White gloves hold high importance for Mary
Posted Jul 22, 2010 By Mary Cook
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Tweet ThisEMC Lifestyle - No decent girl would be caught dead on a Sunday without her white gloves. It mattered not how hot it was in the summer, or how young we were, we all had our own white gloves, and we were expected to keep them spotlessly clean, and at the ready.
Keeping them at the ready wasn't a problem. They were stacked neatly in our drawer, and if we were lucky, we had more than one pair.
I was one of the lucky ones, because my older sister Audrey would soon grow out of hers, and they would become mine. I liked Audrey's better than my usual ones, because hers often had a little cuff, sometimes made of fine white lace, whereas mine were short and barely covered my thumb, and of plain heavy cotton, just like the cotton in Mother's bloomers that she wore out in the garden to keep the mosquitoes at bay. And the older Audrey got, the longer got the gloves!
Keeping them spotlessly clean was the problem. Once we left the house on Sunday to go to church, everything we touched was covered with dust or grime.
The old Model T was rusted, one door was missing, and the sand from the road blew in from the hole in the floorboard. So you sat with your hands in your lap, not daring to touch a thing.
The pews at church were highly varnished, and they too could present a problem as I found out one hot summer Sunday. Sometimes when the whole congregation was praying, I would put my hands on the pew in front of me, and lean my head on my hands as if I was thinking of nothing but pious thoughts, and I confess now, my mind was often on other things besides prayers. The Sunday in question, the church was beastly hot, my head was pressed to my hands on the pew in front of me, and at the sound of the last "amen", I raised my head, but my gloves were stuck to the varnish! I had to take the gloves off my hands, and peel them off the pew.
That pair was added to the rag bag when we got home, and used to polish the few pieces of silver Mother had brought from New York.
And you never, never asked your mother if she thought your white gloves were clean enough. Her standard comment back was: "if you have to ask, then they aren't."
I was awfully glad Mother didn't insist we wear our white gloves into Renfrew if we were just going in for our weekly supplies. But if we were making a social call, then Audrey and I were expected to arrive in sparkly white gloves.
By the time my sister was in her mid to late teens, her gloves were about two inches above her thumb, which I thought was the height of high fashion, and I couldn't wait until I could have a pair with longer cuffs as well.
Now, my aunt Lizzie who came from Regina, wore white gloves. And I could never understand how, when she got off the train in Renfrew, after days on the train, her gloves were spotless. "That's because she has a bag full of them, you ninny," my sister Audrey said. And her gloves were almost to her elbow.
To add to Aunt Lizzie's glamour, on top of these long white gloves, she wore a big red glass ring the size of a toadstool. I used to think she was the smartest thing to ever step off the train in Renfrew County.
And when she arrived at our old log house, she would look around the kitchen before she took another breath. And pulling one finger out at a time, she pulled off the gloves, and you could tell she was looking for a place to park them. And always, she said the same thing. "If you don't mind, I will just go ahead up to the bedroom, and tuck these into the drawer." She guarded those gloves like they were made of white gold.
Mother kept her white gloves in the same box she kept her one pair of silk stockings. Sometimes, when I was in the house alone, I would go to the box in her dresser drawer and try on the gloves, and move my hands up and down in front of the mirror, picturing what I would look like when I was old enough to have longer white gloves.
White gloves were well looked after back then. They were washed with the 'whites' on Monday morning, dried flat on a tea towel out on the grass in the summer, and on the back of a chair in the winter. They were never hung on the line, because then they wore the dents of the clothespins until the next washing. I often wondered why white gloves held such importance back then.
But I guess it was because new gloves were a costly expenditure...after all, they were 19 cents a pair at Walker's Store in Renfrew!
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