With today's temperatures, the heading should be "Button up your overcoat." It was barely zero on the bank thermometer downtown when I headed to a 1 p.m. meeting a few blocks from my office. I noted several student-types wandering about with coats unbuttoned, mittens missing. It was all I could do to overcome my mothering tendencies and walk past without lecturing them on the perils of bare flesh in such sub-freezing conditions. But I did...Instead this button up refers to the charming American Maid buttons I bought at the Crowded Closet awhile back. I have a thing for pearl buttons--they remind me of the prize of finding an abalone shell on the beach as a child, and more recently of a piece I wrote many, many years ago for the now defunct children's history magazine The Goldfinch about the button industry in Muscatine, Iowa. It was a perilous industry and one that eventually depleted the Mississippi river of mussels. But even with that dark history, I have a real admiration for old pearl buttons, because of their varied and natural origins and the labor that's required to produce them.
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