“So what happens to your blog now that you’ve purchased a car?” my sister “Barbie” asks me.

“We just become a Car-Light Family,” I reply.

Yikes. Did we just do this?

My symptoms have been increasing by the day, and it looks like we are getting closer to a diagnosis on all this pain and wobbliness. Not sciatica. Not MS. Not ALS. Not LUPUS. Not Chronic Fatigue.

Lyme Disease. From a bite over 20 years ago, before they were talking about Lyme Disease. So, we caved into the pressures of the world. No, wait, we didn’t do that. We looked practically at our lives, winter, stress and my illness and bought “The Little Red Wagon” from our next-best-thing-to-Amish friends, Mark & Annie.

They have been lightly fanning the car in front of us for over a year.

“It’s in the garage waiting for you. Whenever you are ready.”

I’m ready. I don’t want to be ready. I want to figure it out. I want to be car-free. I also want to get where I need to get when the pain makes it so I can barely walk, so this is what we’ve done.

I told dancer husband that I thought we needed to think about “Mark’s Car”. Within days he was on the phone, getting it done. He is in the beautiful, beautiful car, on his way home.

We knew it would be a Volvo. We hoped it would be a wagon. I secretly wanted it to be red.

I’m trying not to think of this latest move as a failure. We still think of ourselves as a car-light family, and will continue to document our new life. This process has really been about the intention. We want to live more authentically, slow down, live interdependently and with a greater consciousness of the way we damage the planet. Today I did two things to keep that intention, both before I even saw the Little Red Wagon. First, I set up a car-pool with Boychoir, which started with tonight’s rehearsal. Next, I let a family across the street know that we bought a car and it would be available to them if they wanted to ride somewhere, needed to get somewhere, etc. They dropped down to one car when their second car was totaled last spring. It is about intentional living still, and how do we do it with a car? Stick with me?