When my mother was a child, during the Great Depression, I think every family had a button box. That's where you went when you lost a button, rather than to the store.
My grandmother kept her button box all her life, and when I was small I used to play with it. My mother had a button box as well, and I used to play with that. It was a rectangular red metal box with some kind of picture on it. I can't remember the picture, but I remember the shade of red. The box was a bit battered and dented. I think it was an old chocolate box.
And the buttons! Every possible shape and size and color. Some were plain men's shirt buttons, not very interesting until you spent time playing with them--how many holes did they have? Were they bone or shell or plastic? Shiny or matte?
The buttons I remember best, and wish I had now, were once part of a pair of mother-daughter dresses that my mother and I wore in about 1960 (Remember the mother-daughter thing?). The buttons were round and black with a brass shank at the base. There was a design carved into the top of the buttons, and they were fairly small.
Once we outgrew the dresses, the buttons were cut off and went into the button box.
Not long after I left home, I started my own button box. So my boys have played with buttons too.
One Saturday back in February, when Younger Son came home to have lunch with me (and so I could tell him about the tumor in my lung), I had the button box out because I was working on a project. Younger Son sat down and started sifting through the buttons just like he had done when he was small. And he commented that it had been years since he'd played with the buttons. That's probably true--seven or eight years would be my guess.
In any case, the buttons were a great distraction from the rather serious topic that we were discussing, and we both kept sifting and sorting them as we talked.
@ Jeanne Sather 2009.
