Beltane                                                         Garlic Moon

…To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

Mary Oliver’s In Blackwater Woods

Things of metal and gears.  Engines and oil.  Brake cylinders and transmissions.  These are not mortal things.  They are inanimate.  Without feeling or care.  Whether they are here or there does not matter to them.

So we say.

And yet.  I just watched the tow trucker driver hook up my 1994 Celica, red and still shiny, a car the like of which I’ll never own again.  He has taken the red car, as I always called it, away.

A rational decision.  273,000 miles, not quite to 300,000 which I wanted, irrationally, to reach.  We can’t afford two cars anymore.  And it had begun to do this and that.  Though it always had, some.  But now, we didn’t need it.

The boy is gone.  Once in junior high and high school the boy and I rode in that car ten times a week, back and forth to St. Paul, every two weeks.  It carried us and kept us warm, safe.

He’s been gone, of course, for years.  He went off to college in 2000 and at that time the red car was 6 years old.  I drove it to the Sierra Club, to the Woollies, to the MIA.  I drove it to Denver and down to Florida to see the boy after he went off to the Air Force.

There did come a time, five years ago or so, when I no longer trusted it for long trips.  So those ceased.  Then, its winter performance began to lag, the engine knocking sometimes, sometimes tires blowing out.  So I drove it less and less in the winter.  It could no longer climb the driveway in icy weather.  Much like me.

It had become old.  Not feeble, never feeble.  It could still take the big curve off 35 at 70 mph, laying flat in the lane, as if on a city street.  Its engine always had plenty for passing, for getting in and out of traffic.  But it wasn’t the car it used to be.

And now it’s gone.