This is what happened: I emptied out toolboxes, sleeping bags, camp chairs, and stored items from the Mothership this morning, sprayed the floors with Clorox spray, and let it sit for awhile, in preparation for trading in this beloved vehicle to downsize. I woke early and during meditation one word got louder and louder in my head: Simplify! I’ve thought for a long time about selling the Mothership, but every fire season I cling to it as my escape pod if necessary. But the truth is I haven’t driven it in three years, it requires maintenance, I only love around 86% about it and the rest of it occasionally really grates on or worries me.

So I left it open for awhile to air out, then loaded up little Wren and drove to town, where I vacuumed the mouse poop from all the floors and a few other surfaces. I pulled all the way forward at first, to vacuum the back end. My strategy was that Wren would keep as far from the vacuum as possible, so I’d do one section at a time and she wouldn’t try to escape. It worked well for the first half of the back, before she suddenly shot out the back doors right past the vacuum hose. I dropped the hose and called her back but she was a little panicked, and the car wash is right on the highway, and so I panicked a little. But in just a few seconds she ran to me and jumped into my arms, knocking my sunglasses off my face onto the pavement. I tossed her back in the van and kept vacuuming so as not to lose more quarters.

From then on my strategy worked great. She stayed up front til I closed up the back. I got in and backed up to position the hose at the side door, and she ran to the bed in back where she stayed until I finished the middle floor and closed that door. As I circled around to the driver’s seat to back up again, she beat me there, but obligingly returned to the bed while I vacuumed the front and under the hood. I finished just as the vacuum ran out of time. Both of us back in our front seats, I backed up again and turned around, heading home.

I was almost home when I realized I wasn’t wearing my shades. They weren’t in any pocket or anywhere I could see. Had I even worn them to the car wash? It took me a few beats to recall them falling off my face when she leapt into my arms after her daring escape. Had I picked them up? I prayed I’d set them on the bed after I set her on the bed. In those last four minutes driving home, I visualized them on the bed, under the bed, crushed on the car wash gravel, resting on the vacuum island where the next person to pull up had set them, and also, lying untouched in the gravel. Anything was possible. I didn’t panic, but I did step on it. I got home to find out that no, they were not with us, anywhere. So I parked hastily and we jumped in the car, and sped cautiously back to town, alert for critters and other cars on the road. I’m grateful there were none.

And my biggest gratitude and my biggest rush of the day was spotting the glasses lying uncrushed in the gravel where I’d backed a 21-foot three-ton van over them three times without touching them, and living in a town where no one else had either.