Nostalgia Button

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At dVerse, the prompt is Buttons and it took me - zip! - back to the late 1940's,
playing on the rug in my Grandma's living room.


Grandma had a small black wooden button box
filled with buttons in all shapes,
sizes and colors.
It was a privilege
to be given the button box to play with
on a cold winter afternoon,
in those times
when kids didnt have 
roomfuls of plastic toys
and knew how to amuse ourselves 
endlessly with virtually nothing.


You could fish around in it,
pulling out the buttons you wanted,
line them up like a parade,
make designs with them,
even play a makeshift game
of tick-tack-toe.


Remember those times when
buttons got sewed back on
when they came off,
and clothing was patched and repaired,
rather than discarded and replaced?
Do you remember?
When we were lucky to have 
a few changes of clothing
in the correct size,
given hand-me-downs, 
and adults' penchant for "buying bigger"
when buying could not be avoided,
so we could grow into things?


I remember having the same underwear 
from age six through twelve.
Is that even humanly possible?
And I HATED them so much,
because they were so big and bulky,
I once threw a pair behind the toilet
in the girls' room
in grade one,
and was horrified 
when someone brought them in
and held them up in front of the classroom.


Being too honest to pretend 
they were not mine,
I slowly raised my hand,
shaking my head with fear 
and horror at the admission:
("I'm so sorry,")
and the nun telling me
"I know they'e not yours.
They're way too big,"
then sitting at my desk
in acute fear as
the nun went around 
peeking under all the little girls' dresses 
to see whose knickers were missing.
My mind blanked out before she got to me, 
so I dont know what happened next. 
Merciful memory gap.


In those days I could while away hours
making "houses with a deck of cards,
adding each card to the roofs
with bated breath
till all collapsed in a laughing whoosh
and I started all over again.


The story of the three little pigs
and the big bad wolf
(that I told to Sebastian last night,
to his intense delight)
figured largely
in these card houses.
It was great fun to be the wolf
and blow the houses down.


Grandma had a kitchen drawer
with bits of string
and folded brown paper
cut from bags.
Having survived the depression
she saved everything
and wasted nothing.
They lived modestly:
small cottage,
careful expenditures.


They would be horrified
at the excess of today,
everything disposable,
inflated, over-priced
and cheaply made.


Oh, for Grandma's button box,
and the days when missing buttons
got replaced.