To My Dirty White Gloves

I like this 500 words a day challenge.  This is day five for me-- I missed a day (thanks, stomach flu), but other than that, I've been writing more in my journal and here.  If I had fewer obligations, I'd be writing even more because it's kicked my writer's brain into gear.  If only I could just stop what I'm doing and write whenever the ideas came.  Some day....

Today, I just wanted to write a regular old post about my gloves, but it came out like this.

To my dirty white gloves:

Ambiguous mittens

Gray and gritty, the grime of ropes and coils

Chipped paint from playground metal

Caught between your fine-knit fibers

Your fingerless hobo state

Derailed if my bluster-hardened fingers can just

Gah just

Hang on

Get a grrrrasp of the

Uuuahhh cold little

White loop of elastic

That,

There,

Frees the mitten top to warm the

dancingest parts of my hands.

Dirt where you’ve made contact

With fences and handles,

Pressed pedestrian signal buttons,

Drummed on metal bleachers,

Scratched a nose,

Brushed hair away from eyes,

Sloshed coffee.

No longer crisp and ladylike,

You’ve taken on the dust-and-wind smell

Of all my coats.

I bought you to transform me into

A creature more ladylike and refined.

Instead, you have become slightly frayed,

Unmistakably soiled,

Broken in,

perfect.

Read a better ode to an inanimate object here.  Because Pablo Neruda is divine.  

Read the last poem I wrote here. 

Other reflections:

On Ellen this week, Jennifer Gardner referred to her post baby body as her "everlasting baby bump" and she called it by her three children's names.  I think that's pretty awesome.  Love me a little celebration of healthy women's bodies and all the changes they go through.  Full disclosure, I read about this on some news website while I was looking for Ebola articles.  I didn't actually watch Ellen.

This morning the wind was coming from the north -- not the first time this school year, but today was the first time the air smelled arctic.  Summer's been lingering in tree smells.  I picture it lurking in the shade of the oak trees in front of Sts. Peter and Paul.  It tucks itself up under the low branches, which are still a good twenty feet off the ground, and it curls up its feet, letting fall blow around beneath it.  I know the summer is waiting there, looking for the right time to leap down on us one last time before it blows away til next year.

So yeah, fall smells have been trading days with the tail of summer.  There have been a few salty, southern smelling mornings, too.  But today was barren, windswept plains and the grey of geese, snow snakes slithering down highways, and tall grasses bent under the weight of hard frost.