Ford Tough

Rory was my new bff about 7 seconds after I met her: we locked eyes, I smiled, she noticed my shoes. It doesn't take much.

A few months later and there's not much left to explore on the friend frontier; we've exchanged gifts and exchanged spit, we have a theme song, we have a "place" where everybody knows our name and the bartender mixes our martinis before our bums hit the stools - Mango Magic for her, Clear Skies for me (doesn't blue curacao make everything better?).

Rory and I are probably more than enough trouble just the two of us, but it's almost never just the two of us. We're a threesome.

Lucille is everything that I am not - big and black and fast, fast, fast. Lucille is Rory's truck.

Lucille is not just a vehicle, though. She gets us where we want to go - has taken us to the corner store for energy drinks, and to Jack's house for post-work debriefing, and last weekend on a 5-hour road trip. But she's also where we sit and have our chats, and where we hide our purses while we're dancing at the bar (clever, no?), and where we make our costume changes and store brownies and discover new parts of town and lose lots and lots of small change.

Lucille is where we eat chicken fingers when we suddenly realize we've just had too many martinis on empty bellies.

Lucille is where we throw our groceries when we suddenly get a craving for nachos, which we then forget about when we decide to follow a fire truck instead.

Lucille is where I sit quite comfortably in the back of the cab when Jack is riding with us, and where Luke sits rather uncomfortably (knees to chin) because whereas I am built for backseats, he is not.

Lucille is where we tell our secrets when it is raining outside.

Lucille where we've taken naughty pictures and practically overdosed on cough drops and compared ex-husbands. We've dug her out of snowbanks and gasped at how much it costs to fill her and taken her down "secret passageways" while being followed by less worthy cars.

When Lucille accidentally parked in front of a No Parking sign, I had her back. I karate-chopped that thing to the ground and stashed the evidence in my basement.

And now Lucille is putting some junk in her trunk. Her bed is piling up with boxes labelled 'kitchen' and 'linens' and 'pictures of Jamie'. Lucille is about to drive away to new and exciting horizons, and I find myself amazed at just how attached I've become and how sad I'll be to say goodbye. We've had some good times, the three of us. Lucille is some truck.

xo