I am not yet in Spain, so today’s sit spot is full of familiarity – a green, rocky alcove of the park I grew up in (Sacramento’s Land Park, but my friends and I have nicknamed this spot “The Cove”). I have innumerable memories here: playing soccer when I was little, my first kiss, a surprise birthday party my friends threw for me, a breakup, reading Anna Karenina for the first time, etc.. It’s strange to revel in these moments past, knowing that in merely 2 days I will be not in the familiarity of The Cove, but in a place where everything is foreign.

No one else is here with me; there are few sounds. There is the distant whirring of cars on the street – like the rushing of a mechanical stream. I lament how Land Park has become more and more car-centric over the years. Closer, there is the occasional soft cawing of a bird, invisible to me. My ears grow bored with the emptiness, and I find myself looking at the cloudless, dusky sky. Today’s sunset will not be colorful, it is clear. Although I suppose I can’t complain after weeks of wonderfully sunny California winter days. The trees are all a similar sort of olive/dark green, but they drastically vary in height. I focus my attention on that which is closer to me. A rock to my left, for one. It’s unremarkable, a generic gray. Large. I look more closely and notice relatively large, coarse grains of grey and black. Granite! (Thanks GEOS 102). I touch it and it feels exactly how I’d expect it to feel; or perhaps I’ve touched it so many times in the past that I already know how it feels. I don’t know to what extent The Cove’s familiarity has invaded my senses.

Objectively, there’s not much to notice, although I like this exercise of breaking down this ordinary space into detailed fragments. It’s strange for me to come here and so intricately focus on the physical, when this spot inspires such nostalgia, a grand myriad of emotions. How different it will be next time, when I write not from a place of familiarity and nostalgia but of newness and excitement!