wrecks

this morning when i was backing out of my driveway, i noticed something out of the norm.
let’s step back a few years first…
my doorbell rang, i went to the door and it was this cute young asian girl and her father. he didn’t really speak english, but he wanted his daughter to talk to me. she’d hit my pickup. i went out and looked and it was barely scraped, mostly just white paint from her new mustang. they were my neighbors across the street, and i’m guessing she was still learning or very early in her driving. i told them it was no problem at all. he smiled and nodded, she looked relieved. over the years since then, i’d see her from time to time, coming or going in her car. it was parked in the driveway, or every now and then by the curb on their side of the street.
back to the present…
this morning i looked in my rearview mirror as i was preparing to back out of my driveway and i saw a crushed white mustang across the way in my neighbor’s drive. it had to have been dropped there by a tow-truck — the tires were flat and both the front and back were crushed. but it looked like the cabin was intact, and the roof wasn’t crushed or anything. i’m guessing it was in the middle of a pile-up on a highway.
anyway, it just kind of struck me this morning — seeing that wrecked white car — how much change happened in such a short amount of time. the rest of the world around me was pretty much the same, but this one static piece of my surroundings had been dramatically changed overnight.
sometimes life is like that.