1900's high tech vocabulary comes to mind. Following the stapler, stethoscopes, steam locomotives, safety pins, and tungsten steel much spoken of in our metallurgist's family where Dad won a Bessemer medal and we all hazarded a worry while stepping into the Barney's department store elevator about metal fatigue, came this rearrangement of antique comforts and distresses. Camphor, eucalyptus, levomenthol, thyme, and cedar oil: call them to mind and hearing this you can feel already the aromatic stirrings swirl up your sinuses. I think of embalming -- myrrh in the exotic garden setting the space ajar between death and preservation. I thought it was named after my Dad -- Vick's -- and remember dimly him circling it on my chest at night through the crush and press and gasp of pertussis, how he sat by my bed through the night when I was four, and camphor swirled like saints' ghosts up from the sheets. Bitter bewitching notes of turpentine made me dream of his soaked rag in a tin in the cellar for wiping oil paint splotches off our hands; and paraffin -- that lit my Nana's glass lamps before the cords came spidering across the ceilings. These ancient consolations cleansing, opening,...