The Pussy Willows

​As a child in the mid 1980s I remember going to my grandfather's house and him showing me a new Oldsmobile that he had purchased. He was in his 70s at the time so it made sense that he had purchased an old man's car. He told me in a few years when I turned 18 the car would be mine. I realized that it would be cool to have my own car when I became an adult but I was not sure if the ladies would dig the car which was brown in color and a four door sedan. 

​He told me to hop in as we were going to go for a spin and get a soft ice cream. As I got in I looked in the backseat and atop the speakers were pussy willows which I had seen in his last car that had been in a horrific accident on the highway. It was amazing that my grandfather had survived the accident as the car was a total write off and was crumpled like an accordion. My grandfather had told me that the only injury he had received from the crash was a scratch on the head. 

As we drove to get a soft ice cream I asked my grandfather about the pussy willows atop the speakers in the back. He told me that his father had brought them over from the Ukraine in 1894 when he had immigrated to Canada. He said the pussy willows atop the speakers were the rarest of the many pussy willow species in the Ukraine. They had been blessed by a Ukrainian priest and my great grandfather kept them in his pocket everywhere he went as they were to provide him good luck and safety on his life journey in Canada. When my great grandfather had died he had passed them down to my grandfather who did not keep them on himself but instead put them in the car. He claimed that the pussy willows had allowed him to walk away from the car accident unscathed. 

Three years later I turned eighteen years old and my grandfather was a man of his word and gave me the Oldsmobile and as a bonus he left the pussy willows atop the speakers. On January 30th 1996 I headed out to my 18th birthday party. The weather was good and the roads were decent but I was still an inexperienced driver and as I merged onto a bridge I didn't realize that bridge surface had become frozen from the river. I drove onto the bridge, pressed the gas and my car fish tailed on the icy surface and seconds later I slammed into the concrete meridian at 100 kilometers an hour. I remember seeing the hood of my car fold up in front of me and I thought I was going to die. My car spun a few times and amazingly no other vehicles were coming down the freeway at the time and I walked away untouched. I grabbed the pussy willows off the speaker, kissed them and put them in my pocket.

A year later I purchased my own vehicle which was a beautiful Ford truck and I put the pussy willows on the back speaker for protection. At the time I was parking my truck in the back lane at my parent's house. A week after purchasing the truck I went out back to hop inside to drive to work and to my disappointment the back window had been smashed by a vandal. The only thing stolen were the pussy willows.