I am finally coming out with a big secret, one that only those closest to me know: I love buttons. I don’t mean that I enjoy the way they fasten a shirt or a coat. I mean that I have an insane, visceral, tactile LOVE of buttons, lots and lots of buttons! And I know whence this appreciation for buttons arose.
My mother was quite an accomplished seamstress. She was also quite an accomplished pack rat. So, as the natural result of these two proclivities, she always had a cookie tin full of assorted buttons left over from her many sewing projects.
Oh, the delight of running one’s fingers through the dozens upon dozens of discarded buttons! At one point, when I was attending college not too far from home, my mother would babysit often for the toddler daughter of one of our neighbors. She would bring out the tin of buttons for her to play with. (Choking hazards and other basic safety concerns never crossed my mother’s mind, but that is a story for another day.) The little girl loved to look at the buttons one by one, then take them out and line them up. Invariably, she would end up losing all control and start flinging handfuls of buttons around the living room, and my mother–who had the patience of a saint–would laughingly and good-naturedly pick them all up and put them back in the tin for another day.
Although I’ve never been what anyone would call a seamstress, I have done enough sewing in my day to have accumulated a little button collection of my own. Many of them were added as those “extra” buttons you sometimes get when you buy a new shirt or sweater. I never keep those in the little envelopes; I immediately dump them out into my own little button box. Over the years, I have amassed quite a few. It’s just a drop in the bucket compared to my mom’s collection, but it’s a start.
buttons!
It’s a bit of a trip down Memory Lane, looking at the buttons and remembering the clothes they once belonged to–a dress I used to wear to work in my New York City days, a sun dress I made for my infant daughter (who is now in college). And every once in a while, ever so quietly, I open my closet, take out my little box, and run my fingers through my buttons with reckless abandon! I haven’t started flinging them around the room yet, but you never know.
My mom, also quite the seamstress, had a big box o’ buttons too. I can remember lying on the floor of her sewing room while she sat at her Singer. I liked to sort the buttons by color “families” and then by size. There always seemed to be a new button I didn’t recall seeing before or a new way to arrange them!
My mom was quite the seamstress, and she, too, had a big button box! PLUS, my grandparents owned and ran a Mom & Pop small-town department store that had a fabric section, and Grandma would give her old huge display BOOKS of buttons that Mom would remove and add to her box. She had thousands of them, I swear. And I loved to run my fingers through them, too, so I know just what you mean.
Oh good! So, I’m not crazy then? At least not about the buttons?
My family will be relieved to know I’m not alone!