Retired traffic cones are found chiefly in the back corners of municipal yards, propped in the beds of pickup trucks, or reassigned, without ceremony, to hold open a fire door in July. The specimen under study here was recovered from behind a car wash, faded from safety orange to the color of a peach left too long in a bowl. Fieldwork suggests the retired cone rarely dies; it is simply demoted. One in service directs six lanes of traffic around a sinkhole with a kind of stoic, blinking authority. One in retirement holds a garden hose coiled against a fence, or props open a screen door for a cat that has already gone inside.
The reflective collar, once its badge of office, has usually gone gray with grime by the time of decommission, though it will still throw back a flash of headlight if you catch it right, a reflex it never quite loses. Weight distribution is telling: the wide rubber base, designed to survive a bumper at low speed, now serves mainly to keep it from blowing into the neighbor's yard. Ask any groundskeeper and he will tell you that a cone never really retires so much as it is quietly promoted to furniture. Keep three around; you will find a use for all of them by October.