Ouch!

Tuesday, 3:23 pm

By Kate

Jan

30

2007

This morning I scorched my thumb again. There’s a lovely little blister on the pad of my thumb after sticking my hand in the wood stove with my old work gloves, which I’ve worn out. That’s the third time in the last week that I’ve burned my fingers. The ring finger on my other hand also has a blister on it.


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These are the old leather and fabric pair. I’ve used them for about two years. They began life as garden gloves and turned into stacking wood gloves and sticking my hand in the hot stove gloves. They held up very well, but, as you can see, work gloves don’t live forever.

Sooo...I decided the time had come to track down a new pair of work gloves. In the middle of winter.

The supposition around here, at least, must be that women don’t require work gloves in the winter. Because I had a devil of a time trying to find any. None at the hardware stores nor at Walmart. The only true work gloves I could easily find were men’s work gloves. I could fit two pairs of my hands in those. Asking the help if there might be any smaller sizes available, the answer was no. Not yet. The garden gloves will be in stock in another month or so. But not yet.

Well, there you go. Women don’t do work in the winter around here, evidently.

Then I stopped at K-Mart. One of the clerks said there was a box of summer gardening odds and ends in the back of the store that might have a few pairs of garden gloves. She showed me where it was and I started digging around. Martha Stewart was well represented with a variety of fabric gloves, but wayyyy down in the bottom of the box I found a pair of sturdy Martha Stewart leather garden gloves. For a whole $4.00.

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As you can see, these probably weren’t meant for wood stove service. I’m sure the little plastic baubles would melt fairly quickly inside an 800° stove. So, I will cut off the ribbon and plastic thingamabobs. Then they’ll be quite adequate. The leather is thick and they’ll work nicely. Trouble is, they won’t be pretty for very long. But at $4, I feel much less sorry about that.

Still, I’d like to point out, it shouldn’t be so darned difficult to find women’s work gloves in the middle of winter. Or any other time, either.