As we prepare to put our old house on the market, I’ve been busy eradicating all the signs from doors and walls.

Yes, you read that right.

My old house has signs pasted in various places all over.

When my son was small he adored traffic signs, and we made regular trips to educational stores where they were sold in boxes of various sizes. He would have jumped onto this custom signs website in a hot minute, and had the time of his life. As he got older and more artistically inclined, he made up his own signs, and stuck them to doors jambs, table legs, cupboards – all the lower-down places that were close to his line of vision and in the roadways for his (also homemade) cars.

Even though my son has been grown and gone for almost 15 years, I never had the heart to take down all of his signs. They were such a neat reminder of the way he was as a little boy – creative and compulsive all at the same time.

I guess we all have signs that point to the things we’re most interested in, things in our homes that scream out our interests and obsessions. It doesn’t take visitors to my house very long to notice that I’m a book nerd – the signs are everywhere, not only in stacks of books piled on tables, but in paintings of women reading that adorn the walls and the ceiling high shelves that line every corner.

Signs like these are so indicative of who we are, so evocative of memories of times gone by.

So even though the actual signs may soon be gone from the doors and walls, I won’t soon forget what they stood for.