Infinity symbol with live the life you love lettering

Your mother kept the toll gate for forty years and never once rode past it. She said the loop was a kindness: wherever you started, the road would bring you round again, so there was no excuse to leave a thing unfinished. Over the arch she had the masons cut a figure eight lying on its side, with words running round both loops. Half the stonecutters quit before the end, because the letters never seemed to stop. Some read the line as live the life, and some read it as love the life, and she would only shrug and say the road didn't care which.

The winter she died, you found her ledger. Every page recorded a crossing: a bride, a thief, a child sent for bread. Beside each entry she had written one small thing she had liked about the traveller, a habit or the colour of a scarf. You read until the candle guttered, and the last entry, dated that morning, said only: the miller's girl argues like a hawk. Keep the gate open.

In spring you carried a brush and a pot of lamp-black up the ladder. You began with the thin curling word at the top of the arch, slow and careful, then pressed the heavy capitals beneath it, letting the lettering run round the loop until your arms ached. When the miller's daughter came up the road that evening, you stepped out and told her the price of eels was settled. She laughed and asked what you meant. You handed her the brush.