Good girls go to heaven...

I was just re-reading Bill Wittle's essay about Columbia's last flight, and this bit reminded me of your story.

We don't call industrial-sized air conditioning units 'she.' Well, most of us don't anyway. We don't refer to buildings this way very often, or to generators or dumpsters.

But vehicles, they are different somehow. If you do not believe it is possible to love an inanimate object, then you do not know too many teenage boys and their first cars. Ships have always been she. Airplanes, too. And I don't think this is so hard to figure out, because there is something about a machine that takes us places, something alive and magical. Many foreign observers of America simply cannot comprehend our love of automobiles, but that is because they have never had to face crossing Texas. There is a rite of passage for everyone in the US, and that is your first teenage road trip. And no matter what kind of piece of crap you may be driving when you take that trip, that machine is serving you up pure, unrefined freedom and it's so delirious and liberating that it makes your head spin, and carves the songs you heard during those glorious hours into that part of your brain that makes you cry when you hear them again twenty and forty and sixty years later.

So yeah. Rose knows. Maybe she got to Florida a time or two, and helped someone find their way home on a cold morning.