The Button Jar

I was getting a button out of my "button jar" to fix Jeffs Pants the other day and it reminded me of a story I had forgotten all about. Long ago in Santa Barbara where I grew up, we spent many days and nights at my Grandparents house. I esp. loved my Grandmother and since they were Italian we called Her Noni and my Grandfather Nono. Noni was a wonderful women who loved us completely. She would let us go and play at their house whenever we wanted. We would have sleepovers often and go there nearly every Saturday while my Moms shopped and ran her errands. It seems like we would call most Fridays or Saturday morning and ask if we could come over to play. They would take us to the pony rides or to the Childrens Estate which was a small zoo or we would just play at their house. The house was huge a beautiful.(maybe that was a childhood perspective) My Nono was a gardener and the grounds were large and gorgeous. There were flowers and fruit trees everywhere. We loved having breakfast there. The smell of coffee brewing brings me back to their kitchen still today. We would pick lemons to squeeze in the dishwater for cleaning up later. We would pick oranges and grapefruit to eat for breakfast and she always made us waffles. Yum... We would take all her blankets outside in the lower yard where there was a chainlink fence and make forts and we always had so much fun there. Inside their was a "grand stair case" that led upstairs to the bedrooms. We would play on the stairs for hours , Having pretend weddings with my cousins and sliding down them on blankets. They really let us do anything we wanted.

 Looking back many of my best memories were at their house. Back to the buttons. One of the things I also loved to do was go in their room. At the time I thought it was really pretty. I mostly remember all the little trinkets on her dresser. She had a silver mirror and brush set we would play hair shop with and a small dish of buttons. It was a pretty little dish. I think it was pink. It had all these buttons it in that we would sort and count and wonder about. My Noni was the thriftiest person I ever knew. She saved EVERYTHING! We made jokes later in life about all the rubberbands, paperclips and drawers full of stuff she would save. She would stay with us when we moved to Utah and clean out all our drawers. My Mom hated it! Everything was tidy though, she would organize it not just shove them all somewhere.

When my Noni died, my Aunts cleaned out her house and asked us what we wanted. I wanted the coffee pot that we spent Saturdays washing and then trying to put it all back together. Her pretty silver where we would polish for special occasions. I also asked for her cooking utinsels that brought back memories of the good old days and of couse I asked for her button dish and buttons. I am sure the choices of things I wanted made them laugh but that was where my memories of her house were. I got them all, my three top choices. I added the buttons to a big jar I have and don't really remember sharing the stories with my girls when they were little, which is something I now regret. I think some of them might know about it.
One day a few years back Michon and I were sitting in our kitchen and she asked me about the jar. I started telling her about them and soon we had all the buttons laid out on the table. I of course has added lots of buttons of my own from various craft projects and things but it was pretty easy for us to pick out most of the old ones. Some were really pretty or really worn or made of glass some were really tiny like they came off of baby clothes. Michon and I talked about a few things we could do with them. She was really sentimental like me and we tried to think of a cool thing we could make so they didn't get lost or ruined along the way. We never really came up with anything too great so the buttons went back in the jar. A few days or weeks later Michon called me all excited! She had found a bag full of buttons at DI ( she was a great DI shopper, she could find treasures I can't see) She told me she was going to start a cool button jar too to pass on to her kids. It breaks my heart to think of little things like that. Dreams that she never fullfilled even small little seemingly meaningless things like a button jar. One day when I am at my Moms I am going to find her buttons and bring them home to add to the jar. Then when I think Kaden is ready for it, I will ask him for hers and maybe I can add them too. Down the road if Karver is married to a sweet sentimental girl I will pass on the story and the jar to her. But, just in case I will remember to fill my girls in now so that someone in our family understands why I have them in my home.