The neighborhood is especially vibrant this particular morning of this particular day... the one which I've selected to be my final one residing within these old plaster crumbling walls and cracked, permanently clouded windows. I took the short walk to that epicenter of Woodfinian culture, "The Hot Spot" for my just waking up five cent coffee. It's one of those little stores where the police scanner is always on, there's always some drama being related by the local folk, and never a shortage of wit and banter from the bobbing grey head behind the counter. I'll miss this little walk, three minutes of my day in transit in my neck of the woods, where life goes on around me and I frequently forget to notice.

The colors on the fire hydrant... the way the Latinos have painted their mailbox... the constancy of the yard around the little brown trailer... these are things that I've noticed but never entirely appreciated. Today it seemed as if all were dancing beyond their skins for my eyes to notice their common, easy to miss qualities. And all the while, on my little groggy jaunt for nickel coffee, as I planned a day of packing boxes, there was music.

"Doc," as he is known, is this little hunched old man who wears a safety orange vest and cap, with a smile broader than the French Broad River, who walks up and down the road collecting cans and whatever wanton trash crosses his path. He especially likes the car wash down the street, and is always enmeshed in some inscrutable commerce. This morning, minutes ago, "Doc" had a harmonica, and played it in short bursts of three notes, always ending in a high, happy tone, much like the yellow warblers that darted through the wet leaves that caught sunshine and put a spell on it. Ta-dah-da! Ta-dah-da! If Doc's smile were any bigger he would swallow the sounds.

I make a practice when in the car to honk the horn a wave at Doc, because no one else seems to and just in case this man with the goat voice might just happen to be God. I remember one day last summer, I drove by and he was fumbling with a black broken umbrella by the side of the road. It looked like he had caught this giant, bent bat and it was feebly flexing it's tattered wings against him. That was heading one way, and returning south down the road this time he had a bright, multicolored perfectly round bumpershoot (as my grandmother calls them) and was twirling it in ecstasy, again with that world swallowing smile through ancient reddened skin and thick glasses. Had he transformed the broken blackness into this circus of spinning colors? Transubstantiation in action?

Incidentally, I'm told that the moniker of "Doc" might be derived from an orange sign that he used to wear around his neck. DOC. Department of Corrections, which will not be too far rom my new home, just a few miles down river. They say he has more money than everyone in Woodfin put together, and that you'll see his brother, a skinny little fella who runs the magic tricks shop up the road, occasionally running down the road with a wheelbarrow.

I will miss these fun collisions of stimuli of this old place, but the new one offers much promise. The other day, one of the neighbor's roosters was up in a tree by my future bedroom window, and he seemed to do this little dance (not the 'chicken dance,' thank you) as he pondered higher branches of the pine that dwarfs my new home on Old Home Road. Could that tree be Yggdrasil, the world tree? Wherever I live, I try to activate the mythology of the place, so I can attempt to understand just what it's trying to say. Do I always hear it? No. But the land is a language of sorts, and it's always talking; if we do anything at all in this life we should take a moment to listen as we awaken into it, even if all we hear is cat scratching at the door and the distant sweetness of a harmonica played by God.