buttons

Last weekend, on Sunday, someone asked me what I did the previous night. I emailed back and explained that I had been steadily working on organizing the storage room in the lower level. I was very excited about organizing, arranging, and labeling the storage containers. It was especially fun to go through and organize my buttons.

I received a rather snide (if I do say so myself) reply about... well, perhaps needing a more well-rounded social life; that organizing buttons on a Saturday night was a bit spinsterish, and right up there with alphabetizing spices (okay, I admit, that is something else I do.)

Okay, before the story goes any further, let me explain why I spent a Saturday evening going through and organizing buttons into different little baby food jars, their screw-on tops painted different bright colors one lazy day last summer.

I have always loved old buttons. Ever since I sat by my grandma's sewing machine and inspected the colorful buttons she had tidily arranged in small baby food jars, I have appreciated the tiny treasures.

My grandma Hanna was quite a seamstress. I was told she would critically consider a dress in a window of Marshall Field on State Street in Chicago and then go home to the farm, make a pattern, cut out lovely fabric of her choosing, and execute a beautifully-tailored replica, yet better I like to think, of the original. I have never achieved her level of craftsmanship behind a sewing machine, but it was she who encouraged me to sew.

Before my Grandma Hanna patiently taught me how to guide the thread through the maze of the old Singer sewing machine, or how to sew a straight line on scrap fabric, or to appreciate a well-constructed outfit, she allowed me to pick through her many buttons. I suppose she saved unused buttons from outfits she executed years before. I'd dump the jars of buttons out on the floor or fan them across her neatly-made bed and marvel at the tiny treasures-- wooden ones, rhinestone, cloth, knotted, plastic, metal, tiny pearls, shell, ones with tiny painted flowers, leather. I held each in my hand. They told a story.

Through the years, I acquired a very small sampling of those tiny treasures. My grandma's buttons. Each brings me back to my Grandma Hanna-- her steady influence, her no-nonsense demeanor, her appreciation for a hidden-stitch hem and invisible seam. I loved her.

Growing up, Grandma Hanna and my Grandpa Jake were the strongest, dearest, and most reliable people I knew. I still miss them.

So, organizing buttons on a Saturday night was so much more than just that. It was a sentimental journey of sorts. And it was good. It was the perfect thing to do on a Saturday night.