I have been feeling so nostalgic lately! The combination of snow, family time, and the holiday season brings out the storyteller in me.

Last weekend I spent the run up to New Years road-tripping to Ithaca, NY with my dad. For all of you who call Westchester upstate, you are wrong. Ithaca is upstate. The drive was four and a half hours so we trekked across my drive way to the town library (right next door) and picked up an audiobook. I still haven’t fully accepted that audiobooks are no longer on cassette. Cassettes don’t scratch. We should go back to cassettes. Luddite me aside, it was a pretty mellow trip. We got up to Ithaca, hung out with my grandmother for a bit, and then met up with my aunt Ellie, uncle Tom, and one of their two sons, the other faked sick to watch Lord of the Rings, Liam for dinner. Dinner was great but the real excitement came when we started discussing Ellie’s “New” Mustang.

The Biddle Family has a pretty old school view of automobiles. American-made is best. The best American cars are Fords. If you can, get a Mustang.

My grandfather Bill Biddle took this to the extreme, collecting a total of nine hardtop Mustangs that hung out in a barn in Northern Washington state along with his wood canvas and birchbark canoe collection and two woodie station wagons. Over the years, one of the woodies was sold to be used in now iconic In-and-Out Burger commercials and Mustangs came and went but the magic and obsession they fueled stayed strong.

When my grandfather passed away there were four left, one for each of his children. Problem was, only one of his kids lives anywhere near where they were stored. My father, already the proud owner of a more recent gunmetal grey Mustang, decided to sell his (of my grandfather’s four) in order to help finance the repair and transport of Ellie’s across the country from Washington to New York. The car, if it can even be lumped into a category that includes minivans, is gorgeous.

She’s a 1964 1/4 hardtop model whose paint was, when purchased, described as bronze but since the DMV no longer accepts that as a color it is listed as the unfairly gaudy color gold. The interior is almost immaculate with seats covered in tan leather and chrome knobs and buttons that you can see your reflection in. She’s registered as a Historic Vehicle and every few weeks my uncle gets her going and drives around town.

I used to give my dad shit for only buying American cars. I didn’t understand why he was so stubborn about it, why he would never concede that a foreign car could be just as good, if not better than, his much beloved Fords. My mom’s been lobbying for a Subaru, and so it’s likely that in the near future we’ll have a foreigner in our midst. However, after seeing how Ellie looks at the Mustang, how my dad looks at his, and how my grandfather cared for his cars, I am starting to understand the magic of the Mustang. It’s American muscle at it’s best. Each one, built here on our soil, designed to embody spirit, strength, beauty and the American Dream.