By Percival Hartwick, Grounds and Parking Correspondent

SOUTH ELDERMERE — The last visible stripe in the parking lot of Briar Creek Fellowship disappeared sometime during the winter of 2014. Church records do not say exactly when. One trustee remembers seeing a faint white line near the dumpster that February. By Easter, it was gone.

Nobody noticed, because nobody needed it.

Every Sunday morning, the regulars at Briar Creek pull onto the blank gray lot and slide into the exact spaces they have parked in for decades, perfectly straight and perfectly spaced, guided by nothing but muscle memory and a deep personal sense of where their space begins.

"Mine is the fourth one from the light pole, two over from the Kowalskis," said usher Norbert Feeney, 74, standing proudly beside his sedan, which was parked at a flawless right angle to nothing at all. "I don't need paint. I need the light pole and the Kowalskis. And the Kowalskis have never missed a Sunday."

According to a hand-drawn map kept in the church office, the lot still contains 84 spaces, two handicap spots, one space marked "PASTOR" and one reserved for Dale Ostermeyer, a former deacon who moved to Tucson in 2009. Members continue to leave Ostermeyer's spot open out of respect. Several say they would feel it.

The system works well for everyone except visitors, who arrive to find a wide, featureless slab of asphalt and a dozen cars arranged in a pattern only the congregation can see.

"I parked in what looked like an open area by the side door," said first-time guest Renata Solberg, 39. "A very kind older woman came over and explained that I was in the Hutchinsons' spot, the Hutchinsons' overflow spot, and about a third of the fire lane. Then she gave me a muffin."

The greeting team now posts a volunteer in the lot each week to direct visitors to what members call "the new-people area," a corner near the mailbox that has no assigned history and therefore belongs to no one.

The trustees first proposed restriping the lot in 2016. The proposal went to the Buildings and Grounds Committee, which spent most of 2017 debating whether the new spaces should match the old ones exactly or be "updated to modern widths." A compromise plan was approved in 2019, tabled in 2020, and approved again in 2023, contingent on the church first finding the original paint color, which members describe as "a warm white, not a cold white."

The lot was finally restriped on a Saturday in September. The crew, working from a tape measure rather than the hand-drawn map, laid the new lines about two feet to the left of where the congregation believes they belong.

The following Sunday, every regular at Briar Creek parked in their usual spot, straddling a fresh white line with total confidence.

"The paint is wrong," Feeney said. "We'll give it about ten years. It'll fade."

At press time, the committee had voted to leave the new lines alone, and a visitor had parked neatly inside one of them, causing three members to circle the lot twice before quietly parking in the new-people area.