Morning all and welcome to October. It is still warmer than October should be but rainy and a bit dreary so if you look out of the window it now seems like a cold fall day. As I spent yesterday sweating it out as I gathered up fallen tree limbs before they could be flying hazards in the approaching wind, I can tell you yesterday, and today ae not fall temps. But at least the fallen tree branches won’t be breaking windows. So on with the first prompt of October!
Something untoward is going on with these buttons. I just don’t know what yet.
Tuesday, October 1st: I searched the box for a matching button.
I searched the box for a matching button. I knew I had at least one. The buttons on this shirt were standard white shirt buttons. I generally kept a supply in hand as I tended to lose buttons far more than most people. I was never sure why. I would leave the house with a shirt possessing all of the buttons that it was supposed to have according to the manufacturer’s specifications yet, at least a couple of times a month I would return home to find that alone had gone missing.
At first my imagination took me back to childhood stories of little people living in the space between the walls and stealing tiny items to use in their secret hidden spaces. For a moment I allowed myself to indulge in the fantasy that my home was host to such people and that my missing buttons were now prized serving platters or something.
The fantasy didn’t last as I never lost the buttons at home. I always had them when I took the shirts out of the closet. I checked them when they came out of the laundry and they were there before I hung them up. It was only sometime after I left the house that they disappeared.
While I was willing, in my wilder flights of fancy to believe in the possibility of little people taking disused items, I didn’t think even they had the stealth to steal my buttons when I was actually wearing the shirt.
‘And I doubt they would want to live in my office.’ Tried imagining an office dwelling tribe of little people. My mind immediately went to some sort opium den style habitation where toner fumes were inhaled by loopy little people. Given the stuffiness and stiffness and overblown sense of self-worth my supervisor projected I did take slight amusement in thoughts of a hidden nest of toner addicts lurking in his walls.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t think what such creatures would want with my buttons, or how they were getting them.
I sighed and had to give up on miniscule button thieves and content myself with the more mundane. I expected that somewhere along the way between the office and home or even somewhere in the office, there was a spot where something I accidentally knocked against had an edge sharp enough to sheer off a button.
Today my problem was finding a replacement. I was down to my last fully buttoned shirt and had a stack of my identical button down work shirts that each had a button missing. Unfortunately all of the buttons I had were of the wrong size. Some were slightly too large, others slightly too small. Some had a pearlescent sheen to them, and I wondered where they managed to come from.
Finding none of the plain buttons in the size I needed I decided to do a single shirt sacrifice. One shirt would give its buttons to replace the buttons on the others and then I would repurchase buttons in the correct size for it’s replacement. It was more sewing than I planned but at the moment, I saw no hope for it. As I threaded my needle and got to work, I turned over the options of where I could have lost them in the first place.
Ten til Midnight 