Wheels: Remembering Mom's cars

The sunlight filtered through the side window of the empty garage as the overhead door slowly greeted the ground. Not since 1958 has this one-car garage been so devoid of personal belongings. A few miscellaneous bumper stickers, edges curling, still clung to the pegboard and a Suzuki motorcycle ad torn from a magazine back in the early 1980s decorated the area over my old workbench, the last few witnesses to changing times.

Through the 1960s and '70s, neatly parked bicycles with banana seats and chrome fenders, representing independence for my brothers and me, shared this space with yard games and dad’s tools. This same concrete floor was occupied by motorcycles in my teenage years after my older brothers moved out and moved on. Eventually my mother reclaimed the storage for her vehicles aided by the garage door opener my buddy Dave and I installed back in high school, a used but functional older model his father removed from another residence in the course of an upgrade.