I love getting a new pair of gloves. They’re so soft and supple. They fit so well. When I slip them on and start working in the yard, there’s just enough leather between my fingertips and the rocks and pieces of wood so that I can feel what I’m doing but nothing gets through. Though you want them to last forever, you know they never will.

They get sweat soaked on the first day, or in summer, in the first hour. The leather turns darker and stretches out a little. After a few days or a week or so, I can begin to feel the rough bark of a pine round a little more through my fingertips. And then eventually I look down and there’s a hole in the finger.

The gloves go through color stages. They get reddish stains from the rocks I handle. Every round of wood has sap on both ends, and the gloves get sap as I handle the wood. Then the dark pine bark dust sticks to the sap and the gloves get darker still.

In the end the gloves are so stiff they look like there’s a hand in them even when they’re on the shelf. I tape up the holes in the fingers, and then I tape up the tape when it wears through. I’ll buy a new pair, but I can’t bring myself to start wearing them, not just yet, not as long as there’s life in the old gloves.

The fingers get tight and stiff from multiple wrappings of tape. It’s hard to handle anything small. There’s sawdust in the fingertips that I can’t get out. I can’t seem to keep my fingers all the way to the tip of the glove fingers.

So I put the old, taped gloves on the shelf and put on the new gloves. And they’re wonderful. I wear them to cut some trees and stack the rounds. I keep the old gloves to use when I’m working in the dirt.

Eventually they get so filthy and worn out that I have to face reality – they’ve lived out their useful life. I hate to throw away anything that’s served so well, but the patches make the goodbye harder still.

Three generations of gloves. Grandfather and grandmother on the left are ready for retirement. The pair in the middle are still in the prime of their lives, but I’m afraid they may be contaminated by some poison ivy I had to pull. I used plastic to grip the plants, but I have a pathological fear (and hatred) of poison ivy, so I’m afraid these gloves are going into early retirement. The pristine pair on the right got their first use Saturday.