By Raynee Hamilton. Written for J302 (Creative Non-Fiction) at UW-Madison. Written Fall 2020.
The winter of my second birthday, my father crashed his car. He was driving to work when he hit black ice and spun out across four lanes of traffic, hitting the safety railing on the opposite side of the highway. He was fine but his car, a 1997 blue Toyota station wagon, was totaled. A tow truck eventually brought the car back to our home, where it would spend the rest of its life slowly rusting in our front yard.
The blue station wagon sat in our front yard for years. It was a permanent, if unnoticed, figure in the background of my earliest childhood memories.
A picture of me, age 3, learning how to ride a tricycle, my father crouching down next to me smiling, making sure I don’t fall, the front bumper of the station wagon visible in the background.
Another picture, winter 2004, I am bundled up in a hot pink snowsuit smiling and waving at my mother behind the camera, the now rusted station wagon sits partially obscured by snow.
The first few years of the blue station wagon's tenancy in our front yard were marked by my mother’s frequent requests that my father either “fix it or get it the hell out of here”. He would promise to call someone about it the next day, she would call him a liar, and I would listen to them argue until I fell asleep, often only to be awoken hours later by bright flashing lights that shone through my window and lit my room up red and blue. When I woke up in the morning, my father was usually gone, but the rusted blue station wagon was always still there. It seemed to be one of those minor visual annoyances that fades so quickly into the background that soon I think we all forgot it was there, even my mother stopped bringing it up.
The summer my mother and I moved out of the house, three years after my father crashed his car, she finally called a tow truck. It was one of the rare mornings that my mother was awake when I got out of bed. I found her sitting on the front steps, smoking a cigarette. She told me that she had called a tow company and they were coming to get the car that morning.
I immediately burst into tears. I’m sure this display of sentimentality wasn’t particularly out of the ordinary, as I was a sensitive child who was often heartbroken by situations that seemed mundane to everyone around me - but my mother still stared at me, confused, as I begged her to let us keep the rusted blue station wagon. She asked me why I, a five year old who had never shown any interest in it, cared if we got rid of the car that had done nothing but sit in our front yard and fall apart for the past three years.
I couldn't explain why, but the idea of never seeing the blue station wagon again filled me with an urgent sense of loss that I’d never felt before. I was furious at my mother for not telling me sooner, for not letting me prepare to mourn the loss of an object that felt like a permanent fixture in my life. As the tow truck rumbled down the street, I sobbed harder, looking for words to explain to my mother why we couldn't just get rid of the car, why it seemed almost sacrilegious to discard something so reluctantly indelible.
My mother shooed me inside, paid the tow truck driver, and stood in the front lawn watching them load up the rusted blue station wagon and take it away. After they were gone she surveyed the spot of dead grass and dirt under where the car had been and placed her hands on her hips.
That summer my mother would spend many hours trying to re-seed the dead spot in our front yard but no matter how much she watered it, or how many different brands of grass seed she tried, it remained barren.