Button Joy

If you’re a friend on Facebook, you know I’ve been on a crocheting and cleaning jag. It started with this one kicky beret and morphed into 12 days of productivity that has resulted in nine hats:

What twelve days of unresolved anxiety, fear, and nervous energy looks like at my house. There's a scarf in there, too.

Some of those are pretty ugly. In my cleaning and decluttering jag, I’ve run across bunches of scrap yarn, and I’m using it to experiment with patterns. But some of these are also quite pretty and/or feel very nice against the skin. A few are spoken for; the rest will go to a shelter at the end of the year, along with any others I can’t find a home for. The Man is afraid I’ll open an Etsy shop, but I don’t think I’m that nuts yet (although I have thought about selling them at my sister’s coffee shop–just for yarn money, of course).

I’ve also run across scads of buttons. I love buttons. When I was a little girl, both my mom and my grandma had button tins, and it was a favorite pastime to wile away an afternoon sifting through them. So many had stories–they were leftover from this project or that one, or they’d fallen off someone’s coat, or they were just pretty. And as much as I am convinced that I’m not a tactile person, there was always something soothing about letting the buttons run through my fingers, silky and cold against my skin, clinking and clunking and jingling when they hit the tin. Button tins pick up the odors of the house they live in, and my Nana’s always smelled like hay fields and fresh cake and the pleasant must of an old house dampened by Oregon rain. My mom’s smelled eerily similar. They were good smells, good sensations. The button tin was a happy place.

I made my own button tin today:

A tin of happiness.

It’s not as big as my mom’s or my Nana’s, but it’s a start.

I’ve flung a lot of crap out of my house the last couple of weeks. I’ve made three trips to local charities, filled up both the garbage and recycling bins to near overflowing for two weeks in a row, and reassessed my emotional connection to a lot of junk I have lying around. I don’t tend to be sentimental, so flinging stuff is usually pretty easy.

But I couldn’t throw away the buttons.

Buttons tell stories. Not just the stories of where they came from or what they should have been attached to. They also tell our stories. Consider:

Don Draper buttons.

These are the attractive, functional buttons–the ones on our coats, our suit jackets. Understated sometimes, but never dull. The warrior buttons–always able to come through in the clinch.

Or what about the royal buttons? These ones say you’re important–you wear metal:

Someone should salute you or kiss your hand.

Then there are the buttons that fool you–they look sweet, but they hide a tough interior:

They look sweet and girly, but don't be fooled.

And the buttons you hardly notice:

Wallflower buttons. Beautiful, but shy.

There are cute buttons that everyone loves for some inexplicable reason:

Admit it--you love these, but you don't know why.

And elementary school buttons:

They even *feel* like Kindergarten.

But at the end of the day, they all go back in the same tin. They share the same space. They get jostled around a lot. And they come out with more character, a little dusty or nicked or funky, but better off for their time in the tin.

Don’t tell me that’s not a story.

I’m not a big antiquer or a super shopper or anything, but I’m going to start poking around at junk shops and such for old buttons and pick up intriguing ones at the fabric store when I can. I intend to keep crocheting, so some of these buttons will likely end up on hats or whatnot, but I think a lot of them will just go in the tin.

I guess the storyteller in me wants to see where this story leads.

I have button joy today. Major button joy. The Man fears I’m a little simple or I’ve gone off the deep end, but there’s a connection here–with my mom and my grandma and hundreds and thousands of girls who have gone before and understand the Tin of Happiness.

Or maybe it’s just this dang cold I have.

No, it’s button joy. And I’m going to revel in it.