Aspie Girls

When I was a child (around the age of 5 or 6), I used to get worked upover the "little things". I can recall driving out through rural Indiana with my mother en route to visit my aunt. Having grown up primarily in the city; these narrow two lane highways seemed a bit foreboding to me. I used to struggle to keep count of the lines in the center of the road and was perplexed as to their meaning. Why a double yellow line? Why a dashed yellow line? Why only dashed on one side or the other? It was all very intriguing and I really dug in to study the possibilities. However, one bit of rural signage in particular just drove me to distraction! It was the "no passing zone" signs that appear along the side of these rural highway systems. I knew that road signs were there to advise travelers of the rules of the road, but being small and not understanding the true meaning of such signage, I was left to ponder how these "no passing" signs could ever be obeyed.  In my minds eye I was imagining the world in all of its roundness spinning someplace out in space. Protruding out from the side of our planet was a huge yellow sign dawning the words "no passing". "How does this signwork?", I would puzzle. It seemed to be an obstacle to our travels to visit my aunt and it really bothered me a great deal that my mother would just casually pass the thing without even the slightest mentionof the obvious "rule breaking" she was engaged in. If one were to drivet o the left or right of the sign they would be passing it. If they were to fly over the sign they would be passing it. In fact, one could drive the entire circumference of the planet and still have to pass the sign to arrive at their final destination. It made me uneasy to think that such signs dotted the landscape with a relatively high frequency. What a hindrance to travel!! How was anyone expected to travel about with all of these signs that could not be passed? Being like so many Aspie children, I never bothered to ask my mother about the obvious problems arising from these signs. It was so obvious that the rule was to not pass them; I didn't have to ask for clarification. Instead, I just sat and puzzled over them until some time around the age of about 14 or 15. At this time, I began to study traffic rules in preparation for mydriver's education course at school. It was then that I first realized the true meaning of the elusive "no passing zone" signs. How stupid I felt when I realized that it wasn't the sign, but the other vehicles on the road that were not to be passed!!