by Julie Carter
An old leather glove - wrinkled, worn, torn and stretched. If
it could talk, possibly it would tell you a story of a time when men put on
gloves as often as they put on their hat. For some, it was part of a morning
ritual, first thing. And once on, they didn’t come off, even for the portrait
of him with his bride.
The antiquity of gloves goes back to prehistoric times when
they were worn by cavemen to protect their hands and took the form of bags, a
primitive type of mitten.
In England after the Norman Conquest, royalty and
dignitaries wore gloves as a badge of distinction. The glove became a token
when it was thrown to the ground at the feet of the adversary as a challenge of
integrity and an invitation to duel.
It was in the 12th century that gloves
became part of fashionable dress. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, no
well-dressed woman would appear in public without them.
Working folk have spent a small fortune in gloves in a
lifetime. Heavy leather gloves -- mule
skin or something tough, elk or deerskin gloves for comfort and dress, lined
gloves for warmth, cotton gloves to work in the summertime.
Any kind of glove will wear out when working. The
favorites, or maybe just the most necessary at the time, will receive repair
with something as functional as duct tape.
Whether tucked in a back pocket for safekeeping, laid
on the dash of the pickup or in the pocket of the door, a coat pocket, wherever
--there is an unwritten law that the good ones will get lost first and often,
only one of them.
Wearing a pair of mismatched gloves only means there
is another pair just like them somewhere, usually to be found when you aren’t
looking. They can be buried in corral dirt, under the seat of the pickup, or
tucked in fence wire behind a post where you last needed to take them off for a
project.
In the early 1800s, a French Master Glover began
making gloves in sizes and a consistent shape establishing a reliable fit. I’m
not sure I ever owned a pair that fit right but part of wearing gloves is
learning to function with them, even awkwardly.
Memories of the gloves worn by fathers and
grandfathers can be found in the recesses of most of our minds. As do those
special times as a child when we would proudly slip on those what seemed to be
very large, old worn out gloves and think it made us all grown up and ready to
work by their side.
With the advent of the ball point pen, the glove
became not just hand protection, but a notepad for recording cattle counts,
dates to remember and a place to do a little math to figure feed prices or
cattle weights.
Ranch records are sometimes written on a leather
glove. In an effort to dignify his bookkeeping practices, one old timer would
drop his gloves in a briefcase when he was headed to the accountants. Another
had his father’s well-used gloves bronzed and in place of honor in his office.
A reminder of where his success really came from and what it took to get there.
Today gloves are a specialty item for work and recreation –
hundreds of different kinds for the doctor, nurse, hunter, skier, golfer, roper
and more. And yet, nothing is more sentimental than that old worn leather glove
that held a set of reins, drove a tractor over the country side, or built the
fences that remain standing today on homesteads across the country.
We can look at an old glove and know that in every crease,
every worn out spot, every dark stain, there is a story to be found. And we
could all perhaps recall the worn out gloves in our own ancestry and question
if we can measure the same.
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