Dirty girl

Hold on
London, ON
January 2019
This photo originally shared on Instagram

It's plainly obvious that Henrietta the Honda 2.0 desperately needs a wash. She's as filthy as she is thanks largely to the combination of a Canadian winter and my not having the time or patience to bring her to a proper car wash. I guess keeping the car clean hasn't been my top priority of late. Such is life.

But dirty doesn't mean uninteresting. I'm pretty sure "dirty car" doesn't rocket to the top of most people's shot lists, yet for reasons I cannot understand or explain, it resonates with me. Perhaps it's because there are so many variations of filthiness, and we all spend a good chunk of our life covered in something.

In a way, the dirt you see here tells the story of our little family's life, the pre-dawn drives to get the kids to campus or the late night excursions to bring them home, the grocery runs, the 9-ish hour slogs to Montreal, the getting lost in the hinterlands between here and there. Henrietta's red paint wears these trips like a badge of honor, and as I walk up to her and take in her smudgy flanks, I can almost read the story of where we've gone, and what we felt as we drove there, together.

Somehow, cleaning it off at this point just doesn't seem right. I know Henrietta will continue to pick up fragments of the places she's been, and those dirty fragments will continue to tell other stories. But I'm not yet ready to let go of the ones we've just finished telling.

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