Saga of the Squashed Abandoned Glove

And so it was and is.

All summer long, there was a squashed abandoned leather work glove in the neighborhood dogwalking lane. Each time, we'd wave to it in the dusty woodchips, the leather fingers splayed, flattened, blended and tired with gravity, thinking one day I'll pick you up and take you home.  One day I'll bring the camera and capture your gesture so grounded and ground in.  And finally one fine day I did.  Swinging camera around neck, all glad about the scenery and the variety of holes in the fence, with creative orange twine repair jobs where the Ranger gets to live, and guess what   ... small gasp? ...   The squashed abandoned glove was gone!  Vanished, just like that.  Perhaps it never existed, in fact.  Someone either liked it as much as I did, or disliked it enough to pick it up? Or merely decided that it was not part of the woodchip motif after all.  I felt a strange foreign grooming or tampering of my familiar terrain.  It was an empty spot and slightly grieving for the forgotten form, like a painting that leaves a sunprint on the wall behind.  
Why did we even feel feelings (slightly bereft) about this? And even more so, why should Art Ranger try to entice you to care about this? 


The Ranger realized that she had always enjoyed squashed abandoned gloves over the years, and remembered that, in fact, there was a very old specimen in her studio.  With exquisitely fine stitching, mummified, time-frozen.  A fancy dame on a lovely outing with a corresponding hat.  (It's very different, the lost glove from the abandoned glove).

All of them are the starts or middles of stories, that will stand still for you, or turn you wrong-side-out with wonderment at the gesture.  They are a portal:  a happening, a vestige of some human labor or adventure, not a deliberate art work, but a situational type of advanced discard, not exactly litter.

At times, a squashed abandoned glove becomes a temporary axis of happenstance and  a deliberate shedding of something.  That dirty tiring job. That icky sticky or toxic situation.  Someone can now go home feeling nice and fresh and clean.


Like the urge to take the energy to snap a photo of something you've noticed, the SAG gently calls out for your attention.  For you to frame around it, a glimpse of current archaeological evidence.  

A glove is just a thin covering manufactured as a membrane between you and "nature" or the nature of work. Or the nature of your leisure. Or even your desire, to "get a grip"!

Please, Ranger would be so pleased if your sighting of an orphaned object caused you to pause enough to send:
FAF@homelandinspiration.org