Just Like Magic

     We have a detached garage. It was once a carport, but someone built walls around it. It's long and narrow, with an extra room built on the back. Someone lined the walls with mismatched old cupboards: brown on one wall, white on the other. There are pictures of cars cut from magazines and glued to the white cupboard doors. They're the only cars that spend any time in there, so it seems appropriate. The garage door isn't automatic, which is the main reason we never park in there. For some reason, sliding that door open seems like more effort than scraping car windows in the winter or washing what the birds leave on the car in warmer weather. For a while the garage was the home of our swamp cooler, which currently hangs from our kitchen window in all its ghetto glory. The list of what we store out there now is short and random: our old couches and chair, an over-sized computer monitor, Owen's bike, a rusty metal table, the lawn mower, all the closet doors from inside the house (I hate them),  a box of earplugs, and a push broom. On the side of the garage is a shed. You can't get into it from the garage itself, there's a separate door outside. The door sticks and has always been very difficult to pull open, but now it's basically impossible. The door knob came off in one of our attempts to wrench the door open and now there's no hope at all for opening it that way. We tried taking the pins out of the hinges and pull the door off. Two out of three pins came out with some effort, but the third won't budge. I'm sure there's some way to get it open, even if it means breaking it down... but we haven't come to that yet. It's just stuck. In some ways, I think it's a relief to Owen. Anytime I'm looking for something and can't find it, he only has to use the magic words "It's in the shed." Suddenly the search is over. I always respond "we really need to fix that..." and the conversation ends. Our overgrown lawn can't possibly be mown, because the gas can is in the shed. We can't even improvise with the weed-whacker as it is sitting right beside that gas can. Most of the gardening tools we have accumulated are housed in there, along with work gloves, household tools, Owen's bike pump and whatever else I can't seem to find. Our yard is looking about like you'd imagine, unkempt and shaggy. The fact that our lawn is semi-dead slows the growth down so it's not out of control, just pathetic. The weeds in the flower bed are growing much better than the grass and everyday I tell myself I'm going to get out there and take care of that. It's just... I can't seem to find any energy these days. Maybe that's in the shed too.