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I loved this line especially,"Money was a very shallow pool with a hard floor..." I remember those times. I moved to the Rockies after leaving island in the Atlantic, with my children. After walking up and down the mountain with groceries and no car and going to a car salesman who had no interest in selling me a Nissan Xterra (a car the children and I enjoyed driving to a Strawberry Music Festival in Yosemite years earlier)so I went to a Landrover dealership and called my ex and said I needed a car that was safe and could battle the many feet of snow after having lived on an island of pink sand beaches and sunshine and never having driven in winter here. So suddenly we had an LR4. It's been a decade now and I always smile at the pink fuzzy dice my little boy gave me years ago "to keep us grounded" he said, because he too could see that this was a "fancy" car to both of us. Having left behind a marvelous toaster shaped Daihatsu Extol in Bermuda (a tiny van much loved which allowed me to take a full vehicle of kids to soccer and baseball games and to the beach, holding 7 people in all) I always felt a little awkward in my LR4, as if it was not really meant for people like me, a mom who wasn't super slim and chic like the other women at the Landrover dealership with their perfectly tidy hair and makeup (my hair always looks windblown and I only wear pale pink lipstick and I can be found in flipflops or sorels depending on the season) and when two other Landrovers of the same color and year showed up in my tiny town my smile or slight hand lift on the steering wheel wave (I used to do this when cycling too , or acknowledging someone with the same toaster shaped van in Bda) I realized I felt like I had stepped in to a vehicle that perhaps others who owned the same one were turning their perfectly coifed hair and noses away as their eyebrows raised in wonder at this person who was really a daihatsu van person and was a ''fake''(am just a simple woman living an otherwise simple life with my kids) driving a landrover. So, I think my son's pink fluffy dice that hang off the rear view mirror make me smile now because over time the car came to fit our lifestyle (pulling a camper trailer, hooking on a bike hitch,tossing 2 kayaks on the roof, taking 3 big dogs to the lake, bringing 3 big muddy dogs back from the lake, dragging boxes to goodwill, and transporting my kids to school and sports and finally to the airport as they went off to university, and now it gets filled with plants because I took up gardening and discovered so much peace in staying home and taking care of animals and roses and lupens and lilac bushes. By the way the cat just peed on the shabby chic couch (he is really old, and so is the couch) so now I am sitting here wondering if I can save it somehow or if I will have to think about what sort of couch fits our lifestyle now. Loved your article. Made me smile .

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This is not making my couch shopping any easier!! 💟

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