Gary V. Powell, Author

It gets cold this time of year, even in North Carolina. Not the kind of cold I remember growing up in Indiana, but cold enough. It gets damp, not that it rains, because it's stopped raining here, but damp enough to make your joints hurt. It's the kind of cold and damp that wants a fire.

We burned the last of the half cord we bought a couple of years ago over the Thanksgiving holiday. It was good wood, cured and hard. It burned slow and reduced to hot coals. It warmed us on many a night.

My wife, Mary, reconnoitered and found a spot for wood up in Mooresville. Saturday morning we borrowed our neighbor Bob's pick-up and headed up. We agreed to split a truck load with Bob.

We found the spot on the northside of town, adjacent to the rail road track and across the street from the old Mooresville Lanes, which  has recently been supplanted by the new lanes on the west side of town, and Bucky's Diner, which recently received a face lift.

Mooresville is that kind of town. Everything that was old is being replaced with the new, because Mooresville is a city on the move. Lowe's has moved its headquarters into town. NASCAR has a large presence here. Several large housing developments have sprung up, the downtown has been almost entirely renovated, warehouses replaced with new restaurants, new office spaces, new boutiques. Out by the lake, The Pointe offers multi-million dollar homes to executives, crew chiefs, and drivers.

But Neil Moore doesn't care about that.

We pulled up as Neil and his young associate were helping another customer load another pick-up. We pulled around and parked next to the sad, shingled little house. Through the window I spied an old woman in a nightgown. Out back. huge trunks and stumps of trees were piled high. Out front, the wood had been split and chopped into huge piles. I asked the men loading the pick-up who I needed to see about buying some wood. The customer pointed to an old man in dirty clothes.

He had thin white hair and white whiskers growing in long strands on his cheeks. His pale blue eyes looked right through me. He walked and worked with a slump. I guessed him to be close to eighty years old. His associate wore a full white beard, had the same piercing blue eyes, and was pushing sixty.

Neil showed us where to park. He told us he'd charge $20 for a row of wood piled into Bob's truck. He estimated we could get four rows in there. I told him I was hoping for half a cord. He looked right through me and asked if I knew how much wood a half cord was. He wasn't interested in my answer.

Neil and his son helped me and my wife and son load up. He got a kick out of Reilly's efforts. When the truck was full, he asked for only $60, $15 a row, because Bob's truck bed was a few inches short of five feet across. Mary asked him if he'd take a check. He said sure. He said he also took hugs from pretty women. Mary laughed at that and Neil knew he had a listener.

"Where ya'll from," he wanted to know.

"Cornelius," I told him.

But he knew better. "Where you from before that?"

We explained we were from Chicago and Indiana. We told him we'd moved around a bit, before settling down here. He told Mary he'd moved 58 times in his life. He told her he'd lived in Illinois for a while. He said his longest move was from Seattle to Florida. I asked whereabouts in Illinois. He said Camp Ellis outside of Peoria. He was assigned there during World war II after telling the Army he couldn't be a bombardier on a B-17, because he wanted to shoot, not be shot at. The Army made him a trainer--he trained the boys who drove the amphibious troop movers that took the beaches at Normandy.

He said the hardest thing in life was that he'd  expected to die, but he'd never expected to go blind. He sees the peripherals, but nothing when he looks right at you. His chin trembled when he talked about losing his sight. He confided in Mary that his uncle was John Moore, the man for whom Mooresville is named. I figured Neil had experienced some things in his life.

I said it was time for us to go. Neil said come back and get wood any time we needed it. He said we could just get it, we could settle up later. He didn't ask our name. He said he trusted everyone any more. He said he didn't care, he just trusted everyone.

As we pulled out, I heard his son say it felt like time for a drink. After all, it was nearly noon.