Memories are what moms are made of and as the years go by it is often the little things that recapture those special moments.
For Wanda Berry, as a kid, the large, decorative button box her mother Aubrey Pye had was like a treasure chest.
Her earliest recollections were sitting with her mom who was sewing at the kitchen table and sorting through the collection of odds and sods in the container.
It was one day many years later while frantically looking through her own button box to find a replacement for one her husband Mark had lost from the crucial midriff section of a shirt he needed for a meeting that it all returned.
Looking down at the metal button she had in her hand immediately transported her back to 1963 as a five-year-old sitting in the polished church pews with her mom.
“The button belongs to a set on my mother’s Sunday best,” recalled Berry. “It was something that just kind of threw me back to when I was a kid and I would play with the buttons.”
It was also the reason she decided to write a letter to her mom, who is now 82, called The Button Box.
To Aubrey this piece of paper is something she treasures dearly and still brings a tear to her eye when she reads it at this time of year with the approach of Mother’s Day. It is a reminder of the many happy times they had just quietly being together.
Berry remembers her mother dressing up her and her two sisters in matching clothes and being a master of recycling when it came to articles of clothing.
“She could turn a set of living room curtains into haute couture fit for a gala event,” said Berry. “We (sisters) often had matching ensembles complete with rick rack and, of course, brightly-coloured buttons.”
According to Aubrey nothing went to waste in those days and buttons were just not something you threw away.
“It was just a silly little thing I had. A bucket full of buttons and Wanda just loved them,” she said. “We took buttons off old coats, old shirts. We just could not throw anything out — there was a button for everything in there.
“I think this (holding up the letter) tells me exactly how she feels.”
The last paragraph simply reads:
Again, I think about my mother, with her seemingly tireless energy, She’s probably already edged and mowed her immaculate law and is at the gym.
Her legacy of ‘use what you have, waste not want, want not’ is one that I never truly reflected upon, appreciated, until now. With any luck the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree… or is that, the button from the button box.
Mom is the best.
Love you mom!