The garage.

For most people, a garage is a place where you park your car, bikes, and store odds and ends that you can keep out of doors. That’s true for this garage, but it has other stories to tell that you won’t see on its surface.

If you look on the left-hand side of the garage you will see a brick wall with a downspout affixed to it; more years than I can remember ago, my Mom was parking her car, and “accidently” as she claimed, “touched” the brickwork. Although it was a “light touch” it caused all of the bricks in the wall to fall down. Oops.

It just must be the left-hand side, but if you look at the window in the back, you will see a board on the floor. I am not sure when this was added, but it wasn’t soon enough because one of our cars went right through the window when someone pulled in too fast---I was not driving I am happy to say. Oops.

Now this is not part of the garage, but the blue containers on the right-hand side, one time a snake was waiting to completely scare the crap out of someone who walked by; that would be me, and it did. Although it has been more than 30 years, I still look at that sight every time I walk over by the door, you can’t see it in the picture, just to make sure Mr. Snake is not there waiting for me.

One thing that is missing is the second car that used to be in the garage; after my Mom passed away, my Dad decided to sell it and my brother purchased it from him. Now, I am not blaming my Mom again, but apparently there was quite a bit of damage to the bumper that was not visible to the naked eye. I know why. When you park in this garage, you have to do multi-point turns before you can pull straight into it. You back into the driveway, turn your wheels to the left, then to the right, and then pray you are straight enough to pull into the garage. If the wheels are not straight, you make adjustments so you don’t hit a wall or the other car for instance.

There were many times when I parked the car in the garage, and had performed the multi-point turns; however you would have had to be as thin as a piece of paper to get into the car parked next to the car I had just parked. Now, and this was not my fault, here's why it was a problem with the cars and not my parking ability; back in the days when no one really cared about miles per gallon or the cost to fill up the tank (my Dad’s company paid for gasoline back then anyway) we had what would be described as two “boats” that occupied the garage. That would be Si's "Dingy" and Barb's "Yacht." Have you ever tried to park a boat? Not easy. So I am not taking any blame for dings, dents, or scrapes---if we had smaller cars, we wouldn't have had this minor issue.

The photo above says it all---look at the walls and you will see the tools, mowers and shelves that made our garage when I was growing up different than the one we have “unattached” to our home. My Dad’s is organized, ours is not; no matter how hard you would try to park a car in our garage, yet alone two, you would have to move all of the junk that has taken over this space. For me, I am fine with it, because as I see it, it sure beats having to explain how I “gently touched” the sidewall when all of the bricks are on the ground.

Thanks for stopping by.