Buttons
As a little girl I would spend a majority of my days with my great grandparents while my parents were at work. I spent most of that time with my great grandmother. She always had small tasks for me to accomplish. The one task, my favorite, was finding the matches to her endless supply of buttons. She would clear off her kitchen table lined with an uneven oilcloth; she had a habit of stuffing newspaper clippings that she wanted to share or dress patterns under there.
After clearing the table she would grab a large mason jar filled with buttons, unscrew the metal top and pour the little treasures carefully on the table. She would tell me that she needed to find the matches to the buttons, and since she was too old and her eyesight was so bad, I was the only one who could help her accomplish this assignment.
I felt special because she gave me a job, a purpose. I remember meticulously sifting through the buttons trying to find matches for my grandmother, studying all their intricacies and details. There were small black buttons, fancy carved buttons, tortoise shell buttons, plain white buttons, shiny metallic buttons, buttons made out of mother of pearl and every once in a while there would be an object that didn’t quite belong like a pistachio shell.
Followed by what seemed like hours of searching for the button mates, I would excitedly tell my grandma that I found a match. She would come over from the stove, spoon in hand, to inspect the pair and find some small reason why they did not belong together: one hole was bigger than the other, one metallic luster was shinier than its mate, or one button was cream while the other was ivory.
It wasn’t until later in my life that I realized that there were no matches to be found in that jar filled with her buttons. There was never a perfect match. Only mis-mates existed in that glass jar. Perfection did not exist. Or maybe it did if I blurred my eyes a bit. It was my grandmother’s way of keeping me busy while she made her own chicken stock or mended my grandfather’s pants. However, I never felt tricked, only impressed by her craftiness. It was the sorting, unearthing, and scrutinizing that was important, not necessarily the end result. I wish I would continue to see value in the process, instead of putting so much emphasis on the results. Maybe by focusing on always making a match we pass up all the unique buttons on the way and throw out all of their importance with our hurry. After all, life itself is not about the end result, but the smaller pieces that fill the jar.