We recently sold my car, a (very) used Toyota Sequoia. We could never really figure out its color. Sometimes it looked grey. Or green. Or brown. My kids said it looked like the color of poop.
That car had been through it all. Storms outside (snow, ice, gale force winds) and storms inside (food fights, fist fights, music/seat/window/everything fights).
On a 2021 family road trip, my son, Crosby, murmured from the back, “Mom, I don’t feel so well.” Within seconds, large chunks of strawberry-laced vomit spewed out of his mouth like a blasting fire hydrant. We scrubbed the car repeatedly, even paid to have it detailed, but we could never fully erase that smell. There was always a faint whiff, especially on hot days.
Buddy, our 200-pound Great Dane, squeezed his way into the middle of the second-row captain chairs. His signature slobber, shaken and thrown like graffiti paint, marked his territory on every surface. His fur sprinkled like rain every time the car hit a bump in the road. Those two-inch hairs made their way into every crevice—in the leather seat seams, behind the stereo buttons, in the floor mat treads—impervious to even the high-powered carwash vacuum.
Lo, the trash and crumbs! Wrappers and old Band-Aids littered cup holders and between the seats. Tiny bits of chips and bread crusts sprinkled the floor. Plastic toys, balled-up math tests, and broken pencils filled the door and seat pockets. Napkins and wet wipes tumbled out of the glove compartment. Occasional stray granite pebbles created divots in the front windshield. Scuff marks, muddy footprints, and grass clumps revealed the coming and goings of carpool kids.
There’s only so much one little big car can take. Even mechanically, the car started showing signs of early retirement. Over the last few months, it became a gamble as to whether the car would even start. It would putter and I would pray.
A well-worn car, worn out.
It came time to say goodbye. We sold the Sequoia and bought something clean, shiny, and NEW. I had always owned used cars. The only “new car” scent I smelled came from a dangling air freshener, not because I was in a new car. But now, no more sheepskin wheel cover for my cold hands or Bluetooth that worked only if I screamed. I traded turn dials for a touch screen and a CD player for Apple CarPlay. I finally had a car that matched the present year.
But as I handed over the Sequoia keys for the last time, I felt a surprising pang of nostalgia.
My kids grew up in that car. They transitioned from rear-facing infant seats to front-facing ones, to boosters, to seatbelts. Countless children (some mine, many not) crawled in and out of the third row on the way to school, birthday parties, and sports practices. A forgotten Sharpie in the hand of a 4-year-old resulted in inappropriate masterpieces on the backseat leather. My boys argued constantly about whose turn it was to ride in the back, and then, later, whose turn it was to ride shotgun.
We spent many highway hours in that car, sometimes intentionally (road trips), other times unintentionally (traffic standstills). We’d been stuck in snow, stuck on the side of the road with a flat tire, and stuck in a parking lot with a dead battery. On Saturday mornings, we maxed out the stereo speakers with pump-up songs on the way to basketball and soccer games. The trunk was perpetually full of groceries, sideline chairs, umbrellas, blankets, ice scrapers, packages, and discarded clothing.
In a parking lot after a funeral for a dear friend, I cried in the driver’s seat, my forehead resting on the steering wheel, as tears dropped into my lap.
I spent so many hours in that car, years probably. And I never really thought about how much those hours mattered. The sing-alongs, carpools, road trips, spilled coffee, left-behind water bottles, dirt and fingerprints, even all the fights between brothers—a collection of stories and memories all contained in one poop-colored car.
A big box of precious cargo on wheels.
We traveled miles together inside of it, and not just the kind of miles recorded on an odometer.
Now one of those kids who used to be in a booster seat is driving himself around in a different car. Our schedule is so frenzied and chaotic that it’s unicorn-rare we travel as a whole family. Our time is more divided than not.
But such is life.
I’ll miss that car and all the ways it carried us on all the roads.
But not that strawberry puke smell. That I won’t miss at all.
Originally published on the author’s Substack
by Megan Honor Pesch 
by Susan Narjala 
by Tracy Wright 
