Anne! Walk away from the light!

As the five of you reading this blog may recall, Applesauce Anne blew a head gasket thirteen deca-- I mean, thirteen days ago, leaving my husband and I with nothing to drive, not even a moped or one of those little tiny cars clowns crowd into at the circus. If it weren't for the combined efforts of Poppy, Nanny, Carol, Katie, Jerri and Michelle, I seriously do not know what we would have done.

My parents have a nice neighborhood mechanic named Larry, who listened to my husband's lament about Anne and then opined that he could fix her. "And once this is fixed, it isn't likely to happen again," he said wisely. My husband, who Knows Things about cars, concurred: We have been really rigorous about taking care of our van, knowing that she was going to have to put in some hard duty before we bought another. It's better, said my husband, to put a good amount of money into a vehicle we're familiar with, rather than buying another that's an unknown quantity.

So I called Larry's voice mail today to tell him that we'd be arranging for Applesauce Anne to be towed down to his house within the next week. I'm glad she's going to be fixed, because every time I see her sitting there, forlorn, in the driveway, it wrenches me. I have really enjoyed driving Buddy, my dad's Blazer, but I still feel disloyal whenever we jauntily pull out of our driveway in all our cranberry red-and-silver glory, Anne's rosary swinging gaily from the rearview mirror.

I am eagerly hoping that my husband will ask Larry to touch up the four places of chipped paint on her nose, which we've been watching with concern lest rust develop. Those four places detract from her dignity, I feel.

Our Anne. She's coming back to us.