the volvo shirt
May 9, 2025 - in which i explain why we put a volvo on our tee shirt
There will always be a Volvo here; like a Stark in Winterfell or magnesium in hard water. There is something vividly nostalgic and heartfelt about the honest block silhouette of the 240s and the old wagons, the smell of the seats, and Volvos dotting the forest where our father put them to age and become varmint hotels. I remember seeing the world through the windows of Volvos, rain and sun, cruising over the moonlit Kanc or through the sand dunes of the Outer Banks, my brother asleep beside me, Tom Tom Club on the radio, parents talking, in and out of sleep, my childhood.
Our father learned to work on Volvos and rally raced them up in Burlington, our mother as his co-driver, belting out directions and pace notes as they rumbled through the woods. When they moved here to take care of our Great grandparents Mom did the nursing and Dad took care of the machines and the land. By the time I was born he was fixing Volvos in Portland and at the house and had a whole fleet of junkers lined up in the woods: his parts cars. We sat behind the wheels of those dead old cars and drove to the moon and back and sometimes we jumped on them and once we smashed out all of their headlights. Dad was pretty cool about it he said “oh well, it’s just stuff”.
We got Frankenstein Volvos when we learned to drive. Dylan had a wagon with a cookie sheet floorboard (that sprayed water up into your lap anytime it hit a puddle) and a rotted out ceiling our Dad replaced with a tapestry of the map of the world. The speedometer and gas gauge were both roached but Dyl still drove it 1,100 miles down to Warren Wilson. I drove Mom’s red turbo S70 to college in Burlington, delivered pizza in it until it crapped out. By the time I dropped out Dad had fixed it and it was Mom’s every day driver: she drove that car until she died a few years back. We keep it here either as a memory of her or because we don’t have the heart to part with it, some sort of soul jar essence vessel. It will probably always be here.
So we had these shirts printed with the Volvo on them. I have always wanted to plant a garden bed on top of an old wagon, and someday I might do it but like the name of our farm the new shirt is an homage to our history. Paying respect to something bigger than the thing itself. But where we were never Wells - the name Old Wells Farm actually predates our even existing on this Earth and speaks more to a place and our heritage than it does us as a people - the Volvo is deeply us. The Volvo is the defacto symbol of our family for a time on this earth when we were all together in one place, one unit, a planet unto ourselves and deeply nestled within each other in love in only the way a family can be. You dig?
It’s personal stuff and it’s hard to write about; childhood ends, Camelot falls. I have a new family now and I feel that same beautiful important closeness, but the family I grew up with will always be with me in everything I do. We even drive a 1998 Volvo cross country, the wagon that everyone’s Mom had back in high school and my Dad still does his best to keep it going despite his shaking hands. And so we dig around in the earth for places to put plants and we print tee shirts with cars on them to show how much it all means to us in hopes that the love we feel we carry inside can be passed along.