Mama Had a Button Can

    Growing up, I never thought much about the uncommonness of the practical containers in my home. In the cabinet beneath the spoons and forks drawer stood two cans, one shiny silver, the other sky blue. The blue flour can was large enough to use as an extra chair at the kitchen table. The cornmeal can was not quite as large, but could hold a 25-pound sack of cornmeal. Both cans came out before meals almost every day so Mama could make cornbread or biscuits to feed the nine of us, but sometimes the occasion was more special. Mama would make a cake from scratch for one of our birthdays or just because she "felt like it." Mama was a good cook, but the dishes were never fancy or expensive, and she could stretch small amounts to feed all of us and whomever we brought to the meal with us.
     We drank gallons of sweet tea with those meals, and the container for preparing the tea was not a pitcher but a rectangular white enamel pan. Mama would boil loose tea in a small pan on the stove, then pour it through a tea strainer into the white pan whose original use may have been as an icebox drawer. While the liquid was steaming, she would add sugar and stir until it was dissolved, then water from the faucet to the brim of the pan. One of us kids would take ice trays from the freezer, break the ice into smaller pieces with an ice pick, and fill empty jelly jar glasses so Mama could use a Melmac coffee cup to dip the tea from the pan into the glasses.
     But my favorite converted container was the one that stood on the end of the sewing machine. Mama had a button can. Originally, it was a Folgers coffee can, but I never saw anything in it but buttons. Four-hole, two-hole, red, blue, white, tiny, huge, round, square, anchor-embossed, a mixture of every shape and size imaginable. Losing a button on a dress or shirt was an occasion for spreading the contents of the can onto the kitchen table and searching for just the right replacement. Or at least, for just the closest-to-right replacement we could find. Stored in that can was our family's wardrobe history. When a shirt could no longer be patched, the remaining buttons were removed and dropped into the can, and the former shirt would then become a dishrag or dust cloth. It occurs to me only now that other families may not have had jelly jar glasses, a tea pan or a button can. How sad.