dragonlady7

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So– I guess I’ll start with some brief backstory. My late father was a hoarder of Jeeps, specifically. He had fifteen complete or partial Jeeps of varying ages and designs at the height of his collection. He had begun to pare the collection down, but many of them he’d acquired with the aim of restoring them, so he’d only managed to get rid of four and acquire one over this deacquisition period, but he also did a lot of work to get a couple of them running.

Anyway, after his death, Mom reached out to a man down on Long Island that Dad had often bought parts from, and the man said he’d be delighted to come and help figure out what to do with the collection. First off he came up, last weekend i think, and took the WWII Jeep carcass Dad had been restoring with the grandson, and all its associated parts. He came back and took a green Jeep that had run for part of my childhood, and which I once memorably fell out of the back of as a tiny child, along with all the parts to restore it– some of which he’d sold Dad fifteen years ago and they were still in the boxes.

But yesterday he came and he took the yellow Jeep, and the yellow Jeep was– well, that one was special. That one had run for almost my entire childhood. That one, each of the four of us was taught to drive on, out in the field out back, aged 12 or 13 or whatever. That was the one he filled with kids https://www.flickr.com/photos/dragonlady7/3601184171/in/photostream/ at the family reunions and let us take turns steering sitting on his lap as he drove. That one, the grandkids climbed around on https://www.flickr.com/photos/dragonlady7/6235427473/, and we filled it with people and let them steer and drove all around.

Mom went out with a framed photo of that Jeep full of kids in 2011 and showed it to the Jeep guy, and he said all the right things, he said he could tell this was the one that got used and loved. He said he wouldn’t sell it, he didn’t think; his daughter loved driving around their place in the Catskills and this one would probably be perfect for that. M-L sister was there and she showed him that the body was marked with a serial number, and the tailgate had a serial number one off from it, and he was blown away by how funny that was– it had to have happened right off the production line in 1947.

So.

I spent a bunch of yesterday crying in like one-minute increments, because for Mom to have time to deal with the jeep guy I’d taken over doing the remote school supervision for Farmkid and her BFF, so I had to sit on the children to make them look at their Zooms and such.

IDK why but for all of us the departure of the Yellow Jeep was kind of like– that makes it real. Anything else, it’s easy to forget, and think Dad’s just out doing something and he’ll be back in a moment, but– usually what he was doing was fixing that Jeep or driving around in it, and you’d be sitting in the house and you’d hear that Jeep engine growling around somewhere out back, and you’d know that’s where he was.

No more. (Your picture was not posted)