Share the Road

This is a first draft of what was going to be a contest entry, only I decided to go in another direction, so I'm posting it here. The reason I bolded first draft is that it's unfinished and dripping with what one of the local art schools calls "first ideas". However, I think it has its good points. If nothing else, this is a pretty accurate story of life and parking in our neighbourhood up till a couple of weeks ago.

“What are you guys doing up there?” I called as a heavy THUD shook my basement office.
“It wasn’t us!”
No, it wasn’t. It was a construction crew out in the back lane, excavating a hole big enough for both our cars to fall into.
Okay, no big deal. Would’ve been nice if the city or the contractor or somebody had let us know in advance, but . . . Anyway, by the looks of things, I still had a little time to get the cars out of the driveway before it was cut off by the brink of the abyss.
For a while, we parked in front of the house. Again, no big deal. Just a little further to carry in all the groceries. And it couldn’t go on forever, could it?
No – it ended one morning when we saw, planted right by our cars, a sign saying NO PARKING BY ORDER OF CITY ENGINEER.
So we couldn’t park in our own driveway or in front of our house. This was beginning to be a big deal, but then we realized we had the perfect fallback parking space: In front of an empty house around the corner. Our only fear was that the realtor would track us down and complain about how hard it was to sell a house in today’s market even without a rusted-out clunker parked in front. That, and getting a child with a laptop and a trombone over to the car every Thursday morning.
This lasted until the crew started parking their backhoe in the space.
Then it finally became a big deal. We parked wherever it seemed vaguely possible: In front of the house across the street, after asking the people there. In front of the house on the corner, without asking, though I knew the woman there and didn’t think she’d mind. Besides, no one else would want to park in front of her house – the place was so close to the corner it was illegal.
One day I left the car in one of the spaces by the park for half the day. Hey, I pay taxes.
Just when we thought the construction project was going to last longer than either of our cars, the crew disappeared. I saw them at work over on the expensive side of town. They left behind only a stray LOCAL TRAFFIC ONLY sign and a few unpaved spots in the lane – nothing big, only a few inches deep.
We sighed with relief and went back to parking in our own driveway and walking less than half a mile to our cars.
Then, one morning . . . THUD.
Does anyone have an empty lot to rent?