Burnaby's Dawn Palmer has a mystery on her hands.

A few months back, she started noticing workmen's gloves showing up on the floor of her home. Nylon ones, fabric ones, never in a matched pair, just singles - and they were found in the dining room, the back balcony and around the front door of her South Slope home.

article continues below

Assuming they belonged to her son, Palmer simply left them in his room and thought little of it.

"Then I thought, 'Wait a minute, there's too many of them,' " Palmer told the NOW.

Her son decided to count the gloves, and dumped a bag of them on the living room floor - that's when the family realized there was something strange happening. There were just too many gloves.

"I kept thinking this doesn't make sense," Palmer said, suspecting their family dog was up to something.

It wasn't until a day or two later that the Palmers finally figured out who was leaving the gloves. Sienna, the family cat, had a history of bringing home "presents" for her owners and would announce their delivery with attention-demanding meows.

"Sienna does her 'mew, mew, I'm here, and I have a gift for you,' and she's standing right in front of the glove, and I'm like, 'I can't believe this, you are the glove bandit!'" Palmer said.

The Palmers have had Sienna for years, and when the feline was younger, she would bring home gifts: birds, rats, mice and moles, for instance.

"I was in India, and my daughter sent me an email (photo) of a rat floating in our toilet," Palmer said chuckling. "I was laughing hysterically because obviously she just dropped it in there. She loves to give us gifts, that's what they do."

But Sienna is aging and has put on a few pounds, so Palmer suspects the gloves are easy "prey" for the calico.

"Seriously, I think because she's too fat now and can't catch anything, she's picked up this glove thing," Palmer says, laughing. "I'm just so happy it's not mice and birds anymore. ... I would hate it when she brought them home."

But catching Sienna in the act only solved half of the mystery. Where the gloves are coming from is unknown, and Sienna keeps bringing more home.

Palmer feels bad, because somewhere out there, someone is missing a whole lot of gloves, and her cat is to blame. Palmer has a few ideas on the origin of the gloves. She lives close to the couple recently featured in the NOW that installed the controversial massive stone pillars on their lawn, and there's a larger construction site near Royal Oak Avenue and Rumble Street.

"Then I started thinking, 'Could it be the school, is she going to the school?' And there's always new homes being built, but I can't think of any, I don't know - it's just so bizarre," she says.

Palmer estimates Sienna has brought in more than 50 gloves in total and counting.

"She's still doing it! Every two days now, I find another one. Now I just throw them in the bag," she says. "One day, I had the gloves in the bag, and I was holding the bag, and she's meowing at me, as if to say: 'Those are mine.' It's too funny."

Palmer would be more than happy to return the gloves to their rightful owners. If anyone is missing a large number of assorted gloves, email her at dpalmer5@telus.net.

UPDATE: Owner of gloves comes forward.