"Sign, sign, everywhere a sign . . ."

When we first moved to the clear cut, there weren't any road names in Pulpwood County, just state route numbers -- 633, 631, 665, etc. -- boring as all shit, hard to remember, and confusing. Not only did the same numbers sometimes hop, dog-leg, and generally meander about the countryside, but they were reused for completely different, unconnected roads in practically every other county in the Commonwealth, creating . . . confusion!

Enter E-911.

Well, enter the concept, anyway. We were promised and taxed for E-911 service from the time we arrived, 11 years ago, but the road names and house numbers? Finally showed up maybe a year and a half ago. And, to add insult, an awful lot of the road names, like their numeric predecessors, are, once again, the same as the names of completely unrelated roads in neighboring counties. (It's as if the contractor Pulpwood hired for the job had done all the surrounding counties as well, and used the same bucket o' names wherever they went . . . hey!)

I said "a lot," and indeed, a lot are repeaters, but not all, because some people* got to write in names for their roads. Thus we have "One Horse," which makes me smile, "Winfrey Inez," which still makes me scratch my wooden head in wonderment, and . . .


. . . which makes my inner pre-adolescent giggle every time I see it. (That's at least 14 times a week. Don't ask.)

There's one, though, that, while I've never known the real reason behind it, has taken on a whole new meaning since Jan. 20, 2009:



*(Nobody asked us, so ours is one of the plain vanilla, dime-a-dozen, cookie cutter variety. Except there's a church down the road that shares the name, and that church has been there for way longer than the sign! Maybe folks in these parts are just prone to redundancy.)