Recently, David came into the house and said that one of the giant springs had come off the garage door opener. And, hadn’t I noticed that?

Well, no, I hadn’t noticed that. In general, I get in my car, press the door opener remote, and drive out of the garage. When I’m in the driveway, I press the remote again and the door closes. I’m not actually looking down on the garage floor, and I don’t/didn’t notice any really large spring sitting on the concrete. David did notice it when he came into the garage’s open door when I wasn’t at home, and, therefore, that big ol’ spring was pretty was easy to see.

He said that the springs had been replaced really recently. One spring had popped off and the garage door guy said that if one was getting replaced, then both of them should be replaced. I guess so they could work in tandem. I looked in my files and found that, yes, the springs had been replaced in January, so I phoned the garage door opener people and explained what happened.

They came and asked if just one spring was replaced or both of them. I went in and got the receipt and showed them that, yes, two springs had been replaced. And, it had been in January. And they said that they’d put a spring on each side. Then they said . . .

We were living on borrowed time. The replacement springs were used springs, because our garage doors are obsolete. They don’t make that kind any more.

Modern garage door openers require garage doors that are louvered, having four horizontal panels that glide up, instead of our solid doors that glide up as one static piece. And, they said, the whole apparatus is higher up, closer to the ceiling of the garage. They looked up at that ceiling and said, “All that storage has got to go.”

And there is lots of storage. Years ago, my Dad and David created some rather crude (but quite sturdy) shelving that is suspended from the ceiling. After my parents were gone and my sister and I were emptying the house, we found all sorts of old boxes/stuff up there, including a doll’s crib and high chair that belonged to my mother, a doll buggy,  well-used by JoAnne, that had been stored in its original box, and an old potty chair that a friend of JoAnne’s wanted for her antique potty chair collection. (I am absolutely not making that up. She has an antique potty chair collection.)

When David and I moved into the house, those shelves got filled up again. As David and I peered up at the storage boxes, I said, “Are those our things up there?” We thought that a couple of items might be, but the bulk of the boxes are filled with things that our sons had been storing in our other house. Things that got moved and stored here. And now, while it’s not imminent, we’re looking at trying to empty up that ceiling space that will be needed for the modern, up-to-date type of garage doors and garage door openers.

It seems that, when the garage door opener company replaces old, obsolete garage door openers with the new-fangled kind, they retrieve any parts that still seem functional (like big ol’ springs) and keep them at hand, for the old fogey garage doors that are still around.

I guess that putting old springs on old garage doors is somewhat all right. And, just as well, any new spring might just rip the door off its hinges.