Farewell, sweet Nissan

It's been across the country three times and been on its last legs for more than a year, but it took an inattentive driver to finally put our 2000 Nissan Sentra out of commission.

Not our driver, of course, but the idiot who couldn't read a green arrow. Or read a green arrow he didn't actually have.

The car was drivable, of course, but it doesn't take much damage to total a nine-year-old car with 113,132 miles on it. Once the frame was bent, that was all she wrote. That and the check State Farm wrote, that is, which might have been the book value but was far more than we ever could have gotten on the street.

I had to pour power steering fluid into the car every couple of months because it had a slow leak. The air conditioning stopped working in 2007, maybe 2006. CD player hasn't worked in more than a year. The trunk couldn't be released from inside the car. The remote car locks stopped working. The headlights were dimming.

And we'd just decided to bite the bullet and put new tires on it and replace the battery last November.

This was the car, if you remember, that I wasn't sure would make it to Minnesota. We pondered selling it before leaving Virginia, and even when we decided to move it, we didn't pack anything essential in it, thinking that we might have to abandon it on the side of the road in Indiana somewhere. But it got here. And it lived outside all winter, but never once did it fail to start, even on the coldest days of the year.

We're going to try the one-car life for a little while, anyway. It's been almost a week so far, and I've been working at home a lot. The house is pretty crowded, though, and about to get more crowded with school out soon, so I don't know how long that will last. So we'll be shopping.