I loved you too much.....

So, my 10-year-old Echo has sprung a leak in the trunk. I have been apparently growing black mold in there for a while. Nice.

I like my car. It has served me well, never given me any problems, and it gets great gas mileage even all these years later. I have a tendency to live in my car. I get the mail from the post office, it goes in the door pockets. There were way too many empty water bottles to mention. I had fabric and sewing supplies, a calculator (?), 3 books, a pair of flip-flops from when we moved (last July!), a bottle of shampoo, 2 hats, a pair of gloves and a scarf. That was in the interior. Sad, I know.

In trying to remedy the leak situation, I cleaned out my trunk (which was for the most part empty), and came across this:



The key to my brand new, 2002 green, VW Beetle. I got it as a lease, and the dealership worked every which way from Sunday, to make this deal happen, even going so far as to pay my first two months payments. I loved, Loved, LOVED that car. Too much, and therefor it had to be taken away.



I babied that car like you would not believe. I washed it every week. It got to be parked inside the gate off the street, locked inside the chain link fence. It had car seat covers, special floor mats, and a steering wheel cover. I put a new flower in its vase every 3 days. I think my favorite thing about that car, besides its gorgeous red and blue dash display, was the 6-disc cd changer. LOVED that car.

On the Sunday before Labor Day, 2002, after owning it for only 5 weeks, my car met its doom, in the form of a giant, white, evil SUV. Giant evil SUV ran me off the road, my car went into the median and was totalled. Fortunately, my son and I, who were on our way to see my mother, were not seriously hurt, and the car took all of the brunt of the accident. But, when the firefighters arrived, I was crying so hard, and all I kept saying was, "Look, it only has 1054 miles on it. I just got it. My husband is going to kill me."

So, when I went to the body shop to pick up all of my stuff from the car, I must have thrown the key into the roadside emergency bag, which moved into my current car. The buttons still work on it.

Ten years later, and that pain is still with me. I am convinced that because I loved that car too much, I had to lose it. Sadness.