My mother brought these bags home from France when I was a child. This obviously was before anybody (other than the French, apparently) felt the need for a re-useable shopping bag. We always called them “string bags”. I don’t know what the French call them. They were handy because they were so lightweight that they could be dropped into the bottom of a purse.

Some many years later they started to be produced in the US. I bought green ones, they quickly got holes.

Now, some many years further on I find myself in the position of the original French ones, which have been in steady use all along without suffering a single hole in the netting. One handle was sundered, surely not by weight of the objects, but by some sort of mishap.

I felt an urgency to restore this trusty, long-serving companion. I braided rope alongside the handle. I followed admonition to make the repair not invisible, but subtle.