A drawer of buttons

An original literary non-fiction-style account of visiting a neighbour who collects buttons.

The drawer contained no jewels, although I understood why a visitor might mistake it for a treasure chest. Small discs of green glass lay beside dull brown squares. A button shaped like a flower occupied a compartment of its own. My neighbour let me lift it, then asked me to turn it over. She was interested in the back as well as the face.

I asked which was worth the most. She took out a plain grey button and laid it beside the flower. The grey one had belonged to a coat her brother wore to his first job. She had removed it before the worn-out coat was discarded. The flower had come in a bag of mixed buttons from a market stall. She liked both, she said, but for different reasons.

Some compartments held two or three examples that looked identical to me. She placed them on a piece of dark cloth and showed me a difference in their holes. On a card she had written where each had been found. Where she did not know, she had put a question mark. A convincing guess was still a guess, she told me.

Before I left, I offered her a loose button from my pocket. She asked whether I needed it for a repair. Only when I said that its shirt was long gone did she accept it. She wrote my name and the date on a card. The new button was almost transparent. Beside the card, however, it had already become easier to distinguish from the others.

What do you learn about the neighbour's attitude towards her button collection?