I got my first car when I was 15, before I had a driver’s license or even a learner’s permit. I’m an only child and my parents had divorced by that point, and they both worked full-time while splitting the responsibility of taking me to and picking me up from approximately four thousand extra-curricular activities. The decision to buy me a car before I turned 16 was, I think, less about me being spoiled and more about their (understandable) desire to stop shuttling me all over town every single day.

That car was a 1992 Plymouth Sundance. It was teal, and small and boxy, with two long doors that opened so widely I referred to them as wings. I named her Betty.

When I left Wisconsin for the University of Michigan I didn’t take a car with me, but for my sophomore year I was moving to an off-campus house with free off-street parking. I wanted my car there so that I could drive places: to the mall where I worked, to restaurants that weren’t on campus, to see friends at other schools and, importantly, home for holidays and the occasional weekend. I was fine with taking the Sundance, but my parents weren’t sure that it would survive the six-hour drive more than once, so the summer before I went back to school, we went car shopping. I wanted something bigger than my tiny two-door but not too big—a car that could hold a few friends, a few loads of laundry, a suitcase with a week’s worth of clothing. I settled on a smallish SUV. The first car I test-drove was a dark green Honda CR-V, which felt too much like a minivan for my liking. My dad somehow heard about a Toyota RAV4 at a different used lot, so we drove over to see it one late afternoon in July. It was purple and sporty and cute, with lots of storage space but not so much that it felt big or cumbersome to navigate. It had been made in 1997 and had around 80,000 miles on it. It cost, I think, about $12,000. I referred to it, simply, as the RAV. That fall, I drove it back to Ann Arbor.

I sold it last year for $500 to one of Brandon’s coworkers who wanted to buy it for his grandson. The RAV and I had, at this point, been together for more than 19 years; through college, grad school, six jobs in five states, my first solo road trip, countless boyfriends, one husband, two babies, one house, and a thousand past lives and versions of myself. The RAV still runs and is in reasonably good shape (10 years ago a mechanic told me that after the apocalypse, “only two things will run: cockroaches and Toyotas”) and I never had any intentions of getting rid of it until it died on me, but we needed a bigger car to accommodate our family and it didn’t make sense to sell Brandon’s much-newer vehicle so that I could wait for mine to stop working. It was time, and I knew that. This did not make it easier for me.

I had the RAV for exactly half of my life. I know its quirks like I know my own—the gas gauge lies, the engine is loud and struggles with big hills, the driver’s side window works but sometimes needs a little tug to go all the way up. I drove that car from Virginia to California with a boy I thought I would marry and I drove it back to Wisconsin with my best friend a week later when everything fell apart. I drove that car around rural Wisconsin on humid summer nights when I was home from college and needed to get away from my mother; I drove it from Wilmington to Winston-Salem to visit Brandon, I drove it from Virginia to Kentucky, where I hit a deer and fell headlong into love. I drove it from my sorority house to my mom’s house, from Ann Arbor to Alabama, through Niagara Falls on the way to Connecticut to visit my high-school boyfriend at college.

I drove it to my first newspaper job and home from my last newspaper job. I drove it to interview for my current job. I kissed Brandon in the front seat after our first real date and hauled my dad’s law-school desk in the backseat from Wisconsin to Brooklyn. I drove it to sonogram appointments where I heard my babies’ heartbeats, and to my doctor’s office for countless visits to confirm that my miscarriage was over. I drove it to the ocean and through the mountains. I drove it while sobbing and while laughing, and (often) while singing at the top of my lungs and dancing in my seat and not caring who noticed. I drove it through heartbreak and joy.

I drove it, simply, throughout my life.

So even though it was time, and even though I knew it was time, letting it go wasn’t easy. I drove it over to NASA last spring trying to find the perfect playlist for the occasion while reminding myself, over and over again, that this was the last time I would be behind this particular steering wheel. I remembered the zebra-print seat covers I used throughout college and the North Carolina Press Association sticker I placed on the back windshield five years ago. I found Kismet’s old vet bills under the passenger seat and my Virginia license plates tucked into a pocket on the back of the driver’s seat. I parked and got out and leaned against the side, just for a moment.

“You’ll always be my favorite car,” I said.

To the buyers, we made no illusions about the RAV. It is old. It has lived through 20 winters, most of them in the Midwest, decades visible in the layers of rust and road salt on its undercarriage. It will need minor repairs semi-regularly. But it runs, and it passed the state inspection, and when you are 16, I think, those may be your only real requirements. They were for me, anyway, at 19 and at 29 and at 35.

I don’t know anything about the grandson who owns it now. Privately, I worried that he would not understand the RAV or know what to make of it. It is purple. It is loud. It has a CD player (because I installed one, upgrading from the cassette player it came with), but no satellite radio or bluetooth capabilities. It has a working cigarette lighter, which I figured is probably not something a 16-year-old has ever seen in person. It has power mirrors but no back-up camera or parking assistance, which guarantees that he’ll be extremely good at parallel parking but may seem annoying at first. I loved this car, if that is unclear, and so it hurt my heart to think that I might be handing it over to a teenager who would hate it but grudgingly drive it anyway.

I did not express most of this out loud but Brandon knew anyway. The day after I dropped off the RAV he came from work and said, casually, “He loves it, by the way.”

“Hm?” I said.

“The grandson,” he said. “He loves the RAV.”

me & the RAV