For six months, my neighbor Linda treated my driveway like it belonged to her.

It started innocently enough, the way these things always do. “Just ten minutes,” she’d say, leaving her big SUV parked there while she ran across the street to visit someone. And what was I going to say to ten minutes? I’m not a monster.

But ten minutes became two hours. Two hours became an afternoon. And before long, she was leaving that SUV in my driveway overnight, like it had grown roots there.

I asked her politely. Then I asked her firmly. I even went to the hardware store and bought a sign, a real one, white with bold red letters, PRIVATE DRIVEWAY, and I mounted it right where nobody could miss it.

Linda laughed at the sign.

“You barely use it anyway,” she said.

And she wasn’t entirely wrong. That was the maddening part. Since my husband Robert died two years earlier, I only had the one car. There was a lot of empty space out there most days.

But empty isn’t the same as free for the taking. Empty doesn’t mean it stopped being mine.

Before Robert died, our driveway was almost never empty.

Robert loved classic cars. And I don’t mean in the casual, “oh, that’s a nice Mustang” sort of way that most people mean it. My husband could hear an engine from half a block away and tell you exactly what was wrong with it before the car even came into view. It was a party trick and a genuine skill all at once, and I watched him do it a hundred times.

That Monday morning, thirty cars pulled into my driveway. And for the first time since I lost him, I looked out at all that noise and all that chaos and all those people, and I didn’t think about what I’d lost.

I thought about everyone who was still willing to show up.