The Button Box

By Loretta Morris

              The Button Box wasn’t actually a box, but rather a tin. An old fashioned round metal cookie tin, six inches high and twelve inches in diameter, probably from the 1940’s, decorated in an intricate gold, silver, and red Christmas pattern. It had served its time holding cookies, and after sustaining many dings and dents which gave way for a little rust and a few sharp creases to its form, it was repurposed by my resourceful mother to hold buttons. Thousands of them.

              It was a perfect container for this task, not only because of its large capacity and snugly fitting lid, but because it was made of a sturdy heavy gauge tin, not the flimsy aluminum of today, (thousands of buttons are surprisingly heavy) and was easy to locate in the jumble of her sewing room because of its distinct shape and coloring among the many plain brown boxes of fabric and notions. When my mother yelled, “Go get the button box!” while she was doing her evening mending in front of the television, it was easy to find and fetch for her.

              The contents of the box had been purchased, collected, and salvaged over many, many years. My mother, a child of the Great Depression, grew up making all of her own clothes, and when she became a mother herself made most of our clothes as well. As a frugal seamstress, she never got rid of any article of clothing without snipping off the buttons for her collection, and removing the trim, and cutting out the zippers, since she had boxes for those items as well. So, after nearly a lifetime of dressmaking, she had amassed an amazing number of buttons in every imaginable shape, size, material, and design.

              The Button Box fascinated me. I loved removing the lid and taking in a whiff of the metallic tin itself, combined with the old wood, metal, and plastic aromas that the buttons held. I liked the sound the buttons made as I raked and swirled my fingers though the tiny objects, imaging what each one had originally been attached to: Maybe a fancy formal dress, or just a man’s plain dress shirt. Perhaps a simple summer blouse or a warm winter coat. The possibilities were endless, and I always felt that each little nugget had a story to tell.

              The box held an unending supply of rainy day activities. I would sort them into any number of categories, such as color, shape, number of holes, no holes at all (shanks), size, material, abundance, and uniqueness. I would stack them to see how tall a tower I could construct. I would make intricate mosaic pictures of Christmas Trees, or rainbows, or sunsets. I would make piles of identical buttons for my mother, and secure them together on a string or large safety pin in case the need arose to replace all of the buttons on a blouse or dress.

I don’t know what happened to the Button Box after my parents moved into assisted living. Their house, the one they had lived in for nearly five decades, was packed to bursting with so much of everything, that many items were deemed as junk and pitched into the dumpster before an appeal could be made for saving them.

Every now and then, when I poke around antique shops, I’ll come across a mason jar filled with buttons and trimmed with a happy grosgrain ribbon. I think of my mother then, and miss her.