A Jar of Buttons

Yesterday, I bought two jars of buttons in an antique shop.  My intention is to use the buttons to decorate cards and bookmarks that I am making.  When I opened the jar and spilled out the contents (hundreds of buttons cascading across my coffee table), lots of thoughts tumbled around in my mind and so did many sensations.

You would expect the sensations to be those of touch (the different textures of the buttons) and sight (the many different colors and shapes), but ever so subtle smells wafted out of the jar too.

 

I caught whiffs of perfume in the jar and mingled odors that reminded me of how my mother's clothes smelled in her closet and dresser drawers-good smells of perfume, bath powder and sachets.  

It was a real revelation-here was a jar of buttons collected by an unknown woman that revealed what kinds of clothes she wore, (big buttons for coats; plastic buttons for old-fashioned housedresses, men's shirt buttons, etc) what colors she preferred, what perfumes she used and that her husband wore lots of dress shirts. You could even guess at her age from the styles of buttons in the jar. She was obviously a thrifty person, saving hundreds and hundreds of buttons.  There were even left-over needles and some buttons with many different-colored threads in them, suggesting they were used and re-used.

I found it very interesting that in one way or another, we all leave little tracks of ourselves behind, so often so unintentionally.