My family owns this old house which we call The Old Home Place. It’s an old white house built in 1898 that sits outside of a small town in rural East Texas called Carthage. Several generations on my dad’s side lived in that house over the years, including the most recent resident, my great-aunt Charlie Fay, who passed away in the 1970’s. After she passed away, someone went into the house and just put a bowl of mothballs in every room and locked up the house and that was it.

This old house sat there uninhabited for years. Until one day sometime around 2007, when we were having a family reunion, the family decided it was time to go in. I think I was in middle school at the time, visiting from Dallas where we lived.

I clearly remember walking into that house for the first time. The first thing that hit me was the smell of the mothballs, sitting in glass bowls in every room as if they were white buttermints. I remember thinking how surreal and uncanny it felt because, you know, basically someone walked out one day and then no one went in for decades. There's dust all over everything, it smells like mothballs and things are deteriorating.

And the quietness of it all. It felt to me like what it must have felt like when people discovered the Titanic. It’s this place where there used to be people living their lives, and then it’s been completely quiet and untouched for so many years.

I remember there being so much stuff. It was the era of people not throwing anything away because they might need it later. There was one room, it was a small room, but it was floor-to-ceiling packed. We didn't know how big the room was, or that it was really even a room, until all the stuff came out of it. There were a lot of blankets and newspapers and bags of clothes. Everything was dusty and it all smelled of mothballs and pine wood.

For me, the biggest treasure was the clothes. My great-aunt Charlie Fay left behind a lot of dresses and some were still in great shape. So I started wearing them—even though they smelled like mothballs, though that faded over time. She mostly wore shirtwaist dresses, knee-length on me, though I’m taller than she was so they were probably mid-length on her. Short sleeves, some kind of cotton fabric, button-down with a little matching belt. I loved them and wore them in high school all the time.

Those dresses in particular, it felt very intimate to be wearing them. Intimate and a little intrusive. For example, as she got older, my great-aunt got a little bit of a hunched back, especially on her right side. Which meant that when I put on her dresses, the hemline in the back would dip on the right side because it had been tailored to compensate, to fit the shape of her body. I would still wear them, even with the little dip. In some ways it made me feel close to her, and some of my older relatives who knew her said she would have loved that I was putting her clothes to good use. But I never met her, and she never met me, and I didn’t ask her permission. Maybe she would have been embarrassed or uncomfortable. I can’t know. She died before my parents even met.

My grandfather was the youngest of 10 siblings, and my dad was the youngest, and I’m the youngest of my siblings. So I’m on the tail end of all of these generations. I missed out on meeting all of these people when they were alive. But because of the Old Home Place, I met them through all the things they left behind—things that they didn’t think anyone would be searching through so carefully.

In some ways it was like a treasure trove, and the things we found in the house did make me feel connected to my family across time. But there was a limit to that. There were no diaries. No letters that went into detail about their emotional life. No real pathways into their interior lives.

After a while, the feelings of uncanniness and discovery and potential connections to my ancestors started to fade. In fact, the feelings of meaningfulness seemed to have an inversely proportional relationship to the amount of stuff we sorted through. The more blankets, and newspapers, and books, and hats, and knick-knacks, and clothes, and receipts, and pictures we sorted through, the more it felt like a burden, or a waste of precious time. Early on, we thought that all of our other relatives would be equally as fascinated with the house as we were, which didn’t turn out to be true. So we had to ask ourselves, if we’re not doing this for anyone else but ourselves, is it truly important to us?

I realized more and more that these ancestors of mine are strangers to me, and if we met, I would be a stranger to them. They lived a different lifestyle and had different values. They’re just people, and they’re dead. But they had loomed so large in my personal mythology, eventually they had to shrink back down to life-size.

The smell of mothballs brings all of this to mind for me. People’s faces often scrunch up in disgust when they say “mothballs,” but I enjoy the smell. It brings to mind my memories of walking through the Old Home Place for the first time, discovering artifacts from my ancestors, and the simultaneous feelings of intimacy and trespassing that came with wearing Great Aunt Charlie Fay’s dresses.

Sometimes I smell it indirectly, too, because there are scents that have a kind of mothball undertone to them. For example, the indolic scent of jasmine flowers, to me, sometimes has that “Old Home Place” smell. And it makes me feel that duality of being connected to something larger, connected to my family across time, but also disconnected, reminded of the fact that we will never meet.

If the scent had a sound, what would it be? A sound that no one hears. It makes me think of what the sounds must have been in the house when it was empty.

If the scent had a color, what would it be? Faded aged paper. Something that was white once and is now discolored and beige, like parchment. One of a handful of historical treasures that we found was a war ration book, and that’s the color of this smell: an old, dusty paper color.

If the scent had a texture, what would it be? The scent has some space to it. It’s a smell that you can walk into. It's not a hard surface. I would say it’s like walking into a space with very still air, heavy with dust, where there's not airflow—that feeling on your skin.

If the scent could give you advice, what would it tell you? It would tell me to hold things with the weight that they’re worth to you. I guess it would take me through the process of shedding my expectations. When we first started sorting through everything in the Old Home Place, when the smell of mothballs was overpowering, I created narratives in my head about the role this house would play in my life, and how connected I would be to the great-aunts who had lived there, and how other people would find it meaningful, too. Eventually I had to negotiate for myself what role I wanted the house to play in my life. Like I said, I had to bring my ancestors back down to life-size.

So that’s the advice that mothballs would give me: don’t project too much onto someone, whether they’re alive or dead. Let things be what they are. But it’s fine if that still feels a little bit like magic.