I had other cars, sure. I remember back as a highschool junior, the first van I drove was eliminated early as I was merging on to the interstate - the grill of the truck behind me is still perfectly imprinted on its trunk. But this car, this '92 previously-owned-by-old-people naked interior, is the first one i felt was truly mine. I whipped that dirty grey piece of metal through the decomposed roads of the 50' til the steady click-click-click-clack of my steering torqued hard enough to fishtail off of Carolton on the way to rugby practices. It is the same car I straight used as a college sophomore with parking garage hookups, drunkedly busing friends to downtown adventures and extensive roadtrips to Lafayette and Slidell. I lost this machine of freedom one night last summer, driving to LSU pick my own mushrooms. My friends and I had tested formula to know when the boomers were ripe for picking- the morning after a rain. It had rained that morning so we set out on our hour journey.
The mission was a fail. The fields were waterlogged and preventative of growth. Having wasted my time, I sped the entire way. Crossing the spillway, I heard a pop and the sound of metal being scraped across concrete. I heard a pop and sparks flew from the bottom of my car as I saw something shoot off. "Hope I didn't need that," I laughed it off. Then my steering locked up. I inched over to the side of the road and popped my hood to find it on fire.
Long story short, I had left the overdrive on and it burnt out my cooling fan which overheated my engine causing a cylinder to burst off and through the engine itself. It was awesome. But also not awesome.

The Three Gardens

In response to Roland Barthes' "The three gardens" I believe he uses the gardens to symbolize the stages of his life from child to adult. He opens with a description of the house "anything but large...it looked like a toy model" which I interpreted as him reflecting how small one person is in relation to the size of the earth. He then further describes the house "like a castle in a story" which could represent the unique and beautiful traits personalized by each living individual. Barthes then states that the "garden, though continuous, was arranged in three symbolically different spaces (and to cross the boundary of each space was a significant action)," which can be compared to the stages of childhood, puberty/adult, old (as approaching these stages in one's life is significant action). He describes the first garden as "worldy" much like a childs innocent perspective of his surroundings. Barthes includes "taking tiny steps, pausing often" which could reference what he personally did as a child. The next garden lies in front of the house, symbolically domestic, and consists of "narrow paths curving around twin lawns" which I took to mean the twin lawns as parents with the narrow paths being their simple path through their own lives. In this garden grew many flowers which I believe represent either people in Barthes' family or specific memories. The roses as representing the loves of his life, hydrangeas the awkward cousin maybe or a bad memory, kitchen herbs that he has a fond taste for, and "a big magnolia whose white flowers bloomed on a level with the upstairs bedroom" maybe representing the memory of his deceased father watching over them from heaven. There the B. ladies did there knitting, perhaps to occupy themselves while Barthes himself was off living his own life. The last garden, the final years of ones life, has a tiny orchard to represent the few memories one has left of this stage filled [sweet] peaches and [tart, or sour] raspberries. Except for that orchard the garden was undefined (maybe the feeling of unaccomplishment), fallow (land that has undergone plowing and harrowing and has been left unseeded for one or more growing seasons; maybe the lonely feeling one may feel after being abandoned when one turns old), and vegetables that need no tending like when you're old and your children are adults and no longer need their parents in the way they once did and you don't visit often and when you do its just to their house for a few hours. What does this interpretation say about Barthes' attitude on life?

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