For years, I’d barely noticed the fluorescent signs attached to telephone poles this time of year along many side roads in my hometown.

And then, my wife and I decided to downsize — selling the house in which we had raised our children and asking her cousin to build us a smaller home for our twilight years.

Once the plans and financing were set, we were eager for the work to begin when her cousin informed us of a few weeks delay before the excavation could start as “the roads had just been posted.”

Growing up in Maine, I was familiar with the annual appearance of frost heaves in early spring — rippling asphalt like ribbon candy and posing hazards to car suspensions.

But I had not taken note of the late-winter ritual performed by the town’s department of public works, closing many by-roads to vehicles weighing more than 23,000 pounds due to shifting tectonics and geologic frailties.

Now that our transition to our new house is behind us, I still notice, in late winter, the annual posting. This year, in Cape Porpoise, the signs appeared on Ash Wednesday — informing residents and contractors that the roads would be closed to large weight-bearing trucks from Feb. 27 through April 28 — some 60 days.

This shoulder season between winter and spring, with its inherent fragilities, reminds me of past life events that knocked me off my feet — as if the very ground I had been walking upon had shifted without my knowledge.

The poet Kate Light puts it this way: “There comes the strangest moment in your life / when everything you thought breaks free / what you relied upon, as ground-rule and rite / looks upside down from how it used to be.”

And when such moments come, as they inevitably do for all of us, who among us might not welcome a large sign warning others that we are not equipped, temporarily, to manage additional heavy loads.  That we could benefit from a slight pause in life’s traffic, allowing pain or grief or hardship to settle before we resume our journey.

This year, the annual road posting happens to coincide with both the Christian season of Lent and the Muslim month of Ramadan. Like the high holidays in early fall at the start of the Jewish new year, the adherents of these three Abrahamic faiths are encouraged in these holy times to follow certain ancient time-honored rituals to reflect on spiritual matters, atone for past wrong doings, and be more compassionate towards others.

As a child, I was taught that repentance, which is at the heart of the Christian season of Lent, began by having an interior monologue with my conscience — recognizing an error I had made or a hurt that I had caused, having a change of heart, and seeking ways to make amends. I was recently introduced to a different interpretation suggesting that the Greek root of the word “repent” is more active and implies stopping in one’s tracks and walking in another direction.

The same way a truck weighing over 23,000 pounds must re-orient itself this spring when seeing a posted fluorescent sign and take a different route to its final destination.

Whether one practices one of these religions or not, maybe the ancients were right.

Maybe by setting aside certain days each year to pause and consider who we are and where we are going, we better equip ourselves to carry our lives forward, planting seeds for a new course while the world slowly settles around us.

Tom Putnam of Cape Porpoise is a former history teacher and museum director. Early in his career he worked for a federally-funded Upward Bound program, serving students from Lewiston, Lisbon and Oxford Hills high schools.

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