The Cedarville Review 2020

PROSE | 49 Nonfiction OCTOBER 8 th MEGHAN LARGENT The snap of the baseball against my father’s leather glove echoes like a gunshot, sharp and sweet. The glove is older than time itself, from the looks of it—laces deteriorating, webbing worn, and palm cracking until it has nearly be- gun to crumble, flaking like dandruff in the wind. The fissures that streak in serpentine chasms across its tanned surface form a second skin, creasing smoothly around my father’s fingers. They remindme that his skin, too, will crack and deteriorate one day. He once told me about when his father, my grandfather, first gave the glove to him, when the leather was new and supple, and he would place a baseball inside and sit on it for hours in order to break it in. I had just gotten a new softball glove, and was frustrated that I couldn’t open or close it the whole way. His solution sounded much more uncomfortable, though. “It takes time,” he told me with a knowing grin, his face creasing and spreading like the leather of his glove. “If you work at it, someday you’ll break yours in, too.”