On a shelf in my living room sits a jar of buttons.  The jar is an old mason jar that was once was used to preserve some long forgotten food.  It is an odd shape for a Mason jar: tall, narrow and rounded at the top.  Most of the buttons are very old, some are pretty, some are plain.  Some of the buttons are big and round and came from coats worn many years ago.  Some are small, some are square.  They are every color of the rainbow.  There are buttons covered in fabric, some plastic and some metal.

I wouldn’t say this is a button collection, but more a reminder of my grandmother.  Her name was Alice Bradford Charles; she was born in 1898 and lived to be 92 years old.  Grandma was a small woman, 4’11” and 105 pounds, but she had a big personality.  She was only sixteen when she married my grandfather.  He had an 80 acre farm he inherited from his family and a drinking problem.  As my aunt used to say, “Dad spent all of our money on fast women and slow horses.”  Grandma was always poor and when the depression hit, she had ten children to feed.  She was widowed at a young age, so she spent most of her life surviving on her own.  By the time her children were grown, Grandma had sold all but five acres of the farm.

My dad was the youngest of Grandma’s children and I was among the youngest of her grandchildren.  I spent most of my summers with Grandma and I adored her.  I was a shy, awkward child who stuttered and had very few friends. Grandma was my friend, teacher and companion.  She taught me how to plant, weed and harvest a garden.  When the summer was over, she taught me how to can the fruits and vegetables we spent the summer growing. 

Grandma’s farm was located outside of a small town in central Indiana.  On the property she had a small house, a barn for the cows and horses, a chicken coop and a pig sty.  The house wasn’t in very good condition, in fact the kitchen floor slanted so far to one side that my brother and I used to play soap box derby with his toy cars.  The barn was located just a few yards from the house and was large enough to house one horse and two cows.  The pig sty was located on the other end of the property mainly because of the smell generated from the hogs she raised.  Then there was the chicken coop between the barn and the pig sty. Grandma had a flower garden filled with orange poppies, red roses and silver gazing balls outside her front door. In her back yard was the vegetable garden. 

Every summer Grandma grew sweet corn, green beans, tomatoes and many other vegetables.  Grandma even grew rhubarb that my cousins and I enjoyed dipping in sugar and eating raw.  Further in the back, was a pear tree that provided enough pears to “put up” as Grandma used to say.   In the middle of winter, when the pear tree was bare, we just opened a jar of pears that tasted as if they were just picked from the tree.

While we worked, Grandma would tell me stories.  She would tell me of the first man in town to own a car.  She described the car as a horrible contraption with wooden wheels that would scare everyone’s livestock when it sped by on the gravel road.  “How fast did it go, Grandma?” I would ask.  “At least ten or fifteen miles an hour,” she answered.  Then we would laugh because we both knew that was pretty slow compared to the cars of the day.  One day, she said to me, “Treesie, you’re way too serious for someone so young.  You need to go play games with the other kids.”  So I asked her, “Grandma, what games did you play when you were little?”  That is when she told me that she was put in the county children’s home when she was only six years old.  When she was eight, she was sent to live with a family and in exchange for her room and board, she was required to work.  “I didn’t get to play games.” she told me, “I had to get up early and do chores all day to earn my keep.”  She maintained this work ethic her entire life.  For Grandma, life was simple.  She woke up early, did her chores, and took care of her family.

Back then, people did not think much about the environment and conservation.  However, my grandmother strongly believed in “waste not, want not”.  Like other people who lived during the depression, she never wasted anything.  She smoothed out aluminum foil and reused it, never used a baggie just once and thought paper towels and paper plates were a waste of hard earned money.  In the fall there were always apples, pears and pumpkins.  She had a cow for milk and chickens for eggs.  Every fall Grandma, along with the other adults in my family, would prepare for winter.  This included butchering a hog and killing and cleaning chickens for the freezer.  I will never forget the time my brother and I decided it would be a good idea to hide the axe so the chickens wouldn’t have to die.  That didn’t stop Grandma; she just put her thick-soled, black shoe on the chickens’ necks and pulled their feet.  It was brutal, but effective.  That is until one poor chicken was thrown to the ground, and it seems there was a rut where its head landed.  Because when Grandma pulled that chicken’s feet, his head popped out from under her foot, still intact, without a single feather left on it.  The sight of that bald chicken running down the road to get away from my grandmother was so shocking, it took us a few minutes to even realize what had happened.  We never saw that chicken again, but we laugh over the memory whenever our family gets together.

But, back to the buttons.  Grandma never threw an article of clothing away without first cutting off the buttons.  When she passed away in 1989, she had jars and jars of buttons.  There were so many buttons that each of her 37 grandchildren got a jar full of them.  We had so much fun remembering the dress she wore to church on Sundays that the blue buttons surrounded by rhinestones came from.  Or the button from the shirt that got passed back and forth between brothers until it was just too worn out to patch any more and it took its place in the rag pile.  Grandma was poor but she provided for her family and she did not waste one second feeling sorry about her station in life.  She was small, but she was mighty.  Whenever I look at my jar of buttons, I am reminded of my grandma, and I yearn for a simpler time when working in the garden and listening to grandma’s stories was the highlight of my day.