Sunny days on the 800-meter track, I count on seeing the tall, sun-bleached, woodpeckered pine, long dead but still standing, and the black crows that land upon its brittle limbs and call to one another, and just as swiftly take flight again in a black wash of silent lift, and I pause on the sandy track and watch, as if Edgar Allan Poe’s apostles watched from the skeletal bough, high under this Spring cerulean sky, to see if I noticed. I did. It’s the small things–that aren’t.