Post 3: The Garage and the Work of Living

About 30 to 40 feet west of the house stood a two-car garage.

It wasn’t tall—maybe ten feet at most. Low enough that my grandfather’s 1985 Dodge Ram barely cleared the opening by a couple of inches. Pulling into that space required attention. You didn’t just drive in. You placed the vehicle there.

The driveway in front of it still exists. Concrete doesn’t forget as easily as wood does.

Inside the garage, the front half was for vehicles. Functional, straightforward. But behind that, partitioned off, were two smaller rooms. Storage rooms. The kind of spaces where things went when they were no longer needed daily, but not yet ready to be discarded.

You could access those rooms from the main garage or through a side door on the east. They weren’t glamorous. They weren’t organized in any modern sense. But they served a purpose.

Like everything else out there.

The garage, the shed, the grain bin—these weren’t aesthetic choices. They were solutions. Each one answered a question:

Where do we put this?
How do we store that?
What do we need to keep things moving?

Farms don’t waste space on unnecessary ideas. Every structure earns its keep.

And even though the garage is gone now, I can still see it. I can still feel the scale of it, the placement of it, the way it fit into the larger system.

Because it wasn’t just a building.

It was part of the work of living.

This is post three of a multi part series, reflections on the farm owned by my father and my grandfather. This is written for me and my siblings.