Girls Just Want to Have Flashy Cars

I have a friend named Jane.

She’s 94 years young and living independently.

She reports rain, snow, and temperature measurements for the Cabot area. She volunteers with the Cabot Historical Society. She drives and regularly dines out with family and friends.

I met Jane while living in Vermont. She has spent most of her life in or near the rural area where she was born, a part of Cabot, the town I wound up moving to in July 2021.

Jane and I met in the spring of 2023 when she spoke to a small group of us at the Cabot Town Library, the first author is a series of presentations I created to meet other authors living locally.

With Jane, I not only found another author, but a fellow historian and friend.

We communicated primarily through email, as most introverts do. And those communications have continued despite me leaving Cabot and returning to Idaho in December 2024. While Jane doesn’t often post on her private Facebook page, she follows mine and says she sees and understands why I’m happier in Idaho’s mountains.

Jane has a blog that is primarily about Joe’s Pond, the community of mostly summer homes around a large pond in Cabot. She uses it primarily to keep friends and neighbors up to speed on news and events.

But every now and again Jane’s memory is sparked by local news, and she digresses into some topic, seen through her vast stores of historical knowledge and lived experience.

That’s what I love the most about Jane’s blog: her trips down memory lane.

Often, after reading her most recent blog post, I’ll write to her, sharing how much I enjoyed it, maybe even sharing similar memories of my own.

That’s what happened last December. Jane’s December 4, 2025 post started out sharing with readers the current weather and dicey driving conditions.

Roads are not great here right now, so be careful if you are traveling in our region – snow squalls are making visibility poor and also sweeping snow across roadways sometimes hiding black ice. Take it slow and pay close attention to what’s ahead and to other drivers. It’s surprising how many people still don’t have their winter tires on – or who are depending on “all season” tires, which just aren’t adequate when the going gets tough. I know – I embraced the new trend of all weather tires at first. Over the years at different stages of my driving, I’ve carried a set of chains (and had to use them more times than I like to recall) and had studded tires – usually “retreads.” Then new cars came with “all season tires” and front wheel drive. That changed my driving habits considerably. There were many times when I couldn’t make a hill or felt insecure on slippery roads, resulting in “white knuckle driving” experiences. There was some benefit when cars had all-wheel drive, but when we went back to winter tires, what a difference! They really do make driving a whole lot safer, and if you live on a back road, it may make sense to have them studded, too. It is rare to hear a car clunking along with chains – but it does happen. I expect it’s mostly folks who live on isolated back roads who still carry a set of chains with them. Whatever gets you there safely!

Then the fun memories began.

I hadn’t intended to delve into my driving history – but it brought back memories of the clunky 1940 Packard sedan (a lot like the one pictured here but mine didn’t have whitewalls) that was my first car. It was a big old “safe” used car I bought at Lesnick’s DeSoto-Plymouth when I started working there in about 1950. I never liked that car – it began to fall apart almost immediately and if I went through a puddle of water, the engine would die. It was like steering a cow by the tail on snowy roads. I wasn’t unhappy when my father offered to take it off my hands and made it into a power unit to run his sawmill. It was a great rig for that and he sawed a heap of lumber with it. Fun to look back on, though.

I couldn’t resist writing to Jane after reading that post. My December 4, 2025 email to her read, in part:

Second, I loved the bit about your first car, how “It was like steering a cow by the tail on snowy roads.” What an image, but perfectly describes how it must have handled! Your dad’s ingenious use of it at his sawmill makes the story all the better.

Jane replied later that day:

What I didn’t mention in today’s post was that I was persuaded to buy that Packard by my parents after I told them my intention to buy a little foreign sports car. I don’t recall what kind of car it was, but I always regretted that I let them talk me out of having a sporty car. However, I was young, and it was my first job and first car. A few years later when I married (1953), I gave the clunker to my father. Some 20 years later, by then a young widow, with teenage sons with cars of their own, I bought a wonderful little used Opel GT. It was white with large stencils of red and orange flames on either side and across the back! My kids loved it – and when it began to fail, I bought a new Opel – a lovely bright blue, no decorations. I thought of it as “a poor man’s Corvette”. It was a two-door, stick drive (of course!) with a very small back seat, but I managed to sometimes fit three or four pretty large kids in it when necessary, and very often they had to hop out and push me up slippery, snowy hills. It also had electrical problems and occasionally I had to be pushed to get it started. It was great fun to drive, was economical and very agile on the road – a pleasure to drive, and I dearly loved it – but eventually it became too expensive to maintain and I became content with more sensible domestic cars. My first husband loved convertibles and sporty cars; my second husband just looked for reliable transportation, but eventually he began to appreciate style, too, but I could never convince him to buy a real sports car. And that’s some of the rest of the story! 

Jane’s description of those Opel sports cars as a “poor man’s Corvette” sparked my own memories of my one and only sports car, a Mazda Miata, which some people called a poor person’s Porsche and most men felt was too girly for them to be seen driving.

This round of correspondence ended that day with a final email from me:

The “rest of the story” is fabulous! And proof of yet something else we have in common: a yen for flashy cars.

Here’s my car history (in a nutshell).

In the mid-90s, I was financially stable enough to have purchased a small house and was driving the 1984 Subaru station wagon I purchased my first year as a practicing attorney because I needed a vehicle good on snow.

In 1975, my father modified and then gifted me as a wedding present a Chevy Vega, slightly used, bright red. Very sporty. Like your first husband, Dad had a thing for sleek vehicles so he chose that one for me. My marriage only lasted 18 months, but I drove that Vega all through college and law school, and into my first job in eastern WA in December 1983. (In 1971 Dad bought himself a shiny blue Camero, which irritated my mother. They split up a couple years later, but not because of the car.) Dad insisted on doing all the maintenance on the Vega so it always ran well, but when I moved to the other side of the Cascades, he could no longer do that.

The Vega had lots of miles and wasn’t good on snowy roads, so I bought the Subaru. I’d ridden in a friend’s Subaru and he tried to teach me how to drive it with its manual transmission, so I knew it was a good car. I went to a dealer about 40 miles from where I was living, chose a light blue one, paid for it, and drove it off the lot. No test drive; I was too embarrassed to admit to the salesman that I didn’t really know how to drive a stick. For days leading up to the purchase I’d been practicing in my head, clutch and shift, and somehow, I managed to successfully drive it off the lot and home😊I loved that car, especially after getting my first Alaskan Malamute; plenty of room for her in the back. It took us on lots of adventures.

Fast forward to ~1993 and I decided I still needed the Subaru to take me and my dog to trailheads, but wouldn’t it be fun to have a sports car to drive around town, commute to work and court, etc.? Plus, having a second car would extend the life of the Subaru. I bought a used 1991 bright red Mazda Miata. Stick shift, of course. Oh, what fun that car was to drive! So zippy, tight turning, with convertible top for wind in my hair when the weather was good…. People look at you differently when you drive such a car, which I’m sure you experienced as well. Just not good for transporting big dogs.

I sold it a few years later, along with the Subaru (it had 220,000 miles), and from then on have owned practical, dog-hauling vehicles with four-wheel drive.

But I don’t regret for a moment buying that Miata.

So, I totally get why you bought the Opel! And another Opel! Such a sense of freedom and joy, right? I’m not sure what it is, but owning and driving such a car is a way to even the gender playing field, to assert independence and confidence, I guess. To grab life by the balls (pardon the expression). I laughed about your boys having to push you in your Opel up snowy roads, or to get the car started sometimes, but that just makes it all the better. Good stories, good memories.

Hmm. I’ve got a two-car garage but only one car. Maybe I need another sports car… 😉.

Today, I reached out to Jane to make sure she was okay with me sharing our email exchange about cars on my blog. After graciously granting permission

Just as an aside – I’ve thought about getting another sports car, too! Probably not a great idea, even though I know all my kids would understand and approve. Did I mention that my oldest son, Bill, parked his car a bit too close to the first snazzy Opel, his bumper tapped the rear of the car and it fell apart?  It had been damaged and repaired with fiberglass, but the previous owner didn’t disclose that. So after that, it was known in our family as “Mom’s car with the glass ass.” I didn’t repair it – it got traded for a new one. 

Is it any wonder I miss seeing this woman? I’m so grateful we remain in touch via email, still swapping stories.

You can find Jane’s blog at Joe’s Pond Reflections.

My previous post about Jane, sharing her skills as a storytelling poet and sketch artist:

Bringing History to Life through Poetry

Featured image: Cabot Historical Society building on Main Street, Cabot, Vermont.