Red Glove Mystery

Fair warning: this post has nothing to do with the supposed topic of this blog—nature—unless there's something I don't know about the mating habits of gloves.

So—how can this happen?

1.  The backstory: Several years ago, my sister,  Sally,  gave me a nice pair of red gloves as a gift.  I wear them every winter, washing them in the machine,  maybe once a year, and they always come out looking brand new.  Granted, we have mild winters in Georgia so they don't get worn more than a few times each winter, but they are warm, and I like wearing them because I think of Sally when I do.  I can't remember how many years I've had them.  Many.

2. Last  fall,  I cleaned out the front hall closet, and noticed there was only one red glove.  I wondered where its mate was but didn't give it much thought, assuming it would turn up somewhere, and left the one glove in the glove box on the top shelf of the closet.

3.  This winter, I went away to South Carolina for the month of January.

4. While I was gone, our longtime good friends from Kansas, Dick and Barb, visited my husband for a few days and stayed at our house.  It happened to be the only cold week we had in January.

5. In South Carolina I received an e-mail from my visiting friend, Barb, saying she had borrowed my red gloves to go for a walk one cold morning, and lost one of them on her walk.  She planned to buy me a replacement pair.

6. I e-mailed back immediately to tell her I had lost the glove, not she, that one odd glove had been floating around in the closet for awhile before she ever got there, and that there was no need to buy a new pair.

7. She sent me a funny e-mail back saying, "Okay, but I thought I started my walk with two." :-)

8. Our friends returned to Kansas, and I returned home to discover that Barb had indeed bought a brand new pair of red gloves and left them in the guestroom for me.  They are very nice gloves with a ruffled cuff.  I thanked her, of course, and went to put the new gloves away in the hat and mitten chest (not the box in the closet).

9.  The plot thickens. In the chest I found three old red gloves, all matching the odd one in the closet.

10. This I do not understand. I originally had only one pair of red gloves. Now I have three pairs.  Two old, and one new.

11.  Now the plot gets thicker yet.  I lay out all four old gloves to discover that three of them are lefties and only one is a righty----and worse----the only righty has an unraveled finger.

12. My gloves reproduced in the hat and mitten chest?  Three lefts and one right? How did Barb start with two, then have only one, if there were four all along?  And how did that finger get unraveled? To my knowledge, there are no mice in the house.

13. And then the plot got thicker yet.  I pulled out all the gloves to take a photo for this blogpost---and you guessed it---I find ANOTHER old one.  Now I have five old red gloves, two new.

14. I called Sally to ask if she remembered the gloves. She didn't. Sally is a practical woman. She suggested maybe she gave me three pairs and that Barb did lose one glove on her walk. My response to that: why would anyone give her sister three pairs of identical red gloves?

15. Sally is satisfied with her explanation. The mystery lives on in my mind. dkm