terracotta clay · ~21 mm · c. 1978
a thumbprint of red clay, flattened with the heel of a small hand, three holes punched with the blunt end of a pencil. fired once in a school kiln to a temperature too low to be fully vitrified, which is why if you scratch it under the rim you can still take off a little red dust.
it was made by your mother, age seven, as a present. the school sent each child home with one. she gave hers to her own mother, who sewed it onto a cardigan she did not particularly like but wore for fifteen years on the strength of this single button. when the cardigan came apart the great-aunt set the clay button aside in the cigar-box, separate from the general tin, because, as she said, this one had a name on it.
it has, in fact, no name on it. but if you tilt it under a strong light you can see the print of a thumb the size of a coin, which is its name in another sense. you have not held the cardigan in many years. you hold this most weeks.
field-note · the asymmetry was not a mistake. seven is exactly the age at which symmetry stops being important and then later becomes important again.
child · glass · thimble · memory · sewing room