Writer's Retreat

I'm spending the next couple of days in Cambridge, Massachusetts, fresh off of a weekend spent at Colby College reunions. I've got my own basement room in a nice apartment in a residential city. I am only qualmed by the smell of napthalene that pervades the stairwell leading to my guest bedroom. However, after discovering the smell was naphthalene, a compound I had to identify for my organic chemistry lab, I was enthused more than upset. Hurray for chemistry! What does napthalene smell like, you ask? It smells like old people, or at least their breathe, that comes to inhabit most of their knick-knacks, heirlooms, and belongings. It smells like moth-balls. It smells like the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, of American Indian exhibits and stuffed African Elephants.