our other vehicle, the red wagon

Shortly after I married into a family with two young sons, my husband bought a red, metal wagon with shiny black handle and white side-walled tired. On our shoestring budget, that wagon was our second vehicle. Even pulling the wagon, it was a short trip down a well-kept, sidewalk lined streets to the library, clinic, school, shops and Laundromat where we washed clothes.
On sunny wash days, my new sons knew I had dibs on the wagon. When the weather was nice, I didn’t wait for my husband to come home with the car. The clothes were dirty. I had a job to do. I loaded baskets of wash on the wagon, covered them with a sheet and walked to the Laundromat.
Getting there was easy. The streets were all down-hill from our house at the highest pointing town. One morning when the 7-year-old was in school, the youngest and I strolled to the Laundromat, the wagon rolling along easily behind me. The 4-year-old looked longingly at the wagon, “Can you pull it?”
I was reluctant to break my pace, “Oh no, it’s too heavy for you.” He trotted along beside me, played quietly at the Laundromat and watched me, played quietly at the Laundromat and watched me fold clothes into the baskets. On the way home, pulling the weighted wagon up the slight incline I trailed behind him.
As we neared the final block I rubbed my aching arm. “Do you want to pull the wagon for a while?”
That kid made me eat my words, “Oh no, it’s too heavy for me.” I pulled that wagon load of clean clothes the rest of the way home.
The next spring, we added a second-hand stacked washer and dryer to the appliances in the kitchen and an infant seat to the wagon. Entrenched in our early years of tight money, a stroller seemed to expensive. I shaded the baby’s eyes with a blanket, settled him in his infant seat and positioned him in the wagon with his 5-year-old brother before we walked to the library.
As we added children, we replaced our sedan with a station wagon and our rusty metal wagon with a big, wooden wagon with red slat sides.
We wore out both wagons carting things around in them: Books from the library, shop purchases and children.
My husband loaded the wagons down with yard trash and scraps from his remodeling projects. The kids hauled their stuff and each other around in them. When we kept a garden, we trucked pumpkins and corn to the house in a wagon.
We even took our second vehicle on vacation. With a row of five sons from toddler to teenager, the wagon help tow a lot of tired kids. The summer we vacationed in Washington D.C., we cushioned pre-schoolers between diapers, lunch bags and drinks jammed into the wagon and toured the mall. At lunch breaks, I pulled up a slat side, sat down and rested as the boys chased pigeons. That wagon was one versatile, handy item back when I was young, had lots of kids and was very healthy from walking everywhere dragging our second vehicle behind me.