EMBELLISHMENT
A decorative item added to improve the look of a garment.
Embellishments can include buttons, beads, jewels,
ornamental stitching, etc.
I wake, and my childhood teddy bear is staring at me.
It is brown and shaggy with little ears, a golden muzzle with a black yarn nose and red mouth shaped like a gumdrop. He is wearing an old vest my mother and I made him, a sequined heart directly over his little bear heart. His button eyes are blue. Each button has two holes, which are lined up horizontally, and a deep line, which runs vertically, giving the bear a rather intense stare on an otherwise confused and bewildered—if not downright vacant—expression.
“Hi, Dandy,” I whisper.
The late spring sun is streaming through my bedroom window, making the bear look aged. Its fur is matted, its paws are now just nubs, and its stuffing is exposed from a tear in the fabric.
Dandy has seen better days.
Like me. Like the world.
Time passes so quickly.
Nearly two years in the blink of an eye, since my mom’s passing.
The world is nearly back to normal. I still am not.
As a girl, I used to hold tea parties for Dandy. I used to read to Dandy. I used to dress Dandy up in the clothes my mother and I made for him. I took Dandy floating with me in the creek. A lot of kids used blankets—like Linus—as their safety net, many girls had favorite dolls. I had Dandy.
Dandy was actually my mother’s teddy bear. She finally shared that with me when I was an adult and asked to take Dandy with me to Chicago.
“I need an old friend,” I told her.
“So do I.”
It was a simple yet shocking revelation from my mom, and it struck me like a lightning bolt.
My mother was a little girl who had a childhood just like me?
My mother had a past?
She saved Dandy from the fire? How? Why? Was I holding him?
Now those questions have become haunting statements.
My mother was a little girl who had a childhood.
My mother had a past.
There was no fire. So why did she save a teddy bear?
“How many eyes have you had?” I ask the bear. “What have you seen in your life?”
I used to nervously twist on Dandy’s eyes when I was a girl. Anytime I felt anxious or sad, I would hold on to him and rub his eyes. Over time, they would eventually pop off. My mother would lead me to her button jar and tell me to pick his new eyes.
“This will be one of the most important decisions of your life,” she would tell me. “Dandy’s eyes are the windows to his soul, just like those of a person.”
Dandy’s eyes—and personality—changed greatly over the years. His eyes have been every color of the rainbow: purple, pink, red, gold.
But the last time I selected Dandy’s eyes, I was older, and I knew they would last a lifetime, perhaps until I had a child, or forever if I did not. I remembered my mother’s words and selected eyes that were not only beautiful and inquiring but also my mother’s favorite color.
Now the bear seems to mock me with a name filled with as much mystery as my mother’s past.
Dandy.
Dandy Button Company
“You lied to me, friend,” I say to it. “Dandy, indeed.”
After my mother died, my gut instinct—like that of so many friends and acquaintances—was to simply get rid of everything in one fell swoop. In my grief, I was poised to hold an estate sale, list the cabin and toss the rest into a bonfire on the beach.
Purge my past.
But then I looked at my mother’s Singer, the button tree picture, the spools of yarn and thread, the baskets and tackle boxes filled with embellishments—beads, jewels, ornamental stitching—and I couldn’t do it. The old coffee cups, the desert rose dishes, the quilts, my mom’s Bible, even the Formica dining table and chairs.
These seemingly meaningless items told the story of my mother’s life.
She purged her past. I couldn’t do it. I still needed what little I had and knew of mine.
The letter she wrote me still sits on my nightstand, reminding me of this but also making me feel like my teddy bear with no eyes: I can no longer see my future because I am so haunted by the past.
I look at Dandy.
How can I know where I’m going if I don’t know from where I came?
My whole life feels as if it’s been a fraud. I feel as if I’m hanging by a thread.
I feel as if I need to know my mother’s history to survive.
I’ve literally spent months in bed picking through the clues of her past.
I have Googled anything and everything thousands of times over.
I’ve located a few articles about the history of Dandy buttons but it was so long ago, before the internet and social media could track every second of one’s life, when a forgotten industry was thriving.
What I’ve uncovered is that the Dandy Button Company was one of Michigan’s largest pearl button manufacturers at the turn of the century and throughout the early 1900s. It was located in Douglas, a tiny resort town that holds my surname, and run by the Lyons family before it was sold.
Coincidence?
Living in Chicago, I know something of Michigan. The Mitten state is a favorite destination for Chicagoans in the summer and fall. Many own second homes near the lake, and many escape the city for the quiet and the beauty. I know that Michigan is dotted with resort towns up and down its coast, but I know nothing of Douglas and, believe me, the irony is not lost on me.
I’ve scrolled and scrolled and reread the history of Dandy from an old newspaper article a hundred times. I have it bookmarked on my phone.
I click again.
There is a photo of a man cutting a ribbon in front of the Kalamazoo River. Beside him, a two-story building has a painted sign hanging from the landing between the first and second floor: DANDY BUTTON COMPANY.
The Douglas Observer
MARCH 27, 1908
The Dandy Button Factory opened today in Douglas by the Kalamazoo River. Dan D. Lyons, 24, will serve as founder and president of the company which will manufacture buttons made from the freshwater clams found in the bottom of the river. Lyons says he hopes to hire as many as 100 workers for the summer, mainly Michigan families who would like to live and work together in free housing and earn a good wage. Dandy needs men to work as mussel men, clam fishermen and cutters, who will be the highest paid workers in the button factory. Lyons says that skilled cutters can always get as many button blanks out of each shell as possible.
I click on another saved article and read it out loud.
The Douglas Observer
JULY 1, 1918
Michigan Becomes the “Button Capital”
As button manufacturing has caught on across the Midwest, the button company started right here in Douglas, Michigan, by Dan D. Lyons continues to the lead the way. Within ten years the Dandy Button Co. has become the largest manufacturer of fresh-water pearl buttons in the world. So far this year, Dandy has turned out nearly 10 million buttons!
And another:
The Douglas Observer
JULY 1, 1958
Dan D. Lyons, Jr., has bought out the claims of all the stockholders, including his father, in the Dandy Button Company. Despite the challenges to the pearl button industry in America, Lyons proposes to enlarge the plant and conduct the business on a larger scale. At a recent meeting of the directors, it was decided to dispose of the entire stock of the company, and now it is announced that Mr. Lyons was the successful bidder, replacing his father.
I have searched and searched, but I cannot find any Ted Douglas, or Theodore Douglas, in Douglas, Michigan, or any further clues. There are millions of Ted Douglases, none of whom seem to match the mystery man I’m seeking. In fact, the internet has so much information at our fingertips it’s nearly impossible to narrow. I think back to a time with rotary phones, microfiche, written directions and phone books, a time in which secrets were easier to hide.
Frustrated, I return—as I have the last few months—to watching hair videos on TikTok or people baking bread. I flip to reruns of the Real Housewives and episodes of House Hunters and Antiques Roadshow.
My mother loved yard and estate sales, but I had difficulty with the coldness often associated with the event: people’s histories boxed up and on display in cardboard boxes for strangers. Photos of family members still lodged in picture frames that were for sale. Toys children once played with, beloved holiday ornaments, recipe boxes and cookbooks...
Memories.
So I loaded much of it up all by myself into a U-Haul, in the middle of a pandemic, locked up the cabin and drove back to Chicago. Some of it sits in a long-term storage facility off the interstate—an additional expense I do not need—and some made it home. Like Dandy.
But I know it is there if I need it.
There is a map in my soul—a heart, shaped like the one on my teddy bear’s vest—and it has always led me home. And I know that either makes me a very weak person or a very strong one.
I’m just not sure which yet.
Two years have passed since my mother’s death. Hers was just one of over 700,000 Covid deaths in 2021 alone. Everyone seems so ready to be back. Why am I not? Depression? Guilt? A sense that nothing really matters anymore? I have always been such a fighter, tried to be such a positive person, and I feel as if the entire universe—the world, my mother—has let me down.
I received my final Covid vaccine a few weeks ago. I will receive a booster, too. I feel ready to reenter the world, but...it’s taking more time than I imagined to feel “okay” again. I have only begun to sneak out of my condo—still wearing my mask—a nervous rabbit released from her cage. I have gone for a run in the park. I have strolled the streets. But I still hold my breath when I get too close to someone, I still get my groceries delivered, I still need time to process, recover, restart.
I grab Dandy and hold him tight. He still smells like my mother’s cabin, a mix of pine, water and firewood.
I grab my phone and check the time.
“Pull it together, Sutton.”
I slip into the kitchen, start the coffee and then take a shower. I pour a big mug of caffeine and spend the longest time I have in ages getting ready. I do my hair. I put on makeup. I actually slide into a real pair of pants. It’s not easy.
At 9:59 a.m., I open my laptop and join the Zoom call.
“Good morning, Sutton.”
“Good morning, Mr. Kimsley.”
I’ve spoken only intermittently to my boss over the last few months. He provides updates. I provide direction of where I think my designs should head. But it’s all “LimboLand.”
“How are you, Sutton?”
“Great, thank you,” I lie. “And you?”
“The past two years have been a struggle,” he says. “I wouldn’t ever want to do it over again.”
I nod.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “No one knows more than you.” He takes a deep breath and continues. “Well, I’m excited to say—as you may already be aware—that Lindy’s, like the rest of the world, is finally beginning to show some signs of a big bounce. Our projections for the third and fourth quarters look very strong. Shoppers are returning in huge numbers, and we only expect that to get stronger throughout the summer, fall and holiday seasons as everyone returns to work, school and social activities. People will be buying clothes at a fast clip.”
“That’s wonderful,” I say.
“It is,” Jamieson says. “With that said, we’re beginning to ask key employees to return to work. That will mean back to the office, back to routine, back to normal.”
Normal.
My heart skips.
“A full-time schedule again,” I start. “Wow.”
“So?” he asks.
Floor-to-ceiling windows surround Jamieson. He is at corporate headquarters, not far from where I live and yet a world away. I always loved the view from our offices: the tops of skyscrapers surrounded by clouds. So different from where I grew up. To me, the towering, thin skyscrapers always resembled the models we used in our runway shows and the mannequins I used to dress in my office, and the clouds were my clothes draped just so around their bodies.
“Sutton?” he asks cautiously.
I look around my condo at all of my mother’s belongings. I see my mother’s letter.
Words. Stories. History.
I was once as consumed by words as I became by fashion. I read voraciously. My mother had a library card, and we would head there after a day at Woolworths. The little library sat just off the main square, across from a park with a natural waterfall that oozed from the side of a bluff. The county pool was located in the back of the park, but I was not allowed to go there.
“Too many people, too many boys,” my mother said.
But she would let me spend hours in the library. I would pick out Nancy Drew mysteries or Harriet the Spy books. I adored Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. Later, I became enamored with Erma Bombeck because my mother loved her so much. It was nice to see her attempt to smile. I chose books that helped me understand my circumstances, books that helped me escape from the world or laugh, but, mostly, books I believed would help me become a better detective to understand my mother. I would stack my week’s worth of books in my arms and head off to find my mom. I always knew where she was: hunched over a giant monitor reading old articles on microfiche.
“Just a few more minutes,” she would tell me.
Off I’d go to slump into a big, old leather chair next to the circulation desk next to Ms. McCarthy. Everyone around thought Ms. McCarthy—“Ms. McCarthy, not Miss or Mrs.!” she would admonish those who called her by the wrong honorific—was mean, but—like my mother—I just thought she spoke her mind.
“What are you reading this week, Sutton?” she would always ask, sliding her thick, black, cat-eye framed glasses onto the end of her nose to consider me before pushing them back up the mountain.
I would hold up my book, and she would nod. Eventually, she began to bring me more “challenging” books: The Secret Garden, Little Women, Where the Red Fern Grows.
“What does ‘cautious’ mean?” I remember asking Ms. McCarthy.
“Careful to avoid danger or misfortune,” she said, right off the top of her head. “It’s from the Latin cautus, meaning careful, heedful.” She looked right at me, again lowering her glasses. “Like your mother. Your mother is cautious.”
What was she doing poring through microfiche? You were still searching for answers, weren’t you? You were still searching for closure because, deep down, you still cared about those who hurt you most. You were still searching in your own cautious way.
“Sutton?”
Jamieson is waiting for an answer.
“I appreciate the offer, but I think I’m going to have to pass,” I finally say. “I can no longer be cautious with my life.”
“Oh, Sutton,” Jamieson says, neither his expression nor tone conveying that much sympathy. “You’re making a horrible mistake. It’s a tough landscape out there right now.”
I don’t mean to, but I laugh. I actually laugh.
“Sutton?” he asks again. “Are you okay?”
“No,” I say. “I’m not. I lost my mother and never got to say goodbye to her. I never got to hug her, kiss her, whisper I love you to her again. She didn’t get to have a funeral. I lost my family. I’m lost.”
“Not with us. You’ve built a career here, Sutton.”
“I hope you will forgive me for saying this, but that’s not what matters anymore. When you lose everything, you finally remember what’s important. It’s the smallest of things: Our family. Our health.”
“I empathize with all you’re going through, but I don’t know if you’ll be saying that in a year,” Jamieson says. “Listen, why don’t we do this: you think about it. I’d also love it if you’d consider talking to one of the therapists we have working with us now to help employees who are grieving or anxious to return to work and life again.”
“I appreciate that,” I say, “but I think it’s time I forge a new future. For myself. Before it’s too late.” I glance at the letter again. “Before my blink is over.”
“Excuse me?” he asks.
“I cannot express how much I’ve loved working with you,” I say. “It changed my life and career in countless ways, and I will be forever grateful for the opportunity. But...”
“The last years have changed us all,” he says, his voice suddenly filled with emotion. He stops to clear his throat and take a sip of tea. “Go forge that new future. You’ll never have a bigger cheerleader than me.” He stops again. “But don’t change who you are, Sutton. Don’t let this change you. You’re very special. And the world needs your goodness and connection to the past more than ever.”
His words make the world spin before me.
“Thank you,” I finally manage to say.
“I’ll let everyone know.” Jamieson looks at me—really looks at me—as if seeing me for the first time. “What will you do next?”
“Sutton’s Buttons will continue,” I say. “Remember my contract? I retain the rights to my brand should I ever leave.”
He actually laughs, too, but it’s a proper, controlled, British chuckle. “I wouldn’t have let that slip through if I’d been the attorney here negotiating your final contract.”
“No, you wouldn’t have,” I say. “I’m sure our paths will cross again in the future.”
“I sure hope so, Sutton. Best of luck to you.”
“Thank you. It’s been a privilege and an honor.”
He smiles and gives a brief wave goodbye.
And then I put my hand up to my laptop, just like I did with the caregiver at my mother’s facility, and Jamieson puts his hand atop mine.
We all still need human connection. We all still need closure to move on with our lives.
I close my laptop, and just like that it’s all over.
“What have I done, Dandy?”
Where to start?
I look around my condo, boxes stacked everywhere.
You’re not moving, Sutton. You’re just...
I stop, searching for the right words.
...moving on.
“Alexa, play Dolly Parton.”
I need some Dolly right now. My mom’s favorite. The woman who grew up in rural poverty and yet persevered with talent, grace and light.
“Here You Come Again” begins to play, and I laugh out loud at the irony of the lyrics while boxing up my mother’s belongings.
“Just when I’m about to get myself together, Mom!” I sing.
I have sublet my condo to a couple who are moving to Chicago for a new job. I am following the lead of the rest of Chicago—and much of America’s urbanites—who are fleeing the city to return somewhere, anywhere. While many are returning to work, the new work space continues to be our homes, and that means our office can be anywhere, and we want it to be somewhere there is open space, grass, room to breathe, a place where we can see natural beauty around us. Rents have plummeted in Chicago, and office buildings remain vacant, even as the majority of the US is now vaccinated.
Where am I going? I don’t really know yet. Maybe my mother’s cabin to retreat for the summer and float, read books, sew, begin to design anew, mourn some more, seek closure.
But that means returning to a place that no longer feels real. It all feels fake. My mother’s lies still haunt me.
Maybe I will rent a cheap place somewhere pretty where I can sit on a beach made of sand instead of rocks, and read like I did when I was a girl.
“Maybe Dollywood?” I say out loud to the music.
I am hesitant after being isolated so long, and I refuse to be as cautious as my mom. I want to rid myself of that burdensome baggage.
One of the most difficult things about being so isolated is that I—like so many—have learned to live apart from one another. Socially distanced is now the norm.
How do we regain the connection?
I now understand my mother better than I ever did when she was alive. This virus taught me to live alone, be alone, survive alone. And once you get used to that, the routine becomes a part of your being.
My mother’s words echo in my head. Loss and heartbreak is like hard-boilin’ an egg. Everything dries up, hardens, changes. It can never go back to the way it was. And yet it still looks the same on the outside.
I have grown tougher, harder, but in a good way. I believe in myself more. I realize I cannot continue on in this life trusting in the way things were. I want to be in charge of the way things are. Even if that means my path is filled with uncertainty.
It’s the only way I can hope to change the future. Otherwise, I worry I will end up alone.
Just like you, Mom.
I place all the lids on my mother’s button jars. A good many of them—like her sewing basket, tins and boxes—still feature wilted, peeling, yellowed strips of masking tape with my mother’s faded handwriting on them:
MISS MABEL’S BUTTON JAR
MABEL’S FAVORITE BLUES
FANCY BUTTONS
I wonder why my mother went by Miss rather than Ms. like Ms. McCarthy or Mrs. I mean, my mother was married at one time, right? Or not? Yet another question. All of the widows I knew in Nevermore went by Mrs., but we all knew who their husbands were. Everyone went along with my mom’s moniker out of respect, assuming she needed to exorcise the ghosts of her past. But what if she weren’t married? What if that was the reason she ran?
My mother? The most pious woman in the world? An unwed mother? That couldn’t be possible. Could it?
It is this, the constant mosquito-like questions buzzing my brain, that tortures me. I can’t continue my life as if nothing has changed. Everything has changed.
I shake my head and sing like Dolly as I wrap my mother’s jars in newspapers, another fading heirloom just like buttons.
I retrieve the framed button tree picture I made so long ago with my mom—one of my clearest, earliest memories—and, lost in thought, I trip over my fireplace hearth and stumble. Trying to remain balanced, I toss the art into the air. It hits the wood floor with an alarming crash.
“No!”
Glass shards are scattered everywhere, gleaming in the light. I tiptoe out of the living room, slip into some shoes, and grab the broom, dustpan and vacuum. When the floor is clean, I take a seat and pick up the photo to survey the damage.
With the glass gone, the chipped black frame is no longer a square but a rhombus. A couple of the buttons have popped off the tree, and the glue that once secured them is as dry as the Sahara.
My heart feels as shattered as the glass.
I turn on the flashlight on my phone, stand and stoop around the living room searching for the missing buttons.
“Button, button, who’s got the button?” I sing over Dolly, trying to abate my rising tension. I stand straight, wanting to scream, and stretch my spine. “How far can a little button go?”
And then I see one, yellow and shiny, in the very corner of the room, as if it’s trying to hide from me.
“Gotcha!” I say. “Now where’s your little friend?”
I take baby steps around the entire living room. It’s nowhere to be found. So I take a seat on my rear and scoot around the floor like a Roomba, scanning every square inch. The light reflects off of something on the floor. At first, I think it is a small piece of broken glass, but a shiny blue button sits wedged in a gap between the old wood planks.
“You’re going home,” I say to it. “Back where you belong.”
I stand and retrieve some fabric glue I always have on hand. I take a seat by the button tree and glue on the tiny buttons, smiling that the limbs and leaves are once again full.
I lift up the tree to admire it and my handiwork, then turn the artwork over, laying the tree facedown on the newspaper, and reach back to grab some tape.
That’s when I notice the old, dried paper on the back of the frame is torn and cracked.
“We have a lot in common,” I say to it. “We’re both falling apart.”
I grab a piece of tape and use my fingers to tamp down the dried paper to draw it back together. I feel something underneath the paper.
At first I think it is simply the backing of the artwork, but when I move the frame, something behind the paper shifts. I stick the tape on my knee and slowly use my fingernail as a knife to open the back. A picture of a man is staring directly at me.
What in the world?
I pull it free.
It is an ancient, rather blurry, photo of a handsome, square-jawed man, his piercing eyes peering from underneath a broad-brimmed felt hat. He has that look of the very young that announces to the world, “I have my whole life ahead of me!”
He is wearing high-waisted trousers and a long-sleeved white shirt, standing at an angle in a johnboat in the middle of what could be a river, creek or lake. Two long ropes hang from makeshift stick branches that run the length of the boat, about shoulder-high to the man. Clamshells, four-deep, hang from hooks tied to the ropes. Behind him is a lush backdrop of trees, as ethereal and blurred as the moving clouds. I turn the photo over. Faded words, like ghosts, hover, barely visible to the eye. I hold my cell’s flashlight to them.
Sweet Belle—
My Secret Pearl.
Ted
My heart rises into my throat. I feel as if I might pass out.
Ted?
The Ted?!
My dad?
I stare into the picture. The jaw, the eyes, they certainly look like mine.
There is tape, now dried, on the back of the photo, as if perhaps it had been secured here in secret.
I rip all the backing off the frame. Another faded photo is taped to the back of the button tree. This one is of a girl in a summer dress standing in front of a giant dance pavilion, a semicircle arched roof rising above her. The girl is turned away from the camera, hands on her hips, watching the people on the crowded dance floor behind her.
Who is this?
My mother?
A stranger?
There is also a vintage postcard, hand-colored it appears, of sand dunes dotted with footprints leading to the water.
Lake Michigan Beach at Douglas, Mich.
The address on the other side looks as if it’s been erased. In fact, there is a worn area, the paper pulped, as if someone released a lifetime of emotion on a few square inches.
Tucked in the corner of the frame are two button cards. I pull them free and study them.
Dandy Button Co., Michigan.
Just like the ones I found with my mother’s dress in her garment bag.
My heart catapults.
I pick up the photo of the man again and stare into his eyes.
His eyes. So blue.
Suddenly, I jump to my feet. I rush into my bedroom and grab my teddy bear. I stare into its eyes.
I retrieve the button I had saved from my mother’s dress and hold it up to the ones in the tree photo and then next to Dandy’s eyes.
The exact same blue buttons.
Coincidence?
I unwrap one of my mother’s button jars and turn it upside down. They scatter and roll onto the floor.
More buttons that match these.
My mind cannot keep up with my thoughts.
Am I exhausted?
Still grieving?
Hoping to find hope?
Or did I just find the biggest clue to my past, the button that will lead me to my family tree?
Dolly sings, but all I can hear are kids chanting, “Button, button, who’s got the button?”
“Alexa! Off!” I yell.
The buttons I’ve scattered across the floor glimmer in the sunlight. A pigeon lands on my windowsill.
The world spins, my legs shake, and I must take a seat. I shut my eyes to close out the world.
But in the darkness, I can see my mother look up at me from her sewing machine and stare at me, just as intently as the man on the boat.
And in the silence I can hear my mother’s voice say, very clearly, “Lots of beauty and secrets in buttons if you just look long and hard enough.”