View from the Garage

Our Berkeley house was built in 1907, a year before the first production of the  Model T Ford, so garages were known as "carriage houses", and our house wasn't nearly grand enough to have one of those. By the time the production run of 15 million Model T's ended in 1927, a garage of sorts had been built behind our house on Magnolia St, but it had long since outlived its usefulness as a place to put an automobile by the time we moved there in 1967,  and quickly filled with old boards, boxes of paint , toxic chemicals, weed killer and  spiders. .We had one automobile, a 1965 Mustang convertible.  We had a driveway, but we almost always parked  on the street. because it was too hard to get out of the car in the narrow driveway.

By the time we moved to Santa Rosa, we had grown tired of scraping frost off our windows in winter, and broiling in a hot car in the summer. We had two cars and some of the households on our narrow street had three. People were becoming a bit territorial about "their" parking spaces, and  there was barely enough room to drive down the street between rows of parked cars.

We welcomed the fact that our new house had a garage just barely big enough for our two cars. It is still hard to get in and out. The door openers didn't work for the first month until we got somebody out give us new remote controls, but that didn't really matter because there were forty boxes of books in there awaiting new bookshelves and furniture we hadn't had time to give away before we moved.

We worked hard to get things organized enough to park in the garage. That doesn't mean there aren't still some unopened moving boxes still there after almost four years, a fake Christmas tree too big to store anywhere else and a lot of birdseed, dog food, canning jars, tools and an ongoing collection of things for the charity shop, but we take great pride in having a roof for our cars. It is a constant battle to keep it from filling up with more junk, but we're motivated.

In these days of suburban houses,  many garages are used as storage for sports equipment, ping pong tables, tools, unwanted furniture, and lawnmowers, and the cars are still parked outside. The other day I counted 16 baseball bats, boxes of soccer shoes, 7 pairs of batting gloves and countless balls of every variety, and, I admit it, some of our stuff, in Dana and Jim's garage the other day. Dana's car is in there, but Will and Jim both park in the driveway. In her defense, Dana was striving mightily to organize it all. A trip or two to the dump will be needed.

I'm usually running late for an 8am Pilates class, but this morning I had enough extra time to notice that the view from the window and the light in the oak trees outside was quite nice. In fact, it's quite a luxury to have a garage, much less one with a window….