Dear Reader, I have been fascinated with road signs for years. I hope you enjoy this departure from the usual fare:

While visiting our kids in Virginia, we went to the library one day and saw a sign on the short entrance road that said, “Hidden Driveways.” We looked around and couldn’t see any driveways, and then smiled as it hit us both at the same time. We wouldn’t see them, would we?

It became a little joke, watch for hidden driveways, but I started looking for them for real and spotted one six months later from our patio on a September evening, a faint left-hand diagonal loop across the bottom of a cumulus, briefly visible where pink and blue met.

Once I knew they really existed, I remembered one from my childhood. There was a high redwood fence that ran along the side of the garage of the house in Wichita where I grew up, the house where my father’s grandmother had lived and died before we moved in and stacked our long years on top of hers.

Even as a skinny kid I had to turn sideways to squeeze along the space between the garage wall and the fence, pushing my way through the overgrown honeysuckle and Virginia creepers. There was one spot where the firmness of the fence disappeared beneath the vines; you could stick your arm through the vines and the fence wasn’t there. I never tried to fight my way in—I was usually on some mission, and the narrow grasping of the place always had me too creeped out to do anything other than get through as fast as possible.

Then Lucia realized that there was another hidden driveway in the house of her childhood, the old rambling house on Ward Parkway in Kansas City where she and her dad and sister lived. She had the third floor pretty much to herself and there was one small room beneath the eaves with pink roses in the wallpaper and a low hidey-hole, and way at the back, behind where she kept her dolls in a tumbled pile, the wall was insubstantial. She remembered this in a dream.

Hidden driveways and secret exits are especially appealing to us where we are now, 67 and 71. We could probably enter the one in the cloud if we became buoyant enough, jettisoned enough baggage, swapped some ego for whoopsies. I would have to learn to dance the boogaloo and orange uptown twist, the long skirt dervish and the jiggle hop. Lucia could show me.

Come to think of it, we don’t even have to look for them. After all, we created the modern universe. When we were children in different cities, different years, we drew it on our bedroom walls with crayons. I used ecru and you used chartreuse, and we put our pudgy little fingers on the universe and pulled it out. That’s how it happened, how the old two-dimensional universe unflattened, we pulled it out together at the same time in different cities and different years. If we could do that, don’t you think a little thing like a hidden driveway would be a piece of cake?

So when we’re ready, maybe twenty years from now, we’ll share a simple dinner to center and blend our creative juices: vichyssoise, a cold asparagus salad, lobster bisque, and a cold bottle of Prosecco. Then we’ll put our fingers together on the back of the old shed at the end of our driveway in Albuquerque and pull together, whoosh, and open a hidden driveway. We’ll jump into our green 1926 Bugatti open tourer, Lucia will toss a pink silk scarf around her neck and I will don my Harris tweed driving cap, and we will roar through, listening to Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem.”

And who knows, maybe we’ll slash a loop across an evening cumulus where the blue and pink meet and glide on up to a zeppelin tethered deep in the sky, or slip into a little yellow farmhouse that waits for us patiently in the Kansas Flint Hills, or perhaps we’ll just jam the gas pedal to the floor and scream with the rush as we tear a new hole in the universe.

Do Not Stop in Box

said the sign over the street just before a railroad crossing. Is it just a sign or something more? I am suspicious, given our recent discovery of the “Hidden Driveways” sign and everything to which it led. I mull over other signs we have passed that also seem heavy with meaning, “Gusty Winds May Exist,” “Limited Visibility Ahead, ““Loose Gravel.” Maybe we should disobey the sign and stop.

We didn’t, we obeyed the sign and drove through the box; one of the reasons we moved to New Mexico, after all, was to get out of the box. But what if we had stopped?

I was tempted, it piqued my oppositional nature, but I’m glad we didn’t. Not after the hidden driveways thing. We just passed it by, moved on through, eyed the sign with curiosity in our mirrors, and carried the unanswered question on down the road.