I think I’ll title this – Untitled.

Car Number Two is dead.  See you later. Hasta la vista.

Riley and I ride together early Monday morning to have Car Number One – The Last Surviving Great Maroon Hope Running Vehicle – serviced before our next road trip.

Kevin is back at home with five children waiting to meet an HVAC repairman who might fulfill this fantasy of ours of having an air conditioned home.

(Did I mention the dryer has been defunct and unplugged since January?)

The smiling/grimacing mechanic steps out from the garage.

“How many people are in your family?” he asks.

“Uh.  Eight,” I respond, wondering what the number of bodies the suburban carries has to do with the oil change.

“So, you really need this big of a vehicle – huh?”

I nod, bracing myself for the worst.

New brakes.  Damaged power steering.  A detailed tune up.

Talk of heads and gaskets and I see his lips moving but I can’t understand the words he’s forming.

I did understand one part, however.  The numbers.  I’m not actually good with numbers – but I recognize the big ones.

$600 – to get started.

To.  Get.  Started.

“Can I pick now or later?” I ask.  “Because I pick later.”

In the car, driving home, postponing the inevitable until later in the week, my nineteen-year-old daughter asks, “So – what do you think God’s teaching you in this Mom?”

I don’t actually know.

I play dumb.  Buy myself a few minutes.

“Huh?”

(I told you I was playing dumb.)

She doesn’t catch my act.  She politely explains for her poor dumb mother, “Lately, I just think God keeps telling me – you are not in control.  Just when I begin to think things are going well, he will remind me – you are not in control.”

Passenger side – all calm and conversational.

Driver side – all pompous and arrogant.

“Well,” I start speaking without giving thought to my words, waiting to hear myself say whatever might come next, “I think God has already taught me that.  I’ve long known I’m not in control.”

(Have I long known I’m a jerk too?)

Eventually both our ride and our conversation end.

At home, I discover the washer is not draining or spinning or something.  The clothes come out dripping and are so heavy I actually use the wagon to pull the laundry basket to the clothes line.

The weight of the sopping towels and t-shirts weighs down the white stretched cord and creates a sagging drooping mess.

T-shirts look mangled and the hems are puckered from the weight of the wet pulling down the clothespins.

The afternoon sun barely makes a dent but the breeze helps and at night fall they seem almost dry.

But still too wet to take down.

And so they remain on the line.

As I sit here listening to the rain fall outside the window of our still un-air conditioned home, I think about those lousy re-wet clothes being pulled down on the edges and about my foolish answers to my daughter and about how little I actually know about anything at all.