Forget zombies. Forget those anemic-looking ghouls. Forget erogenous zone Draculas. Forget stitched-up Frankenstein. Forget Freddie, but do keep an eye on that chainsaw. When it comes to Halloween, beware the country road, the one that wanders off to where the lights go dim and the evening mist curls out of the low ground. Beware the visitation not of creepies and crawlies, but of Fleet Farm work gloves.
In Wisconsin there is no ghost, no Halloween haunting like that of the lonely Fleet Farm work glove, I mean the fuzzy yellow kind. Frightful is this business that starts out so simply, a lonesome work glove found at the side of that road… a lost glove. Dear pilgrim, it is not lost at all.
Farm country Halloween is not about Frankenstein looking like a messed up quilt. Instead, Halloween is about man-eating combines, limb-ripping silo fillers, hand-severing hay balers, carnage causing silage choppers, monster machines that at some unguarded instant eats your hand. Poof. Gone. One hand, one glove. Gone. And one perfectly good Fleet Farm glove.
Every farmer knows there is something immortal about those fuzzy yellow Fleet Farm gloves. This the glove able to survive long days, rotten weather and really icky chores. Articulate besides, able to thread a three-eighths nut and lock washer onto a rusted three-eighths stud, in the dark, from the bottom, backwards, at 12-below zero, a 30-knot breeze and the machine still running. As kinda explains things.
It’s not about the ghost, it’s that Fleet Farm glove. The glove that some blood, bone and DNA went with it. Some think teeth also but there’s no science to prove that. No eyes either. The glove may well be alive but has to feel its way about.
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