The Button Box

My extra present at Christmas was something old.

It was my mother's button box. Well, actually it's a fruitcake tin from the 1960s, full of buttons.

I had mentioned it on a blog post about my mother back in June, when Thursday landed on her birthday. I wrote about some of my memories of my mother for Thursday 13, and mentioned the button box, wondering what had happened to it. My mother passed away in 2000 from pancreatic cancer. Most of her things remained with my father.

My stepmother saw my blog post (I didn't know she read my blog), and she knew where the button box was. She pulled it out of the basement and cleaned it up and gave it to me for Christmas.

She was quite emotional when she gave it to me. I probably did not offer up the expected reaction - I am not one to cry, especially in front of other people, but I was certainly shocked and surprised to see it.

I imagine many women of my mother's generation had a button box. Waste not, want not and all of that. My brother and I used to make a kind of toy out of the buttons and a string, a zinger type thing that I am not describing well. It was always fun to comb through the box and see what was there.

Long ago, I probably remembered what some of the buttons came off of and thought about those garments as I sorted through the buttons. Now, I have no idea, but there are certainly a lot of buttons in there, as well as needles and a die from a game, among other things.

It was incredibly kind of my stepmother to clean up the box and give this to me as a keepsake. I really appreciate her thoughtfulness.