Keepsakes

The button lay inside the dual circles of the cheap wire bracelet I found at the bottom of the swimming pool and the silver engraveable bracelet my great-grandmother gave me for one of my birthdays.

            I stared at it for a long time.  Why a button?  Everything else in the box had a story attached by my childhood.  Imaginary or real, as if they could be separated then, a reason had caused me to treasure each object in the safest place my childish paranoia could think up: my jewelry box.

            The bracelets, for example.  The wire bracelet, much too big for my bony girlhood wrists, had been turned into a circlet fit for a princess one elementary summer.  I was the explorer of the deep, the only adventurer brave and strong enough to touch, at my peril, the bottom of 12 feet of blue chlorinated mystery.  The bracelet had been my reward.  Being so far away from retrieval by ordinary mortals, it had to be the lost magic jewelry of some sorceress.  And I was meant to have it, even if my wrists weren’t big enough to match up with my imagination.

            The other bracelet was a real treasure, though worth nothing to me when I first received it.  How could it be valuable when I knew where it came from, my very ordinary and non-mysterious great-grandmother?  It was too clean to be magical, too new to connect me to some story bigger than me, too pretty to take on a harrowing adventure.  But my mother told me it was special, and to keep it safe for later when my wrists were less bony, so I put it in my jewelry box with the other.  The first was stored away so that that sorceress couldn’t find it again.  The second, only because the adults told me it would mean something later.

            The box itself had its own story, easily recollected.  The matching boxes had been given to my younger cousin and I one Christmas when I was eight or nine years old.  Though our taste in Christmas presents always differed widely, in an effort to keep things simplified and fair, our grandmother would give us at least one present in common every year.  Beyond the simplification and justice of this system, I also have the suspicion that the presents represented an effort on the part of my grandmother to encourage my femininity, to give her tree-climbing, knee-skinning oldest granddaughter something in common with her ballerina, Barbie-loving younger granddaughter, even if that something in common was just a jewelry box. 

I didn’t see that then, only now, after many more years of presents.  Then, I only knew that I didn’t like the wooden hearts attached to the lid.  At least they were purple, not pink like my cousin’s.  I could always pry them off with my pocketknife later when I got home.  The ballerina dancing inside when I opened the lid was pink though.  I couldn’t dance.  I had never worn a pink tutu like the beautiful ballerina in the box.  But it did play music, a magical fairy-like tune, and it had hidden compartments.  Enough magic to warrant its use as a hiding place over the years.

The box had a story.  But the button.  The button had no story.  Perhaps once, but I fail to remember it as I clean the box for the first time since receiving it more than a decade ago.  I still don’t dance.  My wrists are more meaty than bony now, like the rest of me.  I still don’t like pink.  And I keep treasures in my heart instead of innumerable boxes and drawers, mostly because of the lack of space in my dorm room.  Moving back home for the summer, my belongings, these drawers represent the state of my maturing soul: in order to make room for the new, the old must be let go.

So I’m cleaning out the box to make room for my adult treasures, the keepsakes that have monetary value or I can actually wear in the future.  It’s easy to let go of the worthless wire bracelet after reliving my childhood in its related story one last time.  The bracelet from my great-grandmother is easy to keep.  It connects me to the women of my family, gives me a history, something to give to my future daughter, something to wear to look sophisticated.  It gets tucked back into the safety of the box.

            But the button.  It holds my attention because it has no value.  It is the mysterious echo of something lost, the thing I want to remember but can’t.  It’s the tug on the edge of my memory, the word on the tip of my tongue.  Why? Hangs above my head like the hazy golden fog seen in artists’ representations of heaven. 

            Perhaps it came from the clothing of someone I knew, someone I loved.  The old-fashioned mother-of-pearl could have come from one of my mother’s old blouses made of the soft fabrics I loved to hug as they came warm from the dryer.

            Or maybe it was another gift.  My grandmother, or my great-grandmother, could have passed it down to me like their great-great-grandmother had given it to them.

            Maybe I found it.  Maybe my adventures led me to its shining hiding place in a tree hole or under a bush or in a gutter or puddle.  I took it as a fairy treasure, and saved it with appropriate solemnity.

            Each of these options remain likely, but none of them offer undeniable truth to echoes of my faded recollection.  That the button held meaning to my younger self is all I know.  Not the reason, not the story, not the memory.

            It was easy for me to rethink my definition of keepsake when it came to the other objects, like the bracelets.  I had known their stories, remembered my childhood, laughed at the memories, and thrown them away.  Knowing their stories allowed me to give them up.  I could absorb the significance that had matured beyond the object, revelations about myself and my life, before giving up the things themselves, no longer holding meaning on their own.  My childhood, though not what my childhood had become, made its way gradually into the trash.

            But the button did not have a story.  I could not absorb the significance, the experience, the revelation when the story was lost.  I could toss away an object, a symbol, a moment.  I could not toss away a mystery.  If I did, a piece of me would be lost forever.  That piece of me would remain a mystery to myself.

            But then, how much of myself had already floated away like a balloon accidentally loosed by a small hand, disconnected from memory, from a piece of junk stashed in a drawer?  How many moments had been forgotten already?  How many past cares and worries and loves had already been tossed away and replaced so long ago?  What had already slipped into the oblivion of the past?

            So I took the button into my palm, stared for a few more moments, clasped it tightly, then opened my hand to let it slide into the black garbage bag at my feet.  When I looked down, its shine had been lost among the countless other memories.