My Private Junkyard

Every car that I had ever owned was parked in my driveway.  I kept having to pull them out and rearrange them, trying to get them all to fit, getting entangled with the busy traffic out on the street in front of the house.  I had to get behind the wheel of each car one by one and find the right key on my key chain and start them up, some of them having sat for years collecting dirt and dry leaves.  They carried different scents from different seasons in my life, forgotten debris, scraps of paper stuffed into the seats, all of them dense with memories.  I got to where I almost forgot when and where I was, looking out the dirty windshield on some hazy Friday afternoon of time itself, cars gridlocked everywhere. 

I ended up pulling some of the cars into the fenced in back yard.  I knew that the tires would tear up the grass and wear muddy ruts into the ground, but I wanted to keep them all, now that they'd come into my possession again, now that they'd all been so vividly recalled.  I got them all to fit to where I could close the wooden gate and lock them in.  It took me hours.  I was sweating from the effort and my t-shirt was dirty from climbing in and out of the vehicles.  I went in to take a shower and I glanced down from the upstairs window, and I could see all the cars packed in tight around the house.