Mom texted me a photo the other day: a beat-to-hell baseball glove pulled from the black hole that used to be my childhood closet.
The webbing’s half-chewed, the leather gone soft as a wallet, but along the heel you can still make out ANDY KEES—my daddy’s name—inked by his mom in careful Sharpie eons ago.
Except you can’t see it, really. The letters had been so faded by the time I inherited the glove that little-me decided to trace them back in. Then Mom, practical as ever, scrawled my name underneath—just in case I lost it. She’d go on to add Libby’s name too. I remember being irrationally furious at this, as if adding our names would dilute its magic-mojo. Clearly, it belonged to us, the Kees girls. I didn’t see any reason to deface it.
The symmetry was lost on me; I saw vandalism, not lineage.
One JPEG, and suddenly I’m back in his driveway, shrunk to fit my kid-bones with my kid-nose buried in that glove—grass, sweat, and a hint of saddle-soap wax Daddy once rubbed in to keep the leather alive. I’d worn that thing until each catch stung my palm.
Dad eventually bought me a new one and used his relic to help me break it in, tossing soft lobs until he was also wincing. It’s caput, he’d admitted, flexing the pancake shell. I snatched it back before he could bury it in his garage.
Even then, I collected keepsakes like an old granny.
Here’s what I find marvelous: two decades of dust obscured that memory, and it was all blown away in a millisecond with just one picture.
Through my research, I’ve learned that the brain keeps sensory back-ups we don’t know exist until the right stimulus comes along. When scientists say a single image can wake up smells you forgot you knew, this is what they mean. They call it the Proust effect—how smell or sight skips past language and logic, landing straight in the limbic system, where feeling lives unfiltered.
But a part of me still wonders: how could I have ever forgotten that leathery smell, or the small thrill of sharing an object Daddy’s hands had broken in long before mine?
Almost everything else Daddy owned is gone—trashed by the wife he’d been married to for less than a fortnight, who told everyone his things were “soiled” and hauled them to the trash.
Seeing his glove again reminds me how little is left, and how greedy I can still feel for what remains.
So when Mom said I’d need to pick up my stuff at Libby’s later, guilt flared. If my sister wants to keep the glove, she can. I’ve already claimed too many artifacts—too many fragments of a man neither of us got enough of. I couldn’t deny her this, too.
But the second I let myself mean it—I can let it go—some quiet place inside me loosened, like it had been holding on too long. So there Daddy’s glove sits, safe in a box, smelling like 1999. One day, Libby Drew might want it. Or maybe Elodie will. I’ll let it go.
It took me a while to learn this part of grief—that you can let go of the object and still keep what matters.
That absence isn’t erasure.
That this is how we should grieve: not by clinging, but by passing memory back and forth—and trusting it stays with you, even once it leaves your hands.
Sources: Green JD, Reid CA, Kneuer MA, Hedgebeth MV. The proust effect: Scents, food, and nostalgia. Curr Opin Psychol. 2023 Apr;50:101562. doi: 10.1016/j.copsyc.2023.101562. Epub 2023 Feb 9. PMID: 36863096.
inspo: Mom cleaning out the closet (yes, that’s a nod to the poet Eminem) // a very old baseball glove once broken in by my daddy, then by me // the beautiful symmetry of Daddy’s name written in blocky Sharpie by his mom with our names scrawled by ours // the human brain’s wild gift for unlocking memory through scent, texture, etc. // time-travel in JPEG form // the guilt of wanting to keep what’s already gone // learning that grief can shift shape—that letting go doesn’t mean forgetting
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