Buttons and Snails, How I See Things

“I still like the way I see things best.” Georgia O’Keeffe

Sometimes, when I put my iphone down, it’s still in camera mode and it focuses on whatever is under it.

When this happens, and I see the photo on the screen, I snap a picture.  Most of the time they’re only slightly interesting.

Yesterday this happened with some buttons in the wooden box next to my sewing machine. This is where I keep things I need when I’m sewing. Things like bobbins and seam rippers and the screwdriver to take off the throat plate on my machine so I can clean it with the little brush I also keep in the wooden box.

But other things, like buttons, wind up in the box too.  It gets pretty messy and dusty at times and I occasionally clean it out.

I clicked the picture of the buttons because I have a thing about buttons.

I know I’m not alone in this.  One reason is because when I was picking up the sewing machine for Bishop Gibbons from Dee, she had a nice collection of buttons in big glass jars on her shelf.

I admired them, telling her how I use old clothes to sew with and always save the buttons.  I just can’t throw them away.  Of course, she felt the same, which is why she has so many buttons.

But even if I never saw Dee’s jars of buttons I’ve seen enough tins and boxes and bags of buttons in thrift stores and Antique stores and garage sales to know there are many of us button savers out there.

So I took the picture of the buttons, then forgot about it. Because on its own it’s not a particularly interesting photo of buttons.

But when I was in the back pasture this morning I was gazing at the pond as I usually do, seeing what I could see and there was a brown and black striped nerite snail.

Nerite snail eggs only hatch in salt water and they’re not natural to pond water so I know it’s one of the snails I put there a few years ago. I was surprised to see it so I took a picture.

Again, the photo wasn’t anything special on its own.

But later when I was looking through the pictures on my iPhone it was easy to see the similarities between the buttons in the box and the snail in the pond photo.

Here it was, two of my worlds coming together.

I don’t think it goes any further than that. Mostly it’s about a way of seeing. I guess my way of seeing.

And like collecting buttons we know we’ll never get to use, I’d bet there are other people out there who might have seen the same thing too.