Mother's Day

Today we visited my Mother and I picked her these flowers from her garden:


This is the place where I have spent all my summers until I was twenty, and lived there until I moved away from home at the age of 23 (the last summers I was working abroad for my studies).



My heart aches every time I leave this house, because I know it will not be there forever for me to visit. My mother is 91 and lives there alone. She is very healthy and cannot imagine leaving the house. I can understand her view. On a beautiful day it is like this:

This is the sauna by the lake. I think this is a lot like paradise. There are about a million photos taken from this spot, by all of us who love Rantakoto. This is the newest, taken today.

Hostage buttons are safe and sound

Here are the famous Buttons. As the Observant Reader may already have noticed, this is not really a hostage situation but my chance to have the princess feelings for a short period of time. The wooden (juniper) buttons on the left are made by my father, the ones in the top and bottom row for me for a lovely thick jacket my mother knitted me when I was maybe ten. So those really are mine.

These are all genuine mother-of-pearl buttons. They are really not practical in use, you have to take them off if you want to wash the garment in the machine, and you have to be careful not to break them. But they feel so cool and smooth and they are so shiny and beautiful, like the wings of a dragonfly.




And so are the ones on the left here. In the third row from the left the two bottom ones you all know already, that's where this whole thing started. On the right are black buttons from by grandmother's fur coat and a big black button of glass.

And these are the final three beauties.

Can anyone really blame me for wanting to hold these? I mean, I have known these buttons since the time I started school, but they were not mine. I even know that my mother was most probably only pleased if I (or any one of my three sisters) wanted to look at them and arrange them, but it ist not the same. And I will be happy to see Kaija taking care of this lot, when the time comes. Just not yet. Not today, anyway. She will be the person who best knows how to appreciate the beauty and memories of all these buttons. And I think she will raise the future possible daughter of hers to follow in our footsteps in this question. I will, anyway. And I may even give something wonderful directly to her to keep, in a little over 30 years. When I'm a little older.