Craig’s truck made some nasty noises last week on his trip back from working at Brian’shouse, and it was labeled ‘condemned’ when he dropped it at the shop–too many things wrong and rusting to drop more money into. Digging through for the title, I found the original window sticker. The old F150 cost us $14,000 and lasted 14 years for us, and I am sure we got our money’s worth from her.

We donated her to The Mothers Center today. The guy came to get the title this morning, and a salvage place picked it up later in the day, complete with the perfect background music blasting out the flatbed tow truck windows: Willie Nelson, singing “You were always on my mind”:

“Maybe I didn’t love you
Quite as often as I could have
Maybe I didn’t treat you
Quite as good as I should have…”

It was a melancholy but bearable goodbye until little A, standing on her chair at the front door began yelling/crying “I don’t want Daddy’s truck to go away like this.” Then we all got weepy. Craig caught the sad goodbye on video to share with the world:

It’s the end of an era for us, the last piece of equipment that belonged to our long-dissolved landscape company. Old truck, I could hear you coming down the road, transmission whining, from a mile away. In recent days, you often smelled of spilled coffee, fish and bait. In your heyday you hauled tons of stone and mulch and compost, plants and tools to many a landscape job. You transported half of our belongings from upstate NY to Long Island over several (usually rainy) trips. You picked up many a tag sale treasure and curbside trash for our collections. You were scratched, your upholstery was ripping, your radio tuner was broken and had to be tuned with a golf tee that stuck out of the dashboard. Your second gas tank couldn’t be filled any more because it leaked. But you were our first purchase of something major, “new”, together, way back then. Little did we know that just two weeks ago, when you hauled that load of debris to the dump on Shelter Island that it would be your last. Now we say good bye as you ride off to be recycled, going to some salvage yard to sit and be pulled apart into useful remnants to keep other old trucks running for years to come.

Saying goodbye was bittersweet. Rest in pieces, old friend.