Car Fashion-ation

Spring is the best time to fall in love—with a new car

- Fern Doner

It doesn’t matter if the calendar and the weather agree or not, every year I get a weird kind of “spring fever.” I suddenly have the urge to visit car lots. My brother-in-law still teases me about that time, one March, when I wanted to make a cherry pie and I went out with the purpose of buying cherry-pie filling. Instead, I came home having purchased a brand-new sporty red Toyota Corolla SR5. Well, I got the colour right anyway. I named it Mac, because it was the colour of a McIntosh apple.

I don’t remember when this fascination with cars first began. I do remember that, as kids, we would sit under the maple trees at the end of our farm lane on Sunday afternoons, and watch the cars stream down the road on their way from Lake Simcoe back to Toronto or thereabouts.

We played many car games on those afternoons. You got points if you were the first to call out the make of the car. It was easier back then because there weren’t so many makes and models. We tallied up the number of red cars or black ones and so on. And kudos to you if you spotted a Volkswagen Beetle. Do you remember the Rambler, the Falcon, the Studebaker or the DeSoto? How about the Edsel? Is that where it all began?

When I was about 13, a neighbour boy who was in his 20s, owned a VW Beetle convertible. He would sometimes drive across the hay field and give me and my siblings rides. Such fun with our heads poking out the top!

I learned to drive in my dad’s 1956 Dodge with push-button gears. Well, actually, I learned to drive on the tractor. But that’s another story.