'Hard Border Soft Border NO BORDER' reads the sign on the outskirts of Aughnacloy, a village where Tyrone meets Monaghan, the Irish Republic meets Northern Ireland, and the European Union will meet an area outside the EU single market in just two months' time.
here are similar slogans at crossing points all along the 500km of the Border. I passed the sign twice this week but many people go by it daily - criss-crossing North and south for work or because it's their natural hinterland.
Often, I've stopped to study these banners, which are intended as a warning and not a plea. This week, they took on added impact in the aftermath of a car bomb explosion in Derry and other evidence of renewed paramilitary activity.
Before the Good Friday Agreement, when I drove through Aughnacloy to reach my hometown of Omagh, I had to go across a Border that bristled. There were listening posts, barbed wire barricades and helicopters buzzing overhead, while soldiers with rifles stopped all vehicles, insisting on identification and asking questions about your intended journey.
They held up people for as long as they chose, searching cars, vans, buses and occupants. You had to get out if they told you to. You had to submit to a body search. Motors with young men in them were particular targets but everyone was affected to some extent. You never knew how long a journey might take. And it wasn't a case simply of being inconvenienced - it was frightening, stressful and humiliating. That's just how it was. Like it or lump it.
Last Thursday, making my way without incident through Aughnacloy, I wondered how many more uninterrupted journeys I can count on - how much longer we can bank on the invisible Border that's been our friend for the past 20 years. The no-border Border, facilitated by Ireland and the UK's common membership of the European Union, has improved co-operation and integration on this island.
Much focus has been placed on the difficulties which hauliers will experience. But they aren't the only ones. Consider the tourism industry - coaches regularly take holidaymakers from Dublin to the Giant's Causeway or Belfast's Titanic Quarter, and vice-versa. Imagine if they have to stop for passport and visa checks - those trips over the Border will be sliced out of itineraries.
But that's the prospect because the Brexit process has entered a volatile phase and a hard Border looks increasingly likely. It won't only mean crossing delays, unfortunately, but the resumption of violence. And innocent people will be injured or killed.
PSNI chiefs have said the Border will need to be policed 24-7, acknowledging it will act as a target, while there is talk of extra gardaí being drafted in.
Yesterday, the Taoiseach went further and raised the prospect of soldiers back at the Border, according to a report from Davos. Not just customs checkpoints, then, but heavily armed ones.
In a worst-case scenario, a hard Border could mean "people in uniform and it may involve the need, for example, for cameras, physical infrastructure, possibly a police presence, or an army presence to back it up", Leo Varadkar said in a Bloomberg Television interview at the World Economic Forum.
British soldiers at the Border are probable, in my view. Members of the unionist political community, especially DUP voices, will press for military support at the first spark of trouble. They were reluctant to see the soldiers leave in 2007 and resisted earlier attempts to pull them out.
It was nine years after the Good Friday Agreement before British troops left, ending Operation Banner, the longest engagement in British military history. When soldiers were first deployed in 1969, they were expected to stay for just six months.
PSNI chiefs say they don't want a sense of fear or unease to creep back. But people remember the bad old days - it's not dim and distant history.
People recall the watch-tower architecture of partition, those heavily armed checkpoints, along with the British army spiking or cratering unapproved roads and blowing up bridges across the Border. Locals would fill in the holes and try to keep the roads open, and the army would return and decommission them again. It caused enormous ill-feeling locally.
Mr Varadkar does not want to earn a place in the history books as the Taoiseach who imposed a harder Border, yet he'll have no choice but to protect the single market if Britain crashes out of the EU. Checks at ports and airports won't be sufficient.
In the final analysis, it doesn't matter whether it's the EU telling Ireland to erect infrastructure at the Border or if it's Britain which blinks first and starts putting up the apparatus of division. It's ordinary, decent citizens who'll suffer, especially in the Border communities. Just as they'll be disadvantaged economically in Britain.
Leaving the EU is every member country's democratic right but it's best if it has an exit plan. Britain doesn't. Nor was Ireland considered during those Brexit fantasies.
Even during these past two-and-a-half years of magical thinking since the vote, when reality has lagged a slow second behind dreams of taking back control, Ireland has barely figured to Britain - except as an irritant.
It has the potential to cause untold chaos. This week, we have seen Government ministers dance on the head of a pin as they attempt to avoid stating the obvious: there'll be a hard Border.
But others are admitting it. In the event of no deal, "I think it's pretty obvious you'll have a hard Border", the European Commission's chief spokesperson Margaritis Schinas said a few days ago.
In Westminster, there's been talk but little by way of action again this week. MPs are to vote on an amended version of Theresa May's withdrawal agreement on Tuesday, and are putting forward a range of amendments for consideration, including a time-limited backstop.
There is no doubt but that Ireland will suffer if the UK has a disorderly exit - the Central Bank is warning a no-deal Brexit could reduce the Irish economy's growth rate by up to 4pc this year - yet we cannot give the UK what Brexit ultras want. If it's a cliff-face Brexit, there will be no transition period and that's damaging for everyone. But a temporary insurance policy is no safety net at all.
Finally, we've grown so familiar with seamless cross-border dealings that any return to a hard Border injures all of us. Such a prospect is a diversion off the road to normality travelled by the nationalist and unionist peoples of this island for the past two decades.
But the detour arrows off the Normal Life Highway are ready to go up on March 29. Who knows where they might lead?
