Dear Scent of Paste in a Midwest Schoolroom

It is not nostalgia, this feeling you evoke, it is surety, with you I know every letter in my name, written under a hook in the coat room, the teacher calls it our "cloakroom," my name is there above my blue sweater, and also in the classroom, above a yellow cubby next to a picture of a duck. Scissors here are rounded, boxes of crayons are new, and filled with regiments of primary soldiers, I love their tin woodsman hats, and you, scent of paste in a midwest schoolroom, I hardly know whether to breath you in and then gunk up my finger and lick at your sugarless creamy appeal, or take up my blunt scissors and cut out a brown stick and cut out a green circle and so glue together my first portrait of a tree.