Button Box

Day 29: From my own tin of buttons memories arise, scented with lavender as I open my grandmother’s button box in my mind’s eye. Inside are treasures executed in marcasite, carved of bone and ivory, stamped in metal, and studded with rhinestones chipped and dulled. If some match, it’s happenstance, for they have been gleaned from worn dresses and frayed shirtcuffs, separated from their kin and applied to different garments until many have been orphaned as result. I, a small child, sift them through my fingers, and the lavender pervades.

I know they had stories to tell, but I was young and not interested in histories when I had them in my hands. Some may have belonged to Old-old, the great-grandmother who sewed meticulous quilts with her bent, arthritic fingers. Did she smell of lavender? My sense of her is dim. The buttons smelled of Yardley’s, and so clearly is my grandmother illustrated by that scent that I cannot separate its fragrance from her image.

The room is dimly lit, a bedroom, and the precious box of buttons has been opened as a rare and special pleasure. They tumble out upon the thick bedspread, falling helter-skelter like a scattering of runes unread. Two draw me. One is an obvious choice for a child: a “diamond” set in black Bakelite. The other is broken, unique among its fellows and a riddle: why is it there, preserved in its uselessness? The child does not formulate the question in the button, and its answer is lost in dead years. I touch each one, carefully and separately, to acknowledge its individual presence. I am baptized as an animist at the ripe old age of four, and the souls of buttons address me with a quote from lavender.

My grandmother gathers the existential buttons and returns them to their box. I will see them only once again in life.