button box

I recently had the most amazing conversation with a total stranger and I decided I wanted to share it with you.   

I was in a photography shop looking at one of their beautiful photos on the wall.  I said to one of the employees "everyone needs one of these".  It was a huge picture of a baby and a beautiful keepsake of a special moment in time.  The woman that works there said "it is very important to have those memories where you can look at them".  I replied with my usual conversation about Mom losing her pictures in a fire, and how those types of losses are hard.     

I am not sure how a picture, keepsakes and my mom's fire lead to this conversation but it did. The woman went on to share a family story about her Grandma having a brain bleed and her death was imminent because of it. Her Mom and her Mom's two siblings went into Grandma's home and did what you have to do and cleared it out. The first thing the woman asked of her mom was "you didn't throw the button box away?"  Her Mom had no recall of the button box and assumed it went in the garbage.  The woman went on to reflect of her love for the large cylinder filled with not only buttons, but scissors, some coins, all kinds of treasures.  She said she felt almost a sense of grief in the loss of the button box.  She had shared her feelings with a friend and they said "why don't you start your own button box".  Not being a sewer she thought it would be an unusual collection of items, but she did.  Her fellow worker said that when they visit, her kids love to check out her button box.  For many people a conversation like that would never have happened because they wouldn't understand what a heritage button box truly means. 

The ending of her Grandma's story was that she actually got a bit better and her death wasn't as imminent as they felt.  Since she was on the Palliative ward and not dying, the social worker told her she would be moved to another place.  She asked "where would you like to go?"  Grandma said "well I have always wanted to go to Panama".  Sadly, Grandma's health didn't allow her to get to go to Panama.

The conversation about the button box, stirred up so many memories of my Grandma.  My Grandma was a seamstress, and of course in the olden days nothing was thrown away without the buttons being removed.  I remember playing "buttons" with my cousins. We would sort through the box and make little groups of the same buttons, always excited to see if Grandma had added anything new since we last played.  We spent hours with that silly box, and I have such wonderful childhood memories mostly about the feel of the buttons. 

Although I have great memories of my Grandma's button box, I never thought of what happened to it.  I don't have the same sadness that the lady in the Photo shop did when her Grandma's button box was gone. My memories are different and whenever I put different buttons and colors on some of my projects, I smile thinking "Grandma Dempsey would never have done that". 

  

I enjoy buttons and presently have them sorted by colors in different see through containers. I like to swirl my finger through them and get the perfect one.  I buy buttons at the dollar stores for many of the outfits that I have knit.  As I said, I go rogue and sew on all different ones or different colors.  I love the wild and reckless feeling it gives me when nothing matches. It simply can't get any more exciting than that. 

These are fidget sleeves for people
with Dementia or Alzheimer's. 

For those of you that have the same memories of buttons as I do, I hope you enjoyed this walk down memory lane.  If you are wondering what the hype is, I totally understand.  Simple childhood memories are the best and I hope you have one that you can relate to others, even total strangers.