Working red wagon

My husband dismissed strollers and bought red wagons for his children … and himself.
He returned from his first foray into the Red Wagon Dealership with a metal wagon that he insisted I take out for a spin. He gave me a push and the neighbor’s a grand laugh.
It was a sturdy wagon; it had to be to drag our mound of dirty clothes down the street to the Laundromat and back. While I washed clothes, the two oldest sons entertained themselves with the wagon or used it as a bench for sitting and waiting.
A couple years, a broken axle, warped handle and worn-out tires warranted our declaring it old and ready to retire. For his second foray to the Red Wagon Dealership, my husband selected the deluxe model: the largest, wooden wagon on the lot, the kind with red, rail sides. When the children were babies, it served as Mom’s Reliable Transportation Service around the small village where we lived. For the weekly children’s hour at the library, I typically loaded an infant into a covered carrier and a child or two into the wagon bed, a diaper bag and snacks, then dragged the lot of them a mile over the uneven sidewalks to the library.
The wagon served my husband through several years of house remodeling and family camping trips east to Washington D.C., north to the mountains in Maine and west to the deserts of Arizona.
When my husband decided it was time to take a trip, he removed the rail sides and stacked them on the bed, tucked the handle underneath and wedged it all into place. With little ones, we always found room for the wagon. It served as an extra chair at the camp site, a stroller, lunch wagon and bed for sleeping children. When we finally collapsed, we took off the sides, let the children out to chase the pigeons strutting down the mall in Washington D.C. and I sat down.
At home, the wagon entertained the children. Big brother hitched it to the back of his bike and hauled the pre-schooler up and down the grass-overgrown alley beside our house. On yardwork days, the kids tested their strength – and the wagon’s – by using it to haul loads of leaves, limbs, and once, a huge dug-out root. During the summer and early fall harvest of our garden, we balanced loads of tomatoes, green beans and corn on its bed.
Mostly, though, I remember its usefulness as we converted the most unacceptable house in town into a premium priced, real estate quick sale. The wagon hauled loads of crumbling plaster and scraps of the fresh dry wall away from the house to the junk pile.
The two years we spent creating a basement out of a cellar were hard on the wagon. My husband and the big boys used it to carry concrete blocks from the stack left by the building company. They loaded it down with bucket after bucket of sand to make mortar to seal the blocks into place beneath the house. Finally they used it to haul stones out of the yard before we seeded it and declared the house done.
We covered the work scars and cracks in the wagon with blankets when our last child and only daughter arrived, but it was never the same after that. We sold the house to the first couple who looked at it, moved to the suburbs and bought a second car. The wagon ended its days bereft of its rails, unused, a worn-out toy, left in the back yard to disintegrate.
It has never been replaced.
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times.)


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