I recently moved from one apartment to another, and now I am between cars. The old Chevrolet Lumina went to Valhalla (via tow truck rather than Brunnhilde and her horse).

Another way of putting it would be that the old “Lumina” has lost it “shine” and “glows” no more, a glow much deeper than skin (or paint) depth.

My cable not yet being hooked up, I decided to walk to a Sunrise station on Danville’s nearby Westover Drive to buy a newspaper. Westover Drive is laid out from East to West (or West to East); and since it was morning and Sunrise was the goal of my eastward trek, I was also walking toward nature’s “sunrise.”

It was an unusually warm morning for January, making me think of how each season “seesaws” from the season prior, kind of like “A Little Bit Country, A little Bit Rock n’ Roll,” but performed as a solo. Such a warm “teeter-tottering” in Winter made me wonder about an “oscillation” encompassing the previous Summer.

There not being a sidewalk in the city’s “hinterlands,” the designated bicycle section of the street made a good pedestrian path; and as luck would have it, I met no bikers.

That path is marked by stylized images of “biker-on- bike” every few hundred feet or so. As far as the street’s main purpose is concerned, it would be silly and superfluous to have a similarly-stylized image of “car-with- driver” along the road’s main width.

On my way, I saw curbside fragments of fraser firs, like courtroom evidential exhibits of post-Christmas “struggles” between Christmas tree and garbage man, garbage man winning out.

In my youth, such “evidence” would have consisted of cedar needles and cedar berries leaving a trail to the woods behind our house on the Old Concord Road. In a paraphrase: “From the woods, those trees came; and to the woods they returned”(nowadays, some go to rivers, lakes, and ponds to make homes for fish).

I passed by yards whose permanent trees (permanent as “permanent” can be) were still laden with outside Christmas ornaments. There were plastic icicles, the length of, and even wider than, some carrots. At farther distance, these appeared delicate and filamentary. I suddenly thought of how big George Washington’s sculpted nose at Mt. Rushmore must be in order to appear normal from hundreds of yards away.

I decided to go past Sunrise, not on to noon, but to Food Lion, as it was just a little farther. Where I previously lived, there was also a Food Lion within walking distance. There are new communities being designed for grocery stores, drug stores, schools, etc. to be within walking distance. I must now take the opportunity to publicly thank Food Lion for making the world (well, at least great portions of the Southeast) “Food Lion accessible.”

Thinking of Food Lion just now, I thought of the old Food Lion store in the 300 block of East Innes. If I were to drive that block and see it there now, I would know I had see-sawed backwardly though a worm hole in time.

On my westward way home while on the opposite side of the street (I know the proper safety rules for walking down a street), I passed a large box awaiting the trash man. It was a child’s “Bake Kitchen.” My daughter Rachel had an “Easy Bake Oven” when she was a little girl. Just as with her oven, I wondered if each appliance of that modern day “bake kitchen” was powered by a low-watt bulb; but modern bulbs might not have enough warmth (seemingly, a world-wide lack of “warmth” nowadays, except for the “global” kind).

Reaching home, and later reflecting on my “ambulatory” thoughts, I realized that like the seasons, my mind had ridden a seesaw from “my present” to “my past,” and back again.