We left the mountains of Madison County late Sunday morning and headed to Asheville, our home of two years.

Such an odd place, Asheville.

When we decided to move to Asheville, a quirky friend of the family warned us that there is a lot of Wiccan activity going on in Asheville and that we might want to rethink our decision. I’m not sure what she was expecting: fields of Wicca-ness that float about the city, turning unsuspecting passersby into pagans, but there is a different atmosphere there. In the heart of the mountains, not more than fifty miles from the rhinestone on the buckle of the Bible belt that is Bob Jones University (here in Greenville), Asheville is a hippy-filled, laid back, liberal island.

The Girl fell asleep during the drive so we drove by the apartment complex where we lived.

Changes — three new buildings, and the whole complex feels, well, cheaper. The old buildings were brick veneer and looked a little classy; new buildings show the cheap way out: one-third brick, two-thirds siding. It’s so crowded and sprawling. It was not the place we moved into almost four years ago.

We headed downtown when the Girl woke up, doing a little window shopping on the way. “I want some!” L cried when we saw slab of fudge and explained to her just what it was. For a girl who didn’t like sweets for a very long time, she has grown positively obsessive about them.

Our time in Asheville was not meant to be idle sight seeing. We had a goal: buy a apartment-warming/wedding gift for dear friends of ours in Warsaw. We went to the galleries in the Grove Arcade.

The building never ceases to fascinate: built in 1924-29 by Edwin Wiley Grove, who also built the Grove Park Inn. It was a bustling little place until the Second World War, when everyone was evicted and the building converted to wartime use. In the 1970’s it served as the National Climatic Data Center. When my family would visit Asheville in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, the building was vacant but alluring. It reopened in 2002, filled with shops and restaurants.

Unfortunately, said shops had nothing for us, and we already had lunch plans, so the restaurants went unnoticed. (I don’t think we ever ate there in our two years in Asheville, in fact.)

We went to the Kress Emperium, where we attempted to sell our photos. We had been hoping to make enough money eventually to buy a digital SLR. Our lack of sales and the monthly rent turned opportunity into irony: we simple lost enough money to buy a digital SLR. Still, it’s better to have tried and failed than never to have tried at all.

We went to Woolworth Walk, which, as it sounds, is an old Woolworth store converted into galleries. Still, nothing. In the end, K had a brilliant idea, but it required being in Greenville.

Yet all was not lost: we got an old fashioned milkshake at Woolworth Walk; we got our fill of lesbians (of which Asheville has an enormous population; maybe that’s what the Wicca force fields do!); and the Girl got to run about a bit.