It started with buttons. Me, my sister, my mom and dad were mellowing out on the living room sofa after a stuffed-to-the-gills birthday lunch for me, just the four of us: no spouses, no grand kids, just us. Like it was long ago when we were young. "I need one inch buttons for my mother in-law," I said. My 90-year-old mother-in-law cuts terry cloth dish towels in half, crochets tabs on the cut edge, adds a button and produces an object designed to be buttoned on to the cabinet handle next to kitchen sink for quick hand wipes, assuming you have handles, not knobs. I have knobs. This makes my mother-in-law angry. My mother-in-law considers store-bought buttons too expensive, so I am always scrounging for them. She had a stock of buttons salted away when she lived in Florida, acquired at a going-out-of-business-sale at a crafts store, but my innocent husband, not understanding the rarity of these precious objects, gave them away when he broke up her apartment, as circumstances forced us to move her up to Chicago without allowing her to pack herself. Now she throws it up in his face all the time. "You gave away my buttons!" My mother, who always takes my husband's side, says "Good! Now they are even for her giving away his Superman comic books." She kept the Classics Illustrated comic books. There is no thousand-dollar market for 1956 editions of the Classic Illustrated comic book version of The Count of Monte Cristo. Anyhow, my mother-in-law was harping about buttons again, so I asked my parents if they had any buttons, and my Dad said, "Buttons? You want buttons?" And vanished into his legendary pit of a basement. He reappeared with a small mayonnaise jar filled to the top with buttons of all sizes. "Where'd that come from?" I asked. "It was Grandpa's." My mother's father had been a dress cutter, a stalwart in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union all his working days. Some days on the shop floor he found things before they got lost, and he never, ever threw anything out. "You need any straight pins?" Now, my need for straight pins is as legendary as his basement. I'm a quilter, and I am always pinning bits of fabric together and shedding pins into the sofa cushions and onto the floor where they are eaten by the vacuum cleaner. "Of course I need straight pins." He vanished again. And reappeared this time carrying a Mott's apple sauce jar filled with a mixture of straight pins and hooks and eyes in one hand, and two shoe boxes in the other. I greedily grabbed the jar of pins, which should keep me in pins to step on as I walk barefoot for years, while my sister eyed the shoe boxes. "What the...?" "More buttons." He said opening one, and indeed, it contained hundreds of white shirt buttons and 3/4 inch blouse buttons, along with a small box of used tailors chalk. "But what do you think of this one?" And he opened the other box. It was full of zippers... used, metal zippers. Zippers that had been carefully cut out of old clothes, and then placed into the box, just in case the need for a zipper would ever come up. Zippers on all different color backings, all different lengths from 6 inches to two feet. At least a dozen of them, plus at least a half dozen brand new zippers, shiny silver teeth against black fabric sides. We were prepared should a zipper emergency arise... As we picked through the hundreds of buttons, my sister and I wonder how anyone could accumulate so many buttons in one lifetime. My father explained how the workers would take home the leftover notions at the end of a run of a particular style. My mother, in in all sincereity asked us, "And of course, don't you take off the buttons and save them when you make old clothes into rags?" My sister gave her such a blank stare at that question that my mother said, "Well, where do your rags come from?" And my poor sister suddenly realized she had no idea where her cleaning lady got the whatever-it-was she was using to clean her house. Old clothes don't become rags anymore; they get sent to the resale shop to become tax deductions. Well, my father launched into a monologue about my mother's parents pack-ratting sewing notions and all the thread and buttons and pins and stuff that were stockpiled downstairs, and my Mom started to get a little huffy. "You're the one with the basement full of stuff. You want to talk jars? I'll show you a jar." And she took her turn at vanishing, this time into the kitchen. When she returned, she was carrying a small glass jar full of gray something or other. "Spices. It's a jar of mixed spices your father brought from his mother's house when she died." My Bubby, my father's mother died 42 years ago; that jar had been sitting in my mother spice cabinet for 42 years! "I use her spices for the spice box." A touching memorial. The spice box is an ornate silver ritual object used in the havdalah service that closes the Sabbath at sundown on Saturday. You pass it hand to hand and smell the sweet fragrance to start the new week. Her spice box with little silver bells and flags must be 150 years old. Itcame from Poland with her beloved grandfather. She is inordinately proud of it. She opened the jar for us to take a whiff. My sister said "This is probably more deadly than an anthrax envelope," but sniffed anyway. It still had a vaguely spicy aroma. She started to laugh; she laughed harder and harder at the thought of this jar sitting in the cabinet for all those years, of what could be growing in the dried spices, of germs and mildew and virus and mutations, and tears started pouring down her cheeks. Her make-up ran; she couldn't breathe. She got up and left the room to compose herself. When she pulled herself together she came back in and, in a calm voice, asked my mother for a baby food jar of the spices to put in her own spice box. "Of course," my mother said, with that pride in connection of generations that is so often missed in these busy days. And the two of them hurried off to the kitchen. When they disappeared, my father turned to me with a sly grin on his face. "You know what my mother used those spices for?" "No, what?" "It was her own special concoction she mixed up to flavor the raw grain alcohol the bootlegger brought during Prohibition!" I thought I was going to bust a gut. That jar didn't just date back to 1960; it had to date back to the 20's! While my mother and sister were getting warm fuzzies about their ritual spice boxes, my Dad regaled me with how the friendly neighborhood bootlegger brought the alcohol in a jug, carried in a shopping bag by bus to my grandmother. She would put this crazy mixture in and let it sit for a few days, and the stuff would color and flavor the clear alcohol until it was decent enough to drink. He added that they bought a whole keg for his Bar Mitzvah, and his mother doctored it up and they siphoned it off into medicine bottles his brother-in-law lifted from the drug store where he worked. The concoction was the centerpiece on every table. No wonder he was so nostalgic about saving the old bottle of spices when his mother died. The four of us sat there amid buttons and zippers and pins and mixed spices too ominous to analyze, telling stories of the long-gone grandparents, and we were a little nuclear family again. And Nanny and Grandpa and Bubby and Zayde were as real as they had ever been as we touched things that touched their lives. When the afternoon broke up, my sister and I left my folks' house each clutching a jar, and we knew we had been some place that our husbands and our kids could never have fully gone.