When I went to go bike riding this afternoon, I couldn't find my regular gloves. It has been warm this last week and somehow I misplaced them. So I went to the big tin lard can where my mother always kept wool things out-of-season in mothballs. Hats, scarfs, gloves, thick socks she made to wear ice skating could all be found in the big Fort Pitt tin. Washing things in Woolite before putting them away was one part of the ritual because sweat attracted moths, she said. Airing them out before using them was the counterpart ritual because the mothball smell was so vile. When she moved to my house in Boston, of course she brought the three Fort Pitt tins. The other two have knitting things in them. One still is filled with winter wools.
Somewhere along the way, we stopped using the mothballs. When I opened the tin today and pulled out a pair of white wool gloves, they smelled fresh, like Woolite. I kept looking at them while I was riding, thinking about her hand laundering them year after year. She didn't consider herself a good housekeeper. I think that instead this is just evidence of a care with objects that comes when you don't necessarily assume that there are dozens just like them for the having if anything happens to this pair. It was important to make things last.
My mother would have been 95 last Thursday. In most other ways, she was an exceptionally modern woman, right up until her death in 2004. But I doubt I know anyone else who still hand launders their gloves.
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