A Love Affair with Gloves

I’ve been shoveling a lot of manure over the past two weeks; if I didn’t wear gloves, I’d have some serious blisters. My gardening gloves are alternately sopping wet or crusty-dry. I wear gloves to drive, to bike (let’s hear it for terrycloth), to walk; to do calligraphy (a jerryrigged military dress glove with the thumb, forefinger and middle fingers cut out — the idea is to avoid putting grease from your hands onto the paper); I have gloves in the pockets of all my jackets. I have lots of leather gloves mostly bought in Spain (a pair my father brought me back from his last trip there, for instance). When Numenius isn’t looking, I use them to clean my binoculars on rainy days. There’s a box of vinyl gloves under the bathroom sink. (These come in handy for when you have to move a dead magpie to the freezer in the women’s room at work.)

I don’t think there’s an oven mitt in the house, so I burn my hands on the few occasions I fetch something out of the oven; and even though I own a pair of rubber gloves, I rarely use them.

The best gloves I’ve ever worn, though, are temporary: paraffin dip. Heat, moisture, perfect fit…