Button Collecting

My Mom didn't collect buttons in the way button collectors do nowadays, she saved buttons to recycle and reuse. I sometimes wish I had kept her button jar instead of letting it go at the farm auction. There was a local woman who collected buttons and I wonder if she ended up with them, though I don't even know if she was present that day.
This little glass jar of ten iridescent, warm red buttons is the only collection of hers I have and it only because the jar was in one of the drawers of the old sewing machine of Grandma Lynam's that I kept.
One of my favorite poets understood the women who kept those jars of buttons.

      A Jar of Buttons
               By Ted Kooser

This is a core sample
from the floor of the Sea of Mending

a cylinder packed with shells
that over many years

sank through fathoms of shirts --
pearl buttons, blue buttons --

and settled together
beneath waves of perseverance,

an ocean upon which
generations of women set forth,

under the sails of gingham curtains,
and, seated side by side

on decks sometimes salted by tears,
made small but important repairs. 

The woman who made all the small but important repairs in my clothes as well as my life. (1944 - Mom, me Fritz the dog and my big brother, Ronald.)

P.S. After I published this post, I took a closer look at the lid on that glass vial.
That is an Rx under a Caduceus. It is a prescription bottle. When was the last time you saw anything but plastic pill bottles?