My car sees dead people

a little light whimsy about nouns

A year or so ago I drove the long long way home dodging hail clouds in my new-to-me ride.

Tungsten.

For the three weeks prior, she had been parked under the spruce tree which occupies 100% of my parents’ front yard. The lowest part of the tree conceded itself to the mountain ash tree I planted with my maternal grandfather in 1984. He had a green thumb and could truly make anything grow - even in Colorado. I don’t know the origin story of the tree we planted, but the tree my grandfather planted with my brother was an oak - a sterile cutting of the Jesse Owens tree which didn’t make it much longer than the ash.

I otherwise don’t have many actual memories of my grandfather, who died in the way I hope all of my loved ones go - in his sleep after an epic day of golf with brand new clubs.

Some thirty years later, the mountain ash split cleanly in half after some heavy, late spring snow, and was cut away to reveal this gaping, lopsided hole the size of a 2017 Subaru Outback. The legacy of that tree is that darned hole, as well as six coasters my dad sliced, sanded, and varnished for me. I’m too sentimental to let that one singular grandparently memory exist only in the ether. As the spring of 2023 yielded to the summer, terrific hail storms appeared in the nightly forecast, and my father decided to tuck the Subaru in until I could come and get her. He covered her with a tarp and skirted a notice from the HOA that his is not a neighborhood for lawn parking.

The day I picked her up, the ride back was harrowing, as I turned west and then south and then west again, slinking through a charming and quaint downtown Broomfield and the actual farm-ish fields that still surround it. I photographed hail clouds each of the two times I stopped along the otherwise one hour route. We made it home unscathed, me with teeth chattering because I couldn’t fine tune her confounding dash to offer heat instead of A/C.

My dad called her W, because her color is described as Tungsten, whose chemical symbol is W (originally Wolframite). Her luster is wolf-like, according to the marketing team and the owner’s manual.

She’s smart and spunky - knows when my phone is nearby and also turns the dial to pandora without fail. If you navigate to Spotify or audible, and then try to adjust the volume, she’s right back at The National radio. She has a particular fondness, which thankfully I share.