Monday, March 3, 2014

The Gate











Today's riveting topic has to do with lanes.














Or driveways.














Specifically, the entrance to a driveway or lane.













Which my friend from high school













always called the gate.







(She'd call the entrance to this driveway a gate, even though it's not gated
and you can barely see the driveway--or the deserted house.)






















It was a gate whether or not an actual gate existed.










My high school basketball teammate LaRue (aka Smith, real name Tammy LaRue Smith) lived down the way from me and occasionally needed a ride home from practice.  She lived along Route 198 just around the bend in the road between Mathews Chapel United Methodist Church and Ebenezer Baptist Church.  (She now lives in Richmond, but every time I go by her house--which is between five and fifteen times a week--I think of her.)

Her driveway had no gate or fence; in fact, there was barely a driveway.  There was just enough space to pull in and back out onto Route 198.

No matter.

Each and every time I took her home, she said, "Vogel.  Drop me off at the gate."

Well, she meant drop her off at the end of the driveway and keep on going, but I had to pull completely into her driveway to turn around and go back in the other direction. Every time.  So there was no dropping off except into her front yard--after pulling well past what she would consider "the gate."

No matter.

She still insisted I drop her off at the gate.

These pictures were taken in the Mobjack/Bohannon/North area of the county, where there are many long driveways with very pretty gates.  I tell this story because I don't know anyone in my midst these days who equates the end of a driveway with a gate, whether it has one or not.  I find it all fascinating.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In unrelated news, the Mathews boys are all done with their season after losing to Surry Friday night at Lancaster.  Although it was a tough loss, they had a tremendous season.  I had fun at the game even if we didn't walk away victorious.  On Saturday, Daughter and I spent several hours at the Intermediate School (aka Thomas Hunter) watching rec league basketball.  Daughter kept stats for my friend Alda's daughter's game, which was great fun to watch.

In still more unrelated news, yesterday's temperatures reached the 70s, but today we're under a winter storm warning.



2 comments:

Kay L. Davies said...

I enjoy your blog as much for the irrelevancies as for the facts, and I always love the photos. Beautiful piece of world you have there, but what's with the weather? Here, winter is very very cold, and summer is very very hot but with a chance of snow.
Hi to all.
K

Meg McCormick said...

ONe house on our street has an actual gate. The rest of us have driveways, not lanes. My grandma had a lane, and so did my aunt/uncle and my other grandma, who shared a lane. I'm not sure I could define the difference between a lane and a driveway from where I grew up. But we definitely didn't call their entrances GATES.