"grandmother's button box..."

when I was a little
girl,
my grandmother had
an old hatbox filled with
buttons

there were buttons of stone,
and coral bakalite buttons in the
shapes of flowers and hearts.
there were mother of pearl buttons
that once graced narrow plackets on
the front of a
delicate shell-pink silk blouse she
only wore to church.

and then there were the small
wooden buttons with holes worn
wide by years of resewing them
to linen shirts and coarse cotton
work dresses...these were
my favorite.

I could imagine my grandmother's slender
fingers pushing them through hand-finished
bottonholes in my mother's school dresses
or to my uncles leather suspenders...

wooden buttons were my favorite
you could see the touch of love and time
on their faces...and they were so softly
polished by my grandmother's care...