Button Can Memories

It has been a rainy week for us here in Chesterfield County, and we needed every drop of it.  See God, not one complaint out of me.  I always fear that if I sing the old "rain rain go away" song, it will do precisely that.  l thought about the rainy days of yesterday and how we spent the time stuck inside.  There were only  three channels back then children, and just like today when we have over a hundred channels, there was nothing on.  My grandmother Nancy Douglas was a teacher til the day she walked over to the other side.  She had lessons to teach us all and most of my memories of her involve a lesson she taught us.
Rainy days in the summer involved teaching us patience.   I know that most of you had experience with a button can.  Mammy's button can had place of pride on the bottom shelf of the right hand side of the pantry.  (It was a large Prince Albert can, not the smaller hand held can ,for easy cigarette rolling.)  Buttons were expensive items then as they are now.  Worn out clothes had many uses.  The brightest of the material went into separate rag bags for quilting and rug making, the faded and threadbare into the bag for cleaning rags.  The buttons went into the can.  This was true recycling before it became the chic thing to do.  So on rainy days, Mammy would take down the button can and dump the whole thing onto a sheet spread out on the handmade rag rug in the middle of the dining room floor.  We would be given large safety pins and allowed (?) to sort through the buttons and match them up.  We put our matched up buttons onto the safety pins and laid them aside.  There would be some amazing buttons in that collection, filled with  beauty and mystery.  Where had all these buttons come from in the beginning?  What stories could they tell?  We often exclaimed in true joy when we came across one that was too beautiful for words.  Hard for the youth of today to understand the call of a button.  I wonder what their button can memory will be when they hit their 60's?