedicated band of volunteers cannot repair. Road and bridges in need of work. Businesses still trying to get back on their feet. Entire towns still trying to resurrect what once was.

And so, perhaps it means just a little more when the fixers and those in need of fixing can gather on a summer evening to replace the zipper on a favorite sweater, or crank up that lawnmower again, glue the soles back on a pair of shoes, or get that old lamp to once again glow with light.

“Do you know the last time you replaced the needle?” Perry asks Millet.

“I’m not sure,” says the older woman.

Perry is searching for the answer. She installs a fresh needle, then threads it effortlessly.

“You make it look so easy,” Millet says.

“That’s the first sewing skill I ever learned,” says Perry, “because my grandmother couldn’t see very well.”

For Perry, the storm is why she is here this night. She and her partner stumbled into a repair cafe in the days after Helene in need of help to fix a chainsaw. She marveled at the sense of community and the collective wisdom and volunteered her sewing expertise on the spot. She has been coming back ever since.

“It solidified my belief that we need to have these,” Perry said of repair cafes. “Fixing the things we already have, combined with the community of this, is this very radical thing. … It feels exhilarating, even if you are just patching holes in people’s jeans.”

Millet had her own epiphany in the days and weeks after she watched dozens of trees crash down all around her home in Weaverville. She had a generator and offered to help neighbors she had hardly known to power their refrigerators and freezers. They have grown friendlier, and do favors for one another in ways they might not have before.

“When you live on the side of a mountain, you have to help each other,” she said. “And when you help each other, there is a new type of closeness.”

Outside, beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains, another round of deadly flooding battered parts of Texas. Smoke from wildfires filled the skies from the Midwest to the Mid-Atlantic. The U.S. and Iran had traded another round of strikes in an ongoing war. The stock market fell.

But on this night, as dusk fell over the mountains, a volunteer at the front desk announces that people brought in 85 items — a lawnmower, a Schwinn bike, a weed eater, a toaster oven — and the vast majority of them had gone home in good working order.

Perry tinkers with the bobbin’s housing. She tweaks the tension setting. She puts the new needle through its paces. Finally, the perfect stitches that the machine has made for generations are back.

“Wonderful,” Millet says, elated.

She has a skirt she needs to sew for her daughter and slacks that need to be hemmed. She still uses thread that belonged to her great-grandmother, one in a line of women who never threw away or wasted what could be salvaged.

“Thank you kindly,” she tells Perry. The younger woman smiles.

“Good luck with your mending.”