red car

i'm thankful that though we live on an anonymous numbered street that, from the nearest cross street of our neighborhood's grid, looks like the anonymous numbered streets on either side of it, which makes it hard to realize when exactly you are supposed to turn to go home, we have always been aided in this project by a red sedan which, since we moved here a year ago, has been parked in front of the house on north corner of where our street joins the cross street and has never not once been there in exactly the same place, without fail, ever, for a year, and every time when we're coming home, no matter the day or time, we wonder if the red car will be there or whether it will suddenly be missing and of course always the red car is there, the red car will always be there, and we turn in and we are home, it's always like that except today when we turned onto the cross street and suddenly for the first time ever THE RED CAR WAS GONE and we both gasped and i started thinking about how on the one hand, i was glad to see a rare thing that always seemed to be about to happen (but never did) but also kind of weirdly destabilized by the sudden change, wondering, as i often do, about the owner of the car, about whether the car is even drivable, and then a moment later as we turned onto our street we saw it, the red car, parked on the other side of the corner to improve trick-or-treat access. i'm thankful for the constant of the red car.