The whole ordeal began innocently enough. My dad had finally decided to tackle his ancient detached garage—a structure he hadn’t touched in any meaningful way since I was in middle school, sometime around the early 2000s. It wasn’t just cluttered; it was a mausoleum of forgotten domestic projects and expired technologies. He had enlisted me…

The place smelled faintly of stale motor oil, damp cardboard, and the metallic tang of forgotten ambition. It was packed wall-to-wall with relics: a lawnmower from the 90s, boxes labeled with my baby pictures, a precarious stack of broken furniture, and random metal parts that looked either like spaceship remnants or components for a medieval torture device. It was the classic “Dad Archive,” where every object had a story but was too covered in grime to tell it. We worked slowly, methodically sorting through a back shelf near a perpetually dirty window, tossing rusty screws into one pile and half-empty cans of paint into another.