Today the smell of a passer-by’s hair reminded me of my first welcome into a certain kind of belonging. Remembered were the days of encounter, of the initiation of my nose to warm, sweet scents–Bath and Body Works: Sensual Amber–that arrived as good news from a far-off county. I’d been invited into the intoxicating realm of girl-things. And here’s how it felt. Like coming finally into what I was owed, and that this is how life would be. Exciting, sexy, expansive, heroic. I the orphan, now the inheritor (I thought) of the longed-for dream.