Buttons

     When I was a small child I could play with my grandmother's collection of buttons for hours.  My grandmother did a lot of sewing, living on a farm she made many of our household items. Dish cloths, dish towels, tablecloths etc.  One thing we never threw out were buttons, we cut them off and they went into grandma's button box.  Those old buttons contained the  history of our family, memories of days gone by. Every story of our day to day life was contained in that box.
     The other day one of my friends gave me the best gift anyone could have given me.  It was a beautiful old flowered tin full of buttons.  I couldn't wait to get home to sort through them. It turned out to be a  very interesting project.  The first thing I did , was dump them into a large bowl and just look at their many different colors, sizes and textures. There were large coat buttons covered with material, others were leather, textured or metal. I found pearl buttons, glass buttons,  wood buttons, plastic and copper buttons.
     It took hours to cut the old thread off and I let my mind ponder about the women who had saved all of these buttons and the history of her life contained in them and the beautiful old tin they were stored in.  Next I put them into a large pan of warm dishwater to soak off any dirt or debris. As the buttons went into the water a very familiar scent rose up.   It was one of living on a farm and entering a dairy barn.  At first I thought, why were these beautiful buttons kept in a dairy barn and then a memory came back to me. I remember asking an old farmer one time why he kept a beautiful old pin cushion nailed up on a post in his dairy barn and he told me it had belonged to his wife and it kept her memory alive and close whenever he looked at it.  
     As I looked at the many buttons soaking in the warm water,I could just imagine another old farmer at the end of his long and busy day taking a flowered button tin down from a shelf in the barn and looking through the buttons his wife had saved over the years and the many memories they carried of their married life together. He had a smile on his face as he very gently placed them back where he could see the tin during his time spent in the barn.
     All of the buttons have been cleaned and placed in three glass jars on top of my roll top desk along with the flowered tin. I look at them frequently and think about how pleased their original owner would be at where they are in my home  and how much they are appreciated.