What Was in the Red Basket

And, the weirdest collection you've ever seen.

A few years ago when my Aunt Joan decided to sell her single-family home in Jacksonville, Florida, I got lucky.

My aunt had lived in this home for fifty years. Now her husband, Uncle James, had died, and she had remarried, and life would be easier if they didn’t have to cook for themselves. They planned to move into an assisted-living condo.

Aunt Joan wanted to give me a large framed photo of my great-grandparents, Walt and Mary Branch.

I made the trip the day before her estate sale began, and Aunt Joan was frenetically packing boxes with objects she wished to keep. The next morning, people would begin scavenging her home and toting off her material life.

Time was of the essence, then, and she was past eighty, so I threw myself into helping. I’ve always been interested in material culture, probably because I was immersed in it on the south Georgia junkyard where I grew up. My dad collected everything.

My aunt had collected all my books, and they were signed to her, and she was packing those up to take to the retirement home. She was not taking her collection of antique furniture.

At one point she approached me with a red wicker basket that was rectangular and about the size of a longleaf pine cone. “I want you to have this,” she said. “It was your grandmother’s.” Few baskets come with lids, but this one did.

Aunt Joan lifted the lid.

“This was her button basket,” she said.

I suddenly remembered the basket. It sat on my grandmother’s electric sewing machine, which was located in a bedroom at the back of her farmhouse.

This basket is the one my aunt handed me.

My grandmother was almost a foot shorter than I. I’m not short at all. Beulah Mae Miller Branch barely reached five feet. By the time I could form memories, her hair had turned gray. She kept it short, permed into curls, although this activity—a visit to a beauty salon—was not an association I ever had for her.

She, like most of the women on my mother’s side, were makers. They created things from textiles. I still own a housedress that my grandmother sewed for herself on her Singer sewing machine (“housedress” meaning a dress she worked in but did not wear to town). She pieced dozens and dozens of quilts during her life.

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A button basket would have been important to a woman born in the time, station, and place of my grandmother—in 1905, to a farmer and a housewife, in tiny Graham, Georgia. Growing up, her clothes would have been mostly handmade. Even her children’s clothes, especially when they were small, in the 1930s and 1940s, were handmade as well.

Buttons were valuable. They were carved of wood and bone before they were manufactured of metal, then plastic. They cost money. Because of this, buttons were recycled, over and over. When she sewed a new dress, my grandmother (later, my mother, and even later, I) would dump out a button basket and carefully match buttons for it.) If anybody popped off a button and lost it, a replacement would be sought in the basket.

My grandmother’s collection represents a practice that is almost disappearing in our world—that of making clothing, of repairing clothing, of replacing a lost button. The practice comes from the incredible need to make do, when a person would keep a basket of buttons for a time when one of them might solve a problem.

When I lived in Brattleboro, Vermont, my neighbor Sylvia decided to downsize, and she held a huge estate sale. One of the items was a five-gallon bucket of buttons. It turns out that when Sylvia attended yard sales, she could not pass up a good button collection, and she had amassed a pickle bucket full.

I’ll be honest. I wanted that button collection. But I wouldn’t let myself buy it.

Two thimbles were buried in my grandmother’s buttons. One fits my ring finger and the other (touching the monstrous brown button in this photo) fits a child.

What I really want to talk about is collections in general.

Collection: An accumulation of objects gathered for study, comparison, or exhibition or as a hobby (Merriam-Webster). A group of objects or works to be seen, studied, or kept together (yourdictionary.com).

Around 33-40 percent of Americans collect “one thing or another,” says Dr. Shirley M. Mueller, writing for Psychology Today. This may be due to our pleasure response when we see something unique. A person “sees a string of ordinary objects punctuated by the extraordinary.” Specific parts of our brains light up when the oddball thing shows up. Mueller suggests that social motivation might cause people to collect—treasures “enhance their networks of friends.” Perhaps we collect because of anticipation. The most pleasurable part of vacations, for example, is the anticipation. As Mueller writes, “the anticipation of the reward is more exciting to our pleasure center than possessing it.”

The urge to collect can be the same as Aldo Leopold’s, to keep all the pieces. It may look like hoarding, because definitely, there has to be an organizing system if you are a person who intends to keep all the parts.

Of course we’re evolutionarily collectors as well. After all, what were we doing in the fruit trees?

Once I saw a massive collection of matchbooks (hundreds) that had been lifted from bars and once, impressively, a collection of wine corks. In that case, my friend and her companions over time had drunk hundreds and hundreds of bottles of wine. Those corks would fill a 50-gallon drum.

These thoughts about collections bring me more questions than answers.

1. Some collections consist of objects that don’t look alike—an art or stamp or coin collection.

2. Some collections consist of objects that look alike—the matchbooks or the wine corks, for example.

3. Our fascination with collections may not be the diversity of the pieces but the aggregation of the pieces—hundreds of corks in a barrel is impressive.

4. Some collections are functional, are used—vintage cookware or farm tools. Even an art collection is functional if it’s viewed. I use my collection of pencils.

5. I’m not sure my pencils can be called a collection.

6. Some people say that they have a collection of seeds, although I think seeds would only be a collection if they are used for viewing, not planting. My seeds are constantly being removed to the dirt in the garden and other seeds constantly added. I don’t have a seed collection. I have a container of seeds.

7. I’m not sure living things can rightfully be called collections. Can we collect cows? Can we collect trees? Is this because living things are not material?

8. Our ability to collect has grown with our country’s GDP. In my local archives I see estate records from the early 1800s in which the material possessions of a homesteader can be listed on a single page, items like “one iron bed,” “two skillets,” “four spoons,” “one spinning wheel,” and “one goose pillow.” I think the speed at which our nation moved from poverty to relative wealth (in terms of material possessions) has confused many. My dad collected everything because he remembered too well having nothing.

9. We have grossly overcompensated for lack. We have too much stuff, and we keep on collecting.

10. Sometimes a collection is nauseating in its uselessness and excessiveness—a person with an addiction to frog kitsch or watermelon kitsch or owl kitsch. They are made with precious natural resources. At the end of a collector’s life they will be extraneous.

11. Magpies collect. Pack rats do. Ha, bill collectors do too.

What Do You Collect?

Would you be willing to write in the Comments section what you collect or have collected?

What’s the most money you ever paid to add a piece to your collection?

What’s the weirdest collection you’ve ever seen?

I’ll go ahead and answer first. I collect books. The most I’ve ever paid for one is around $100. I’m not sure about the weirdest collection, but the most powerful and saddest is the collection of dirt taken from places where people of color were lynched during the Darkest Ages in America. This is in the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.

National Memorial for Peace and Justice, Montgomery, Alabama

If You Want More

My personal-narrative essay “Praise to the Transformers,” about material possessions, published in the anthology Dirt: A Love Story, edited by Barbara Richardson, 2015. If you want to read the essay, Salon.org excerpted it here.

What I’m Reading

After that big post I wrote about Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and racism, I realized I had not yet read my friend Ann McCutchan’s book, The Life She Wished to Live: a Biography of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. I ordered it right away and am deep into it. It’s a deeply researched and beautifully written book.

Rid Your Life of Plastics

Recently I was happy to find a plastic-free alternative to underarm deodorant. If I had not done a quick internet search, I wouldn’t have known, because alternatives are not being sold in stores near where I live. A number of brands have sprung up, thankfully. The container for the deodorant is a sturdy cardboard tube. I’m really happy with the product, and I’m even happier not to be tossing a plastic container in the landfill to pollute the earth’s waters for literal centuries to come. This is a command: DO NOT BUY PLASTIC DEODORANT PACKAGING. LOOK FOR ALTERNATIVES. I mean that.

Okay, please….And thank you.