Spare Parts

Hanging from the red sweater I bought last week was a small plastic bag containing strands of matching yarn. I love those little packets of spare buttons. Really, I do. Anyone knows you’ll never find exactly the right 3/8 inch, pastel pink, pearl button for that cashmere sweater should you lose one. But yarn? Come on now. If I discover a hole in my sweater and try to repair it, even with the matching red yarn, it won’t look good as new. Despite my mother’s best efforts, my mending stitches still look like a six year old’s. I’d be better off just wearing it until the hole has raveled big enough to be mistaken for a third armhole.

Dutifully, I tossed the packet of yarn in my top dresser drawer, but not without noting the growing mound of spare parts accumulating there, each button waiting patiently for its time like second stringers awaiting the moment the starter succumbs to a leg cramp or concussion. At my house, it’s a long, long wait on the bench.

Why do I keep this lineup of spare parts? I suppose it comes from a sense of doom, not unlike the pang I feel in my gut as I rip the “Do Not Remove Under Penalty of Law” tag from a new mattress pad. I’m certain that if I toss the spare button in the trash along with the tags and sales receipt, the fingers of some unlucky karma will tug at the threads snugging buttons to my garment until loosened, they'll drop and disappear down a heat register or become lost in the tall grass fringing the sidewalk.

Or maybe it’s simply a case of thrift. A free button is a free button after all. In my young married years, an older woman taught me how she stretched her budget. Her method was to shop at Goodwill on Adam and Eve Days when they clear out merchandise for ten cents an item. For a single dime she could strip the buttons from an ugly shirt and add a complete set of shirt buttons to her stash. This same woman also ground leftover chicken bones into cat food, so maybe she was a tad extreme. Still, her mantra is as woven into my psyche as “eat your vegetables” and “cover your mouth when you cough.” To this day I can hardly bear to throw a shirt away with its buttons intact.

My grandma sometimes presented me with her button box when I grew restless and bored. I pulled the lid from the round tin and ran my fingers through buttons of every size and color. Sitting on her living room floor, I sorted through them, finding matching sets, and stringing them together with a needle and thread. Grandma had supplemented her family’s income in her younger days by sewing. During the Depression, people brought old garments to her. She sat for hours in the evenings, pulling the seams apart and cutting the threads with a razor blade to salvage the fabric. She cleaned the wool with gasoline, pressed it and cut out new patterns to create beautiful new coats and pants for her neighbors. What to me were simply buttons – blue, brown and black – were to her, memories of hard times, good friends, satisfaction and creativity. Of course she saved buttons.

This winter my husband’s siblings moved their parents to a smaller apartment. It’s better in many ways – meals are served three times a day, a van carries them over icy roads to their appointments, and the smaller rooms don’t take as much upkeep. There’s not as much storage room either. Deciding what to keep was painful. Repeatedly they said they had everything they wanted to keep, only to call in a panic the next day hoping to salvage this box or that file.

I understand. In our furnace room, tucked on the highest shelf, a green cardboard box with a plastic top houses my rock collection. I’m not talking about a scientific collection of painstakingly identified and labeled specimens. I’m talking about the pretty piece of quartz I picked up on my way home from school in second grade. Someone was probably building a fireplace and this small chunk dropped from the mason’s truck as he pulled away. I discovered it in the gutter as I walked home one May afternoon. I picked it up, admiring the way the afternoon sun glinted from the white surface and ran my fingers over the deep gold veins bisecting its face. I had never possessed anything so lovely, so I hauled it home. Over time I added a lump of coal from my dad’s power generating plant, a piece of petrified wood, a hunk of iron pyrite that sparkled like silver, a triangular rock that looked like a set of prehistoric dentures, and one shaped like a modern 1960’s era chair – rocks that caught my eye as I wandered as a child through the Wyoming sagebrush. I can imagine my future self phoning my children, begging them to save my box of rocks.

“Bring them to me,” I’ll plead.

"You can't keep everything," they'll say, exasperation leaking through their patience, the way the filling oozes out those little holes in the Twinkies.

"Pleeeeease," I'll beg. I won't be above groveling.

I’ll store them under my bed and bring them out at night when I can’t sleep, turning them over in my fingers as I used to as a child, and as I still do every once in awhile, standing alone in the furnace room, just because.

Before closing my drawer, I sifted through the jumble of spare button packets pushed to the back.

“Ah, yes,” I sighed, examining one. It was a nickel color, daisy shaped button from a favorite yellow jumper I bought at Wal-mart one spring. Every time I wore it I received compliments on how blue it made my eyes look, how pretty I looked in yellow. If I needed a little confidence from my wardrobe, I went straight to the yellow jumper. It wore out years ago, but I still hang on to the spare part. The organized part of me screams, “Throw it out,” but I toss it back in the drawer with the rest. Like the rock shaped like dinosaur teeth, it takes me to a happy moment, so it’s got to stay.

Maybe I’ve had it all wrong. Maybe these extra buttons and snatches of yarn aren’t really for mending and replacing after all. I’m coming to think of them more like starter kits for our button boxes – individually packaged mementos of days when our eyes were blue and beautiful – through which we can run our fingers and remember. All that stuff we hang onto in closets, basements and garages, it’s all just part of the button box. Spare parts. Kept in reserve for possible use. In excess of present need. Just because.