What's Yours Is Mine

So last week I told you how I was the proud owner of this wonderful new car. We got the car that Monday evening, and I greatly enjoyed driving it around town for the next three days. I had driven it less than fifty miles, and I hadn't even had to put gas in the tank yet when it happened.

My husband decided he needed to drive it.

Normally I don't have too many problems with Indiana wanting to drive my vehicle. He's a truck guy (that's his truck in the picture behind my new car), but he needed to go to a conference in Tennessee, and he decided my new car was the best vehicle for the trip.

Now in all fairness, his trip was one day down and one day back and my car would get 2.5 to 3 times better gas mileage compared to his truck. My tires were new, the car was in great shape and it could handle the 1000 miles better than his truck would.

But it was MY new car.

My NEW car.

Mine.

In the space of two days he and Matt would put twenty times more miles on the car than I had. Plus, the car was clean. It had no crumbs. No dirt. No trash. No clutter.

I knew it would not come back to me in the same pristine condition.

No offense to my son or my husband, but have you ever taken a car on a trip where it did not collect trash and debris? I knew there would be crushed straw wrappers, crumpled napkins, discarded candy wrappers and an assortment of other items in my car by the time the trip was done.

Not only that, but there would also be guy smells. You know what I mean. I've lived with enough of them to know they can and do have a distinct odor at times.

Taking my car made sense from a practical standpoint, but that did not mean I was happy with the decision. While they were gone I was stuck with the truck. A cool choice from my husband's point of view, but it already had a bunch of guy stuff and discarded papers and tools and boots and things in it. It already had a guy smell. It seemed incredibly unfair to me, especially when Matt started texting me pictures of crumbs on the seat of the car while they were traveling.

This was the state of the backseat when they returned. Just exactly as I thought. Actually, not quite as bad as I thought it would be, but still ...

I felt that it was only fair to leave something behind in Terry's truck. But what? It was already full of junk stuff. 

I thought about spraying it with perfume, but I knew better. Their trip was Friday and Saturday. This Monday Terry headed up north for hunting season. All his gear and equipment would have picked up the smell of the perfume and the deer would have spotted him coming a mile away. Spraying perfume was a little too drastic.

What I needed was something clearly feminine, but also easy to get rid of after the joke was over. Just not too easy. So I made a little trip to Claire's Saturday evening. Sunday morning, Terry found his truck a little more feminine.

I hung the purse from his rearview mirror, and then I decorated the steering wheel, dashboard and rearview mirror with stick-on earrings. He had hearts and strawberries and rainbows and assorted other feminine things all over his truck. I don't have a picture of it, but I also stretched a bright feather boa of orange, red and pink across the top of the backseat in the rear window.

He was not amused, but I thought it was a fair exchange.

What do you think?