He pulled up for our first date in a 1999 Chevy Xtreme. If you're not familiar with this kind of truck, it's like an S-10, but it's built on a Camaro chassis, so it sits much lower and has some different moldings along the bottom. Everywhere we went for the next few years, we went in that truck.

He bought it with the intention of someday making it a show truck, by reshaping the chassis, putting in a new engine, getting big tires, and other modifications. We've had a lot of fun showing it at different shows, and it's received national attention and recognition as well.

It's fun when someone comes up to my husband at a show and asks about all the modifications he's made. I love the joy I see in him as he recounts the work. I like that it has been with us our entire relationship, from the very first date.

This weekend we’re at a car show, and I’m watching something I’ve watched at a hundred of them. Row after row of cars that were once something else. A rusted shell in a barn. A heap somebody was ready to haul off. A project that's sat for years, waiting for the work. What gleams on that field isn’t really the chrome. It’s the years of someone showing up in a cold garage, hunting for one part that hasn’t been made since 1964, and refusing to let “worn out” have the final word.

Then the owner parks it in the row, and a stranger wanders up and asks a question about the build, and just like that, two people who’ve never met are fluent in each other’s language. Some of the folks around us have known each other for years and circled this weekend on the calendar. Others are meeting for the first time. By lunch you can’t tell which is which.

It doesn’t happen on its own, though. Somebody has to walk up to a stranger’s truck and ask the first question, with no guarantee of a warm answer. And somebody else has to lift the hood, which is a way of saying, here’s the thing I’ve poured myself into, and you’re welcome to look. Both of them are a little exposed. That small risk, repeated all day long, is what a community is made of.

Perhaps you are carrying a project like that. Something you’ve been quietly rebuilding for years, mostly alone, not sure anyone would care to hear about it. And most of us have stood at the edge of a field of strangers wondering whether our question would be welcome. It costs something to go first, in either direction. It’s also the only way anyone has ever been found.

My wish for you this week, Reader, is that you’ll ask one real question of someone you don’t know well, and that you’ll let someone ask you one, and then lift the hood and tell the truth about the work you’ve been doing in the cold. I suspect whatever you call the mystery that holds the universe together has been inviting us this way all along: a question, an open hood, a joy that was waiting for someone to notice. That’s the fiLLLed life.

Live a fiLLLed life, Melissa