When it's time to move out of Fidelity Court and on to bigger (or smaller) places, I'm going to miss the daily bike ride down the Carrboro bike path. In particular, the three dogs -- all permanent behind-the-fence fixtures -- that reside in the junkyard will be hard to replace as early morning entertainers.

Today, like most, I heard the barking before I could see which mongrel was to blame for the racket. As I glided by the first half of the junkyard, it became clear that the fuzzy, furry brown dog wasn't responsible -- it was sitting back on its haunches staring at the back end of the lopsidedly kaput white pickup truck about 10 yards away.

Passing by the small shed (which pretty much marks the halfway point of the football-sized scrapyard) I caught a blur of yapping black and white. Since my eyes aren't so hot, I wasn't sure what it was I was looking at, so it took me a couple of seconds to figure out the scene. (Generally, I'm accustomed to seeing one all white canine standing on top of a trailer hitch while its black companion perches on top of its own, neighboring dog house.)

When my eyes dissolved the initial mess, I saw that the black mutt's butt was toward me, the rest of the dog rising up off its hindlegs into the air. But it turned out it wasn't what I first thought. The white dog was, indeed, underneathe, but it was aligned perpendicular to its shaggy friend, propping up his (or her) black, barking buddy. Basically, if one had had an aerial view of the two beasts, that person would have seen a doggy X -- an italic canine cross with one white and one black crossbeam.

Both dogs remained happily (barking) in that position as I passed them by, and I kept looking back, maintaining the pretzel-like posture on my mountain bike for a good long minute, before deciding it was best to look out for myself and oncoming traffic.