Bye Bye Buick...

...well, today was the day. We no longer own our Buick.

It's amazing how much a car can mean and represent in your life...and generally speaking, I am not very attached to possessions. But the Buick was more than a possession to me...it was a constant...a constant full of memories.

Hubby's parent's gave him the Buick as a present for his college graduation in 2000. We had been married less than a year. It was hubby's third car (farm kid, lived WAY out in the country), but it was my first car. Sure, my parents had an extra car for my brother and me to drive, but I didn't have my own car. When we got married, hubby's car was definitely still his car (I hated it...the cup holders were these little dents in the glove box...the car made no sense...but I guess now I kinda understand why hubby loved that dumb car!)

We hoped we would start a family soon after we both graduated, so the big old boat was the perfect car, in my opinion. Well, we didn't have kids right away, but it has been with us ever since.

It has lived at 8 different addresses with us, and traveled all over Colorado, and through Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Wyoming, South Dakota, Utah, and Idaho. We've taken trips planned far in advance in it, and also last minute mini vacations where we slept on the road (not while driving, of course!)

The gas gauge broke in 2000...I also pulled down the oh s*** bar that year. The bar we were able to fix, but the gas gauge only worked for about a day after the repair. We drove it down the canyon everyday to catch the bus to grad school until we got into family housing. We drove it every weekend to church, and probably THOUSANDS of times to my in laws house. It only lived in a garage for a few years of it's life with us...for 6 months at our first rental house and for 2 1/2 years at our first purchased home. This house has a small one car garage that generally doesn't hold any cars (only when we know it's going to snow).

We broke the driver's side door handle somewhere along the way, and had that repaired, but when the same thing happened to the passenger's side over a year ago, we never got it fixed. About two years ago, the tape player stopped working halfway through a tape with the divine mercy chaplet on it, and we never got the tape out (just a homemade recording, though).

It's the car that took me to the hospital to have Eva, and the car that brought us home again. It's also the car that we brought Charlotte home from the hospital in.

It was our only car for 5 years.

It had so many cosmetic defects (and strange problems with accessories) but always ran well. We were never stranded in it.

I do remember changing one flat tire in my parent's driveway...

I also remember the day that the back windshield shattered on my way home...I still am not sure what caused it...maybe a BB Gun...

I know that many of my friends think of the Buick when they think of me...it just has been a part of my life for a very long time.

But, now sadly, it is gone. We ended up selling it to a salvage yard...in part because I probably couldn't have handled watching it get rejected if we tried to sell it. Maybe we should have donated it to a charity, but honestly, there were so many things that really needed to be fixed that I don't know if we would have been doing the charity a favor.

I think that we probably will give the proceeds from the Buick to a charity of some type. What, I am not sure yet.

I do know that all four of us (okay, maybe just 3, I don't know that Charlotte really noticed what was happening) were pretty sad to see them dismantling the car as we signed over the title and were paid for it based on its weight.

But at least it was quick, and mostly painless.

It's probably not normal to have so much emotion about a bunch of metal...it's not like it was a collector's car...or even really a nice car...but it was our car.

We bought a new-to-us car last week (sadly, it is an older model year than the Buick, but with 95,000 fewer miles on it) and I'm still adjusting. But I'm hoping that I am just as sad for all the happy memories we have in it when it comes time to move on to another car...