Homeless in Vancouver: Look, a garage still life—but don't touch

To you, this may be just an unattached garage in Kitsilano that happens to be open.

To me it’s also raw narrative; a kind of unfinished story, full of details about people’s lives—at least the parts of those lives spent in garages.

The more you look at a garage like this, the more it can come to look like a deliberate act of art—a very detailed diorama. And there are always interesting things to catch your eye.

The light coming through the door. The cool old, electric-blue pickup truck, with its curious “paper leak.”

And notice in the back window of the cab: a black-edged plastic thing, stuck on the inside of the glass.

Old truck survived cold winters when it was young

It’s an old celluloid car window frost shield. It creates a simple “double-pane” effect to keep that part of the window from frosting up in subzero weather.

These frost shields were a common feature on the windows and windshields of cars when I was a kid growing up on the Prairies—where winter lives. 

There was a time, before electric window defrosters, when  these things weren’t just common, they were the law. But that’s a story for another blog post.