Writes a 57-year-old Indianapolis woman, one of many individuals quoted in "Welcome to Our Museum of Smells" (NYT)("We asked New York Times readers what smells they would archive in their own smell museums, what scents are so alive for them that they have become part of them").
The best ones all seem to be older women talking about memories of men they loved.
There's: "When I was growing up, my dad owned a concrete business. To this day, the smell of newly poured concrete at a construction site stops me in my tracks and I think he must be somewhere nearby."
And: "My late husband had a particular scent, and it was strongest after he had been exercising, particularly under his left armpit. There was a smokiness to it, certainly, but also a pleasant tang, almost a citrus-like astringency, and I couldn’t get enough of it. My one word for it is 'raunchious,' which isn’t a real word, but I didn’t want to say 'raunchiness' as what I’m trying to get at is a combo of the words 'raunchy' and 'delicious.'"
My grandfather died when I was two. I have no visual memories of him except from photos I've seen. One day as an adult, I was talking with my mother, and I said, "I don't know why but the smell of leather and peppermint make me feel safe." She started to cry. "When you were a baby, my father used to pretend to steal you by putting you inside his leather jacket. He always kept peppermint candies in the inside pocket."
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99 comments:
And you, Althouse? Do you have a pre-anosmia smell that you fondly remember/miss?
When I recently moved back to my hometown I was shocked to realize that a smell I'd loved best, which I associated with the ocean, was actually from here. Desert sand in humidity -- moist desert -- is sublime.
Works both ways. For me it’s My Wife starting her pasta sauce. She’s still here but when I smell the onions, celery and chopped carrots sautéing I see her face.
My grandfather died when I was two. I have no visual memories of him except from photos I've seen. One day as an adult, I was talking with my mother, and I said, "I don't know why but the smell of leather and peppermint make me feel safe." She started to cry. "When you were a baby, my father used to pretend to steal you by putting you inside his leather jacket. He always kept peppermint candies in the inside pocket."
California chaparral.
Midwestern slightly fermented leaf piles in fall
Bob Smith: sounds like two lucky people there.
Once in a while I smell Old Spice and the memory of my Dad singing Paper Doll overwhelms me.
Old Spice is my Proust.
In all three cases cited by Ann, the word most NYTimes readers would use to describe the smell is "Deplorable."
Back in the 90s I attended a number of Native American Church peyote meetings. The smell of wood smoke always puts me right back in the tipi.
The smell of my aunt's room in the house where I grew up: old wood and To A Wild Rose cream sachet from Avon.
We lived with my aunt from the time I was two years old so that my mother could take care of their mother who suffered from some form of dementia.
My first serious boyfriend wore Old Spice. I scented a handkerchief with it and took it to bed with me. To this day it's the only scent I like on men. [All my men wear Old Spice...or they wear nothing at all].
"My late husband had a particular scent, and it was strongest after he had been exercising, particularly under his left armpit. There was a smokiness to it, certainly, but also a pleasant tang, almost a citrus-like astringency, and I couldn’t get enough of it. My one word for it is 'raunchious,' which isn’t a real word, but I didn’t want to say 'raunchiness' as what I’m trying to get at is a combo of the words 'raunchy' and 'delicious.'"
O brave new world, that has such people in 't!
The smell of fresh sawdust recalls time with my father. A roast, a lasagna, a salmon recalls time with my mother. All memories are processed through the ol' factory.
Love at first sniff is a thing.
Regarding the man-after-exercise smell mentioned in the post, I totally get it. It's not at all unpleasant and is somewhat aphrodisiac.
The only smell I associate with my father is cigars, which I find neither pleasant nor unpleasant.
It's not at all unpleasant and is somewhat aphrodisiac.
Reminds me of going to work when there was some woman's organization using the auditorium. The whole building smelled different. There weren't normally many women working there outside of the usual tech writers and secretaries.
Speaking of which, the change in classroom smell between the third and fourth grades is well known to teachers.
Burning leaves in the fall is a smell that reminds me of childhood.
Men's Sweat May Soothe a Woman's Soul
https://www.webmd.com/balance/news/20030319/mens-sweat-may-soothe-womans-soul
The smell of ripe sun warmed cantaloupe makes me remember my mother's grandmother. I barely knew her since she died when I was less than 5 yrs old. But that smell makes me think of her house, the big screened in side porch, the garden where the cantaloupes were growing and a vague memory of a comforting woman in an old fashioned kitchen.
To this day, I love sun ripened cantaloupe with salt!!!
My mom, before she passed away, confirmed that memory, and elaborated on how I loved the cantaloupe so much that I would eat it until I was sick. Cantaloupe and cookies. Great Grandma.
This turned out better than my first thought have just come from an article on the "class war'. My mind went to the bit below from Orwell's 'The Road to Wigan Pier' Ch 8
But there was another and more serious difficulty. Here you come to
the real secret of class distinctions in the West--the real reason why a
European of bourgeois upbringing, even when he calls himself a Communist,
cannot without a hard effort think of a working man as his equal. It is
summed up in four frightful words which people nowadays are chary of
uttering, but which were bandied about quite freely in my childhood. The
words were: The lower classes smell.
That was what we were taught--the lower classes smell. And here,
obviously, you are at an impassable barrier. For no feeling of like or
dislike is quite so fundamental as a physical feeling. Race-hatred,
religious hatred, differences of education, of temperament, of intellect,
even differences of moral code, can be got over; but physical repulsion
can-not.
Jupiter said...
Interesting that the memories recalled by smells seem to be mostly pleasant ones.
When I was younger, I liked the smell of woodsmoke, but didn't really associate it with anything more than camping. But now there are times when I catch a tang of smoke in the air, and feel an intense longing to be in Mexico. O, pobrecita Mexico.
"That was what we were taught--the lower classes smell. “
I was on an international flight once and a dad from first class had brought his kid for a walk around the plan. Every time his kid went to touch something, his dad would say “Dirty! Dirty!"
The smell of gasoline being pumped always reminds me of my father asking the attendant to put $2 in the tank of our 1949 Plymouth.
Author Poul Anderson, possibly quoting somebody else, said that smell is the most evocative of the senses. May have something to do with his custom of, when reviewing a manuscript, making sure a character smelled something every third page. If not, he put it in.
Thirty some years ago, coaching junior soccer, I was running down the field yelling at a bunch of eight-year-olds to spread out. A car went by with a catalytic converter not up to spec and...I was running along yelling at a bunch of riflemen to spread out.
An old book, usually, smells like my grandmother's root cellar where we used to play hide and seek
How about a Museum of Sounds? Many take me back in time too — a Beetle shifting from first to second, Vin Scully calling a Dodger game, the air compressor cycling on and off at my folks laundry, the sounds of the laundry presses going up and down ...
I've worn old spice since my first Jr High dance. Gasoline doesn't smell good like the olden days because they took out a lot of the benzene ring aromatic hydrocarbons. That's that old school gasoline smell beloved by Kilgore.
ah, the smell of napalm in the morning!
...and neatsfoot oil at the start of Little League season
Steak dripping fat on mesquite.
I like the smell of rain on creosote bushes in the desert because it reminds me of rain on creosote bushes in the desert.
"It smelled like that when I got here!" -- Joe Biden
We would get a lot of skunks in the alley behind our house, and they’d get into our garbage cans frequently. I was never sprayed, but my brother was. I live in another country, but to this day, the smell of skunk reminds me of home.
As long as the skunk is far away enough.
From the childhood cosmoline and mothballs at my grandfather's storage. Today it is burnt Varget and WW-296. Michael K's leaves I can smell from miles away.
The smell of eucalyptus trees in so cal. They were everywhere in old parts of LA like Eagle Rock, at my school and in my nabe.
Sad thing is, I came to appreciate them only after I'd left the area for good. I hated the trees as a kid because they *were* so common.
Eagle Rock is still a great place but I can't afford to live there now.
My wife uses essential oils in a diffuser. I'm tempted to put a few drops of Hoppe's #9 in there.
I had one last bottle of Herbal Essence shampoo, which I used to use when I was young and fabulous.
I kept that old bottle, and whenever I sniffed that intense herbal fragrance I'd feel 22 again. Happy, like nothing had changed. Def a Proustian moment.
Had to throw the remnants out finally. Felt old ever since.
Diesel exhaust takes me back to cold, still, winter dawns on landings covered with deep snow above 11,000 feet in Colorado, with the horizon turning pink through a tangled silhouette of leafless, black Aspen limbs and the guys huddled around a new made fire, lost in their own thoughts, waiting for the skidders and the loader to warm up.
“And their snuff-laden breath blowing lightly over me in my first sleep.”
The roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the crowd!
Reading what Althouse quoted from Eleanor (and cued up by the previous paragraphs about smells), I had read only as far as "My Grandfather . . ." and the smell of my Grandfather was present. Not the idea, not words about it--I smelled him. Pipe tobacco, wood smoke, sawdust. From there, memories of this wonderful man come flooding in. His smile, his laugh, him exclaiming "Wowie!" Thank you Eleanor for your very moving story.
One of my staff is married to a woman who is a Scentsy consultant. I suggested a combo of Hoppes No.9, cordite, and hot brass as a scent for a man cave.
Eleanor - what a lovely image and story. Thanks for sharing.
Smell is incredibly evocative. So is sound. A year after my father died, I heard him coming up the steps from the basement, for just a split second. It was my brother, who unknowingly managed to walk exactly like Dad had done so many times before, right at the time Dad usually got home.
Agee's Knoxville: Summer of 1915 starts out with all of sights, sounds and smells, and devolves into just sights and sounds, and then just sights, and finally:
"Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am."
Smells Like Teen Spirit
I often get song lyrics wrong, sometimes for decades.
This post got me to look up the very simple lyrics to that 1991 Nirvana song. I always thought it was wonderfully cocky, challenging, and predictive to the rest of the music world because I was certain that the lyrics at one point were:
"I feel stupid and contagious
Here we are now, imitate us"
Nope. Every stanza is "entertain us" rather than imitate us". The song was much more awesome in my mind. I smelled extra spirit that wasn't there.
My granddad smoked Prince Albert in his pipe. Many scents recall that scent to me. My sister has a scented liquid hand soap that leaves my hands smelling like I remember my grandfather. I think her soap is a combination of ginger and maybe almond. Neither of those alone smell like Prince Albert tobacco. He also always had Vicks Vaporub close by and that can trigger granddad memories. I left that town when WWII sent families all across America to different areas than those they were born in, and the large extended families they shared. I only saw him 5 times after that. I can still see him in his rocker, stocking feet on the foot rest, and pipe at the ready. And sometimes chewing tobacco with a coffee can as a "spit can."
“Diesel exhaust takes me back to cold, still, winter dawns on landings covered with deep snow above 11,000 feet in Colorado, with the horizon turning pink through a tangled silhouette of leafless, black Aspen limbs and the guys huddled around a new made fire, lost in their own thoughts, waiting for the skidders and the loader to warm up.”
For me, that triggers memories of skiing. The diesel exhaust was mostly from the buses that we would ride to the ski areas, but also from the trucks laboring over the CO passes (esp Loveland and Berthod passes). We didn't start skiing until I was 10, so this was more of a middle school memory for me.
The young memory that I remember best is that of the conifer trees that predominate in the CO foothills from maybe 6k to 8k feet in elevation - Ponderosa Pine, Douglas Fir, and Engelmann Spruce, in particular. My grandparents had a ranch SW of Denver, that they ran as a girl’s camp. Every weekend, every summer, from the time I was born, until I was a teenager, we would drive up there Friday nights, and back down Sunday night. Probably no surprise that half the year, we live in a forest of almost identical trees. My partner has similar memories of visiting her grandparents. We get into town every spring, take a deep breathe, and say “home”. She might have the same thing in the desert here in PHX. I don’t.
The other memory I have from then is that of dirt roads. The weekly trek was not quite 60 miles, but the last 20 miles or so were on gravel roads. Maybe that smell is more memorable for the oldest two of us boys, because for much of the last decade we did the trek, the two of us rode in the third seat of our station wagon, and the dust would seep in around the rear door. I still enjoy rolling down the window and driving gravel roads (through those conifer trees) a bit faster than I should. Her older sister was worse though - she loved sticking her head out of the car when they were driving to get that smell.
I should add that that next brother has lived on a dirt road, in the midst of those conifers for nearing 40 years now. Another has done the same, for over 20, though on a paved lane. And the third one presumably gets the same effect in VT.
My olfactory memories are mostly of trees, the eucalyptuses at my home growing up, the pepper trees in the school yard, the evergreens from camping with Mom and Dad. One exception is the smell of diesel smoke, which can instantly take me back to the rolling deck of a salmon seiner.
"warm smell of coitus, rising up through the air"
For me the smell of my mother's bedroom always gave me a sense of complete security, light, and serenity. I can't really describe it, slightly astringent but somehow elegant and not at all harsh. I still have some of her handkerchiefs in my dresser which somehow years later retain that scent. Remember when people gave beautiful handkerchiefs as gifts? Do they still do that? IDK
Sometimes I experience a phantom smell of a wooden deck warmed by the sun on a warm Seattle summer day and I get so homesick it brings tears to my eyes.
Eleanor, that made me cry.
“ For me the smell of my mother's bedroom always gave me a sense of complete security, light, and serenity.”
My partner’s little sister wears a lot of powder. My partner asked her why? Because it reminds her of their mother.
Do men ever get an emotional "feeling" of safety and security? I don't really know what that feels like. I may know that I'm relatively safe, but the feeling is unknown. I can feel unsafe, but that depends on who's gunpowder I smell.
My first-born daughter spent the first 9 or 10 months of her life with her nose in my left armpit.
What's that condition that our hostess has?? She can't smell.
LOOK!!...on the event horizon. Is that an allegory?
My mother's father died when she was little, and I knew my Opa for only six years before his death in '59. He smoked a pipe and also cigs, and almost any cheap pipe tobacco reminds me of him. My father and mother both smoked cigs, as all us boys did at some time or other on and off, as did most of our friends likewise, so there's nothing specific for me there.
Never wore scent after a few experiments in high school; as long as I don't actually stink I don't worry about it. (Unscented deodorant, plain soaps etc.)
Working with old letters and journals, I came to appreciate the smell and feel of old paper as a direct link to the past. No exciting manly aromas to trigger manly memories, though.
HG Wells, a noted swordsman, was said by one of his lovers to smell of honey (I typed hiney at first!); Woody Guthrie sang a song about the honest sweat between his girlfriend's thighs, but I don't recall whether he was evoking smell or taste.
Narr
And there was Hanslick's famous crack about "music that stinks in the ear."
I’ve never had a very good nose and am not much of a smell person, but the smells of fall—burning leaves, popcorn and candy at a high school football game, pumpkin pie—make me nostalgic for childhood. Not my childhood, necessarily, as my childhood wasn’t a happy one, but some idealized version—the bits of my childhood that I might remember on purpose.
The smell of wet sage takes me back to my teens and hunting cottontails with a .410 shotgun during winter in the fields west of Provo/Orem Utah. Love that smell!
It’s “colitas”, Howeeeee.
I cannot identify a specific smell that brings back childhood memories. My parents were heavy smokers which gave a sour smell to the apartment. Now that I think of it, I really hate the smell of cigarette smoke. The only time it did not bother me was when I smoked. However, I quit nearly 38 years ago.
There are smells that remind me of a successful effort, such as cooking a splendid meal or painting a room.
Spent each summer in college living and working at Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park in northernmost Humboldt. 54+ years later, the smell of virgin redwood forest after rain evokes primal pleasure, matched only by the floral scent of a Samoan ulasisi, sitting around an umu roasting chicken or pork...
I grew up in piney-woods North Florida, and on trips to my grandfather's house we would pass by a creosote works, where telephone poles were treated with creosote - - a carcinogen, and long off the market, but the smell passing by the place was a distinct one.
The smell of a barbecue restaurant with open pits that would make your mouth water.
Hoppe's No. 9 gun solvent has already been mentioned. All rural boys who grew up shooting a .22 know that smell.
Old Spice aftershave has been mentioned, and I'll specify the Fresh Lime version which has long been off teh market - - there's a product that purports to be Old Spice Fresh Lime, but it is made in India and smells nothing like the original version.
Cow shit.
40 years from now, women will be recalling how their fathers smelled of skim almond milk, PlayStation game controllers, Tesla vegan upholstery, and non-fat no-whip extra hot macchiatos.
Hoppe's New first baseman's mitt. Bacon. Three-candle man gift.
A distinctive perfume worn by a secretary in our office in the mid-70s. Don't know its name but it's still out there and when I get a whiff of it, it's like time travel.
Nitro exhaust from a top fuel dragster brings memories of multiple drag strips in SF bay area before pussies took over and fucked up the whole state.
For every leftist asshole we export to Red states, seems ten more produced and graduate every June.
Some really great stories and memories here. Eleanor's is particularly poignant and touching. Personally there are no smells that trigger specific memories for me.
Every once in a while I smell cigarette smoke. It is fleeting and comes out of nowhere. It started shortly after Dad died, over 40 years ago. I figure it is my Dad coming back checking on me and letting me know all will be well. Smelling fresh bread baking is Mom. That and burned roast beef. She was a great baker but a poor cook.
Some say it's Cayuga's waters / Some say it's Cornell.
What's that condition that our hostess has?? She can't smell.
Nostalgia
"What's that condition that our hostess has?? She can't smell."
Man 1: My dog has no nose.
Man 2: How does he smell?
Man 1: Terrible.
I'll be here all week.
The smell of leaves burning evokes my childhood, when the practice every autumn was to rake leaves into the street and burn them. Then some 50 years ago leaf-burning was banned in our city, and probably most other places. So catching that scent is a rare experience.
Odd, isn’t it, how the wicked patriarchy is populated by all these lovable fathers and grandfathers?
This is a wonderful post and the comments are so evocative. I don't have too many memories of smells but after my husband died in 2015 I saved his pillowcases as reminders. Even now if I get them out it still makes me very nostalgic. He had a kind of musky smell. And the "underarm" thing, that is weird, I know my right armpit smells a lot stronger than the left one. I have no idea why that is.
My Grampy smelled like cloves- my mom said he used them b/c he had a gold tooth?
When I leave the house and need to feel strong/being such a homebody- I put a touch of ground cloves on the nape of my neck. Hey, we all have our armor.
I once read that pheromones are what attracts us to our partners. Pretty sure we’ve done everything humanly possible to fudge that up. Sweaty armpits are phenomenal lures. Kudos to the lucky lady who notices.
I’ve often wondered what the use of “the pill” has done to destroy natural selection by changing the hormones w/in the female body- and I DO mean female...
I also remember a stainless steel pail in the milkhouse full of minnows for ice fishing. That is a distinct smell.
My wife gets hot after I've been doing yardwork all day and the sweat has soaked my shirt. Being productive I think is what turns her on. Sitting on my ass all day does not give me the wonderful smell of her naked breasts.
¨I don't have too many memories of smells but after my husband died in 2015 I saved his pillowcases as reminders. Even now if I get them out it still makes me very nostalgic¨
Μy partner was widowed in her mid 20th, and left with two babies. She couldn’t sleep for 5he first year without one of his shirts in bed with her. I think that ended when she remarried.
Clark,
Pipe tobacco, wood smoke, sawdust.
That smells awfully like my Dad as well. Though he stopped pipe-smoking when I was a small child, and hasn't had a functioning wood stove for decades now. I remember still the pipe, and the wood stove, and the detritus of his many woodworking projects. (Some of them were terrific; he made a wooden two-person kayak that I marveled to look at.)
Dad's still very much here, btw, though on the opposite coast, in MD. Turned 80 last month.
The smell of a milk truck in the morning. On a couple of occasions I accompanied my dad on his milk route. I catch a whiff of it in the milk cooler at Costco sometimes in the summer.
For me it is a combination of smells and sounds. I grew up on a dairy farm. I can recall the distinct aroma of the feed from the silo my dad was feeding at milking time and of course there was the barn smell. The barn was always warm and my mom would be milking the cows while my dad fed, no one speaking just working. I can distinctly recall the warm barn, the cows chewing, the rhythm of the milking machines and feeling safe and secure.
mikee,
Thanks for bringing up Knoxville: Summer of 1915. It will probably not shock you to hear that, when I knew just the title of the poem, I assumed it was about a racial incident. Then I heard Samuel Barber's marvelous setting, and thought, "Gosh, people were capable of being happy, even back then!" Because happiness is the subject.
And to all you about to descend on me with tales of Knoxville and its innumerable sins: I know, I know. Only do try, once in a while, to remember things as Agee and Barber do. "Talking about nothing at all in particular." It helps.
As I have read, the sense of smell is the most closely linked to memory, so all of what everyone has written makes absolute sense.
I once read that pheromones are what attracts us to our partners
My first husband smelled like musty old man to me from the beginning, even when he was decidedly not an old man. I didn't pay too much attention to it. My second husband, certainly the love of my life, has a wide variety of wonderful smells--his soap + the unique smell of his skin, the faint metallic smell of his wrist where his watch sits, the mineral scent of his underarms when he's been doing physical labor, the smell that I always call 'loamy' that is found on another part of him.
He seems to like my smells too - I shower every morning religiously but if for some reason I skip it, later that evening, it's Katie bar the door if you know what I mean.
While at an estate sale at a ranch recently I poked round the workshop which was full of old metal tools and bits of wood and coils of wire. I commented to Mr. Pants that there is no other smell that shouts GRANDPA quite as much as that.
Loamy!! I was drinking peppermint tea and that teabag smelled loamy- lol
I wasn’t brave enough to say why I was laughing into my teacup!
Spread fields of manure in various stages of decay causes our youngest to quip- “Mmmmmm, minty fresh!”
Loamy. Like Jeff said, when I read that I could smell that. No manure though.
No- I wasn’t referring to manure either!
Musky would have been my Choice of word.
A Diane Ford joke:
"When my grandma & grandpa were dating [in rural Minnesota], grandma used to daub a little vanilla extract behind her ears as perfume. We grand kids always wondered why when when grandma would bake us cookies, grandpa would get a hard-on."
Diesel smells like every Army base I have ever been on.
There was something spread on local gravel roads in the summer to keep the dust down. Probably used oil.
The green compound our janitor spread on the wood floor at school before he swept. I can't remember what it smelled like but would recognize it if encountered again.
That leather and peppermint thing brought moisture to my eyes. And I'm 73. And a guy.
Grew up near Lake Winnebago in WI. Lake flies hatch ay Mothers Day, July 4th and early August. Look likes mosquitoes without the bite.
Dad would make me scrub the headlights, grill and bumper on return from cottage: it’s been well over 50 years and Iva still smell wet dead lake flies
The smell of motor oil, sawdust and soil regularly occurred in the tractor barn when the farmer spilled oil on the dirt floor and soaked it up using sawdust from the woodshed. So that begot the "plough" smell wayback in the "Dirty Thirties" when digging up the ground was expected to bring rain to the Great Plains.
You know what the women around here put behind their ears to attract men?
Their ankles.
Ba dop bop.
Yay for Barber and Knoxville 1915; not my end of the state or my generation, but pieces of that world still existed when I was a boy.
Not a smell, but a sound I'll never hear again from a world gone forever--a small farmer cruising slowly up and down the streets of the Normal neighborhood on summer days, pounding his truck's door with his left hand, and calling out "Melons! Squash! Tamatas! Beans!" like a vegetarian ice-cream truck man. Ladies would come out and buy from the curb.
Narr
Yumongous Cucumbers!
There was something about Jean Nate' on a girl in the 70's.
The current version just isn't the same.
Asked the current, uh, partner what I smelled like.
"testosterone" says she. Well she's a scientist.
Desert sand in humidity -- moist desert -- is sublime.
In August, you can smell the approaching Seattle rain shower evaporating on the hot concrete.
The lingering smells of toast and coffee remind me of my grandparents. My Nana used a Pyrex stove top percolator where you could watch the water reservoir get drawn up through the glass stem and over the paper filter with the coffee grounds. She had it down to a science and always turned the flame off underneath just in the nick of time. I can picture my family around the kitchen table, laughing and joking with the morning newspaper divvied up amongst us all. When my grandfather was alive he'd fill his pipe with applewood tobacco and start his crossword puzzle.
My favorite smell is the smell of a far off rain. It reminds me of my childhood home in the flat land of central Ohio. You don’t get to smell it in many places. You need wide open space with no trees or hills in the way.
The early morning humidity on a crisp fall day drags me back to kindergarten, walking to school, combined excitement and fear: throw in the smell of the pencil sharpener on the classroom wall and I get tense all over again. And diesel, the fuel not the exhaust, because we used to meet my grandmother at the train station when she came to visit and the smell is still bound up in my mind with mysterious possibilities.
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