Life & Place · A Decembers list
Every car that ever carried you somewhere
You can still feel the shape of the shifter in your first car, hear the door that never quite shut right, smell the vinyl in July. Some cars you'd know blindfolded.
This is the list for all of them, in the order they came. One line to start: the make, the year, how you got it.
Free to start. Private from the first word.
Where this list lives
This is a list in Decembers — the place a life gets written down one question at a time.
Decembers asks the questions no one thought to ask, keeps the answers in one permanent Chronicle, and holds them on one Timeline that reads in order. You answer. Decembers does the writing.
- Lists
- A list for every kind of life, and every turn one takes. Pick one and start answering.
- Timeline
- Your answers arrange themselves in order. Seeing a whole life laid out this way is something else.
- Inner Circle
- Not social media. The few people you name are the only ones it is ever shared with.
Begin with one list. The rest follows.
One line is enough
Write down the Falcon and you're back in the driveway at seventeen, hood up, a friend leaning in to say it's the alternator. One car pulls a whole decade out with it.
The title and the registration remember the VIN and the plate number. They don't remember that the heater only worked on the highway, or that you learned to parallel park it in one afternoon with your father in the passenger seat saying nothing, which was his way of trusting you. They don't remember the eight-track wedged under the seat, or the drive-in you took a date to, or the exact stretch of two-lane where it finally quit.
A car is a place you spent years of your life, moving. Every job, every move, every trip to the hospital and back happened inside one of them. Nobody writes a book about their cars. But a list you can keep, one line at a time — the make, the year, the color, the thing you remember most — and somewhere between the first set of keys and the truck outside now is the whole route you took.
How it works
- 01
Pick this list
It’s waiting, already written. There is no blank page to face.
- 02
Fill in what comes
A year, a line, a photograph. Five minutes or an hour.
- 03
Invite who was there
They add what you forgot. You decide what stays.
- 04
Share it, or don’t
One quiet page for your Inner Circle. No link, no feed.
What ends up on this list
The ones you bought
How you found it, what you paid, whether you talked the man down or got taken. The loan you signed for, the cash you counted out on a kitchen table, the trade-in you were sorry to see go. Some you drove off the lot new and some you bought with 90,000 already on the clock.
The ones that weren't yours
Your mother's Buick that you learned on. The company van. The rental that got you across three states one Thanksgiving. Not every car you drove daily was ever in your name, and some of those you remember better than the ones you owned.
How each one ended
Traded in, sold to a nephew, totaled on an icy on-ramp, driven until it wouldn't start one more time. Every car has a last day. Writing down how it went is half of what makes the memory worth keeping.
Decade by decade
- 1960s
- Column shifts, bench seats, no seatbelts to speak of, and a car you could actually work on yourself in the driveway with a socket set.
- 1970s
- Land yachts and wood-paneled wagons, the gas lines of '73, and eight-track players that ate the tapes as often as they played them.
- 1980s
- The first Japanese imports in the driveway, the Reagan-era pickup, and cassette decks with a wire coat hanger for an antenna.
- 1990s
- Minivans with sliding doors, the first car with a cupholder that actually held a cup, and airbags becoming something you thought about.
- 2000s
- SUVs everywhere, keyless entry fobs you kept losing, and a CD changer in the trunk that held six discs at once.
- 2010s on
- Backup cameras, the phone that talks to the dashboard, and maybe the first one you plugged in overnight instead of filling up.
Other lists you may like
Start with any one of them. Every answer lands on the same Timeline.
Begin
A record of every mile you drove and who you were driving it as
Start with the first one — the make, the year, and how the keys came to be yours. The rest of the fleet will follow it onto the page.