My Button Jar
I started a button jar today. This is a time honoured family tradition on my mother’s side of the family. My mother has a button jar. My grandmother had a button tin. I’ll bet my grandmother’s mother had some sort of container for buttons. 
Up until today, I had buttons strewn about in various places. You know how it is…you buy a new shirt, you get a spare button or two. So today I had an empty jar. A teeny, tiny jar. Which was okay because I don’t have a lot of buttons. Just a pittance of buttons, not a multitude, can be found at my apartment.
My buttons are not pretty like the buttons in this picture. They are more monochrome. I have a lot of navy buttons, a few beige ones and one bright peacock blue button that is from my only silk shirt.
This is the size of my button jar. It is much smaller than a pint jar. It is much smaller than my mother’s button jar. It held, when it was full of jam, about 4 ounces. My mother’s buttons are stored in an empty Kraft Cheez Whiz jar. This is the type of jar I store pens in. The biggest Cheez Whiz jar is perfect for storing pens. My grandmother’s buttons were stored in a shortbread tin. A Walkers shortbread tin. Which seems strange to me now because this is my mother’s mother, who was Polish. It was my father’s mother who was from Scotland (the land of shortbread cookies. LOL).
So here are the button jars. You’re going to have to imagine them full of buttons. I’m not that technically advanced yet.
It seems to me that containers for buttons might be something universally rendered. What do you think? Did your mother have a button jar? Or a button box? Did your grandmother? Do your sisters? Or brothers? Do you?
I think Neil Gaiman’s mother had a button jar/box. How else could he have come up with the other mother in Coraline? A collection of buttons, stored all together, definitely makes one realize how scary button eyes staring into your own eyes would be.
There will probably not be a post next week as I have family issues to deal with. See you in two weeks.
Circling
Google image search
You say you are back in the area where you grew up. If you have family members there, perhaps they can include you in some of their circles?
A comment on my last post leads to this post (go read the comments, if you want, & come back). The prominent part of the comment is posted above. I feel the need to explain why this action isn’t feasible in my life. To do this, I need to explain small towns in Saskatchewan and a bit about how I was raised.
If you look at the map, to your left, you will notice a lot of place names. My province has two major cities, many medium cities and hundred of small towns and villages. I’d give you population numbers but I don’t have them. Most of the smaller centres are not on this map; where I grew up is one not included here.
Let’s just say the city I live in now (a major one) has more than 200,000 inhabitants and the small town I grew up in has about 1,000. Right now, I am about two hours, by car, away from family. I choose to not own a car. This is the bane of my mother’s existence. There are many reasons I don’t own a car and I will eventually blog about that! I am considered quite odd for not coveting this essential symbol of the North American car obsessed culture. This is just one of my eccentricities.
In the winter, I go home for the major holidays, usually by bus. Winter, this year, started around the beginning of October and is not over yet. It has not been this cold for fifteen years. Brrr.
Members of my family came into the city about once during that same time period. My mom was just in for a doctor’s appointment and my sister stayed overnight after she attended a concert. I took the day my mom came in as a vacation day and drove them around and I barely saw my sister. She got to my place around one a.m. the night she was in and left by seven…so there was no time to socialize. We both had to work that day.
That’s part of the problem. Why my family comes into the city, I mean. They have busier lives them me (husbands, children, hobbies, sports etc). They come into the city for quick day trips packed with planned activities.
I go home to visit them and hang out at their houses (I have an apartment) and involve myself in their tasks (cooking, cleaning, walking the dog). Their friends are where they are. As stated, in last week’s post, I’m trying to widen my circle of acquaintances. It’s not feasible for them to include me in their circles anymore than they are.
I do have a few nieces and nephews in the city. I don’t feel I have the right to just insinuate myself in their lives. They would, I think, feel spied upon. Yes, I know, part of the problem is that I have trouble asking others for favours. Not just asking family; asking anyone. I’ve been managing on my own for 90% of my life. It’s a hard habit to break.
It doesn’t help that the car culture has changed so much over time. I’ve never owned a car. As a teenager, I didn’t need one. My peers and I stayed close to home. Most of us only came into the city for appointments and school sponsored trips. My nieces and nephews, on the other hand, think nothing of hoping into a vehicle and coming into the city to party and meet friends.
Look at the map again. Most of these places are just an hour or two apart. In Montreal, I thought nothing of hoping on the Metro and traveling two hours to visit a friend. Here two hours alone on the highways and back roads of Saskatchewan can feel like an eternity. An eternity that I need a vehicle to access in the first place.
An eternity, especially in the cold, dark of a winter evening which can start anytime after four p.m. So, instead of venturing out I choose to stay home where it is warm. It doesn’t help that the bus system is crap and I’m too cheap to spend money on a taxi. Seeing the problem yet?
Yes, it’s me. I’m cranky and cold and tired of winter and way too set in my ways. And, I suspect, I’m not the only one feeling that way as Saskatchewan comes to the end of (another) long, bitter, cold winter.
I like all the seasons. Honest, I do 
Losing & Being Lost
I keep losing people. 
It’s, as if, they’re there one minute and gone the next. It feels that abrupt and that direct. They’re not dying off. They’re just gone from my life.
The first person I lost was my Dad. He left not soon after I turned one and I didn’t see him again until I was almost thirteen. He did bring more people in my life at that time. When he came back into my life I gained an awesome step-mom, two new brothers and three new sisters. An even trade-off
The next person I lost was my BFF B when I was thirteen. She moved into the city and gradually became just a blip in my life. We were pretty constant from the time we were born and I thought we would be friends forever. I lost a few other friends around the same time as parents were transferred or got remarried, and unlike today, we only had snail mail to keep in touch with. I wasn’t permitted to make long distance phone calls; too expensive.
I lost a classroom full of people when I graduated at eighteen. I grew up in a small town and went from Kindergarten to Grade Twelve with basically the same thirty classmates. I wasn’t popular but I had friends and boy friends and potential boyfriends. I was more of an outcast; a clique of one. Still, these classmates were constant in my life for thirteen years. I knew them in a way as they knew me. Life was predictable.
Two years later, I went to Calgary to go to Community College. I lost a whole town then. People who knew me day to day. People who knew my family better than me. People who barely knew me. The townfull of children I babysat for from age thirteen to age twenty. Around two thousand people who knew where I came from, who I belonged to, what my personality was. There is comfort and security and a sort of safety in people knowing who you are and what to expect from you. And in you’re knowing what to expect from them.
I had a small circle of acquaintances in Calgary, mostly from school. I lived closer to my Dad and his family so thus was able to get to know them all in a more day to day way. Got to know them, I thought, in a more real way as I participated in their everyday life. Then I didn’t graduated and moved to Saskatoon and lost them all, except for my family. But I lost the ability to be there with them on a daily basis.
Five years working in Child-Care in Saskatoon. Three years married. I decide to go to university after my divorce and lost a husband and any contact with his family. I lost, once again, the children I babysit. The children who were part of my day to day life.
And moving to Montreal I lost day to day contact with all my family. I went home once in six years and none of them ever saw where I lived in Montreal. This is what being poor and working class gets you. It gets you lost.
I had a bigger circle of acquaintances and friends in Montreal. Acquaintances from school who I saw daily (for four years of my BA program, two years of my Masters program) and lost completely after graduation. The friends I still write to and they write back. A few of them also blog so I feel on occasion that I am back in their day to day lives. We write sporadically and I wonder how the Victorians did it. How they were able to maintain friendships with sporadic visits and daily letters?
I graduated with my Masters in 1997. Since then I lived in one small town well working in another, one medium small town, a tourist small town and a small city or two depending on how many months equals living somewhere. I am now back in Saskatoon.
As I’m sure you’ve figured out by now I keep losing people because I keep moving. I’ve lost not just acquaintances and friends but boyfriends and husbands and lovers. I’ve lost half a century (almost) of connections. And I don’t know how to get them back.
Everyone else’s life looks to be so full. I’m back in the same area where I grew up and can count the number of acquaintances I have on both hands and the number of friends on one. Family is constant but it’s been decades since I was part of their everyday life and they part of mine.
I went to my thirtieth reunion last May. It would be nice to be able to see some of these people more regularly. Some of them live in my city. Some of them I like better now than I did in High School. But they have full lives and don’t seem to be looking to increase their circle of acquaintances.
I yearn for more. I want to have people in my life to go to the movies or the theatre with. People to play with on a weekly basis. How do you do it? How does one make friends and connect with potential lovers when one is middle-aged and new to the community?
Out After Dark
I went out, after supper, to the movies alone.
It was a dark night,
City dark not country dark…
The night is different in the city
Calmer, brighter,
Quiet.
“I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.” – Sarah Williams, 1868.
