When my father died, he left me a small shop that sold buttons, zips and sewing thread. I had not worked there since I was nineteen. I decided to close it. The decision took about ten minutes. The street had three empty shops already, nobody sews at home any more, and I had a job in another city. I went back in March to count what was inside, so that I could sell it all at once. The counting took four days. There were eleven thousand buttons, sorted by size in glass jars, and each jar had a label in my father's handwriting. Some labels were fifty years old. On the second day a woman knocked. She needed a specific green thread for a coat she was repairing, and she had been to two other places without success. I found it in nine minutes. On the third day it happened twice more. A tailor. A student with a torn bag. I understood something I had not expected. The shop was not selling buttons. It was selling the fact that somebody had spent fifty years arranging them. I called my brother that evening and told him I had changed my mind. He asked whether the shop made money. It does not, really. I keep it open on Fridays and Saturdays, and a woman from the street runs it the rest of the week. The jars are still in the same order. I have not moved a single one.