THIS has been a watershed year at our house.
After 20 years on the farm raising a family along with Hard Red Spring Wheat, hubby and I are back where we started.
Alone with a herd of cats.
We’re also, for the first time in 10 years, driving a new vehicle.
He’s happy. I’m ambivalent.
We were in Saskatoon visiting the offspring a few weeks ago when our trusty (and a little rusty) brown Suburban died.
It was killed, actually, when it was rear-ended by a moving van. Hence the new red and silver Jimmy sitting in the yard.
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Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice vehicle. It has every gadget you can imagine, and some I couldn’t. Why, driving down the road, you have only to glance up to know the temperature outside and the direction you are going. There is a special compartment for sunglasses and places to stow four coffee cups. The clock works. The CD player is a bonus. There are no drafts. It still has that new vehicle smell.
But it’s not my Suburban.
Granted, the Suburban was old and on its last legs. If the truth be known, I have to admit it should have been replaced a while ago. But I loved that vehicle.
It was big and roomy and I felt safe in it. And it held a host of memories.
It took us, as a family, to Thunder Bay and Manitoba, to Expo in Vancouver, across on the ferry to Vancouver Island, through the States, across the length and breadth of Saskatchewan, to Edmonton and Calgary and points beyond.
One spring day, it took a friend and I through the ice into the South Saskatchewan River.
Once, on a camping trip, when a violent windstorm threatened to overturn our tent trailer, it sheltered our family through the night.
It was old, it was shabby, it was getting rundown and ready for far too many replacement parts.
It had let me down a couple of times, to the point where I almost called the tow truck before I left home.
I know you aren’t supposed to get so attached to material possessions, but that Suburban was special and it’s going to take the upstart Jimmy a long time to worm its way into my affections.
Years ago, I knew a man of uncertain years who had a farm in Ontario.
On that farm, lined up and carefully preserved, was every vehicle he had ever owned that his wife had ridden in.
I didn’t understand him them. I do now.
