Heidi Stevens: Obviously I’m not writing a farewell column to a car. That would be ridiculous

Obviously I’m not getting nostalgic about a car. That would be ridiculous.

Certainly I’m not sentimental about a 2008 Honda CR-V with a cracked taillight and 170,000 miles and a dented passenger side door and a rusty wheel well held together with automotive tape.

Obviously it will be nothing but a relief to finally trade the thing in, collect my $200 and put it toward a sensible, new (or certified pre-owned) vehicle that can safely transport me and my children and their teammates/classmates/friends who are invariably in my backseat without my having to wonder why that squealing/grinding sound is back.

Obviously.

It’s just that, well, I remember getting that dent in the passenger side door. My kids and I had just moved into a tiny condo on the 13th floor of a high-rise and it came with a garage spot (score!) and I had to circle up, up, up to my spot and one morning I circled a little too close to a cement pillar.

I hopped out and surveyed the damage. The heavy plastic panel along the bottom of the door remained barely attached and a pillar-shaped scratch accentuated my new dent.

Ehh. I shrugged. I was doing a lot of shrugging in those days. I’d just gotten divorced. My life was, by some measures, a mess. A dent was the least of my problems.

I also remember the day my nanny texted me that the barely attached plastic panel fell off. “I threw it in the trunk,” she texted. “Lol.”

Maria. She’s an actress and a comedian and my kids and I loved her (love her, present tense, even though she lives in New York now) like a favorite sister or aunt. She would make videos of my kids singing while she played ukulele or accordion and they would always dissolve in giggles, all three of them, at some point, and they would send the videos to me at work and I would cry and laugh and decide, “They’re going to be fine. My kids are going to be fine. They are, in fact, fine.”

Obviously I’m able to separate those memories from my car, which is just triggering the memories and not in any way responsible for them.

It’s just that, well, some of the memories do actually involve the car.

Like when one or both of my kids would fall asleep on the ride home and I would pull into my new garage spot and wonder how in the world I was supposed to get them through the parking garage, onto an elevator and up to my 13th-floor condo. Two of them. One of me. Certainly I couldn’t leave one in the car while transporting the other. Certainly I shouldn’t wake them both. Certainly someone — me, I suppose — should have thought of this before I divorced my husband and moved into a high-rise with a parking garage that was, compared to our old townhouse, nowhere near their beds.

Or, when I realized, post-move in, that my condo had very little in the way of closet space for, say, a vacuum and I decided that I should probably just store my vacuum in my car, along with the kids’ winter gear and a box of school projects and all the other stuff that didn’t seem to fit inside our actual living quarters, prompting me, once again, to wonder if I thought all of this — all of it — through carefully enough.

It’s hard not to let the memories and the stupid car comingle in my brain and my heart when I’m cleaning it out, this week, getting it ready to trade in, and I find a toddler hat. From when their winter gear was stored there. And a Kevin Henkes book, which must have fallen behind a seat mid-read and stayed there for the past six years. And when I move a windshield scraper and find that fine motor skills-building kit my son’s preschool teacher gave us, the one I used to keep in the car to pull out when he and I were sitting at his big sister’s gymnastics lessons with nothing to do.

It’s hard not to feel like the car is a time capsule. Containing and preserving relics from our old life. The life that felt so haphazard and uncertain and, yet, filled with deep pockets of joy and love and gratitude. The life that we were figuring out as we went.

The life that gave way to the one we have now, which is still a little haphazard. (I wouldn’t have it any other way.) Which has a little more closet space. (Though still not enough.) Which has a second marriage for me and a bigger, loving, laughing extended family for my kids and all the chaos and happiness and frustration and hurdles and celebrations that entails.

That car is older than my youngest kid. My life when I bought it looked nothing like my life a few years later, which looked nothing like my life does now. A long-lost toddler hat will have you contemplating those sorts of things.

It’s a car. But it’s been a character, kind of a key one, in our adventures and our triumphs and our travails. I’ll miss it, even though it’s beat up and rusty and keeps making that squealing/grinding sound.

Obviously I didn’t just write a farewell column to a car.

That would be ridiculous.