There was a different smell to the air. Instead of fertile, pungent soil, and comfortable dry breezes scented with the pine, cedar, and wildflowers I was accustomed to, there was a different sultry odor, one that was seaweed-scented, briny with an overlying fishy odor carried on warm, moist wind. I could hear a flock of birds overhead, calling to one another in a high-pitched cry, all of them white with varying colors of gray and black on their wings.
