New things to see

 Bits of the landscape are so familiar

Not mountains, but coulee's. Just tall enough to make me feel at ease.

A childhood in Vermont, a young adult hood in New Hampshire. Both rural states.

 The rock here is what throws me. I am accustomed to granite. Marble. Speckled and resolute. Stone of the ice ages.

That is not this rock. This rock is sandstone, crumbly. Full of fossils and older than time memories of riverbeds long gone.

 The smell is familiar.

Hay, not yet cut, at its high summer sweetness.

The cicadas sing constantly.

Swallows dart and weave.

I feel like I am ten years old and sent out to gather cucumbers. Lifting up cool spikey leaves, I find garter snakes staring back at me.

That smell is this smell.

And then I see the absurd.

Two adults, dressed as Thing 1 and Thing 2, biking down the sidewalk.

I giggle and snap a picture.