Someone else's gloves

A couple of months ago, when Papa's mom (Grandma J) was visiting, I was talking about gardening. For some reason, I mentioned that my gardening gloves, while they are basically adequate, really inhibit my ability to feel what I'm doing. They've got nice, reinforced palms and finger pads that protect me from the perilous spines on the stalks of thick weeds. But they are not good for digging or planting.

Grandma J had an idea. She suggested that she could mail me some of the blue nitrile gloves she uses when she works in her pottery studio. Not that she was absolutely certain they were the solution to my problem, but she thought it might be worth a try.

I got the package and, to be honest, I didn't try them right away. I was worried that the thorn-like bits on the weeds would just destroy them. Besides, I had already planted my garden and didn't really require gloves for maintenance.

One day when we were all doing yard maintenance, I found my usual gardening gloves, woefully neglected, laying near a spiderweb.

I'm not irrationally afraid of spiders. I feel like it is totally justified to be reticent to put my hand in a glove found so close to a spiderweb. I decided I was going to turn them inside out to check for arachnids.

Again, I'm not irrationally afraid of spiders. I believe it is totally natural to startle and drop your glove to the ground when something comes racing out of it at impressive speed. I can have a spider in my house, on my ceiling, above my bed... I can even have one in my hand without much worry. But when anything comes bolting out of the dark unknown, I panic.

It was decided: I was not going to wear my gardening gloves again until they had been washed. So I retrieved the Nitrile gloves and pulled them on (dramatically, like a TV surgeon). Then, I made creepy finger gestures. I'm not sure why, but I can nearly guarantee you that I have made creepy finger gestures every time I've put any kind of rubber gloves on. When I wear gloves to dye my hair, I make creepy hands. Dish washing gloves, too? Yes. When I was in Anatomy class and working in the cadaver lab, despite bad taste, I wiggled my fingers like a maniacal made scientist before getting back to serious business.

Predictably, the fingers were a bit too short for me, resulting in finger webbing that made me feel a bit like an otter. You can see what I mean in the picture on the left (click to enlarge). Grandma J, this is not to say your fingers are short, I just seem to have consistent trouble finding gloves of any kind with a good finger-length to palm-size ratio for me.

I pulled a lot of weeds. Many of them had sharp bits, but none of them "destroyed" the gloves, like I had thought they would. In fact, I could feel everything quite well, and the gloves survived the whole process. It was actually a nice experience.