I ride bikes a lot.  Enough to notice a very special type of roadkill... solo gloves.
I photographed each of the gloves pictured below in its natural state, sad and alone, on the rural backroads of central Washington.
And here's a story to go with them.  It won First Place in the Write On the River Conference Writing Contest in 2013.
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Lost and Found

Years ago, long before they holed me up in this moldy breadbox of a nursing home, I saw a movie in which some New York nutjob spent his days wandering the city’s parks and sidewalks, untangling white plastic grocery bags from treetops and chain-link fences, from sewer grates and under cars—anywhere they’d been discarded by the charges of the wind.  I didn’t think much about it, but then once the movie was over I began to see those bags everywhere.  And then I started thinking that the nutjob wasn’t such a nutjob after all.  Just a man with a job to do.

    A bit of advice:  wait until you’re nearly dead before being shipped away because this is the kind of puckeyrub that occupies your mind when the highlight of your day is watching Bingo balls bob around a cage.  You begin to notice things—and I’m about to tell you another one, my personal plastic bag, if you will:  gloves.  Rhymes with loves, but I’m telling you straight these muthers don’t have the first thing to do with love because they are alone.  See, the gloves I’m talking about are the kind who’ve lost their partner, a bit like most of us in here, and they are soaking in every parking lot, lost on every sidewalk, buried beneath the snow like old dead pets.

It was my personal curse to notice this on my daily walks, and after a few weeks of seeing maybe three lost gloves a day—always solo—I stopped on the sidewalk in front of Darlene’s Donuts and picked one up from the gutter.  I was feeling depressed, I’ll admit it, and some folks in the donut shop were having coffee but none of them seemed to notice me.  The glove was a suede Isotoner job and it was practically crying with joy when I picked it up—or maybe that was just gutterwater falling down its fingers—but I had an inkling, so I put the muther on my hand as one is wont to do with gloves.

​And this is where it gets weird.

I’m standing there with that glove all damp on my hand and Christ-on-crutches if I don’t have a memory that is not my own, something like a mellow inner movie, a splash of déjà vu.  It’s not too clear mind you, but it’s there nonetheless, somehow attached to the glove, and it belongs to this cute young woman, early on Saturday morning.  She has a bag of donuts pinned beneath her chin as she fumbles with her coffee and keys, trying to get into her car so she can speed home to her husband and two little daughters—all three still curled in bed—to surprise them with donuts.  In the process she drops her glove, doesn’t notice, drives away.

Now that’s where the memory ended and it wasn’t much but my God that woman was in a real sweetheart of a hurry to get home before her little family woke up.  And feeling her excitement, having her memory in my mind, made me just about wiggle out of my skin.  When I came to I was standing in the puddled gutter and wearing a ladies glove on my hand.  So of course I ripped the muther off and chucked it to the ground and when I looked up a few of the coffee-sippers were studying me through the window instead of studying the holes in their donuts.  I must’ve looked crazy—sure felt it—so I headed to my so-called home where I poured a scotch and tried to sleep but instead felt electricity jolting through my sheets:  what a sweetheart, that woman.

A few days later, when I had the courage to resume my walks again, there in front of the theatre was your standard black winter glove, ripped along the thumb so a white cloud of lining was leaking out.  My knees cracked like coral as I picked it up, and when I put it on, my fingers filled with music.  The glove had been lost by a man, I discovered—divorced, 53—and I suddenly had a memory of him taking a shower, scrubbing his pudge and shampooing his balding head.  I was just about to cast the thing from my hand when the man’s tabby strolled in and nudged the shower curtain.  And then this man began to sing.  He didn’t unfurl arias or sonatas—just stupid little jingles, okay—but his voice flowed through the steam without loneliness, without pain, and his audience was no more than a damp damned cat.  Being inside of that moment was beautiful enough to buckle my gut, and I almost kept his glove to slip on my hand again—like an old record, an old cassette—but instead slid it across the counter at the theater to a pimpled young man who promised to add it to the Lost and Found.

Probably the happiest cat in town, when I think about it.

After that I stopped with the gloves.  Maybe it was too depressing to take them off, or maybe it felt too much like spying.  For weeks, I still spotted them everywhere but forced myself to walk past.  But then one morning I was in the park and saw a blue mitten balled against an ash tree.  Other than a stray dog and some lazy snowflakes it was quiet, and as I put the little muther on I promised myself it would be the last.  It only fit my fingertips, but that didn’t stop the memory:  a boy of three or four, playing alone in the park, running between the trees.  His cheeks were cold and so were mine, and the frosty grass crunched beneath our feet.  The world swirled to life in his imagination—lovely animals, colorful plants—but from across the park his mother was calling.

Time was up, she said—but he and I, the both of us, just couldn’t bring ourselves to go.