Honey-golden, irregular cleaving, sticky, crunchy underfoot crust born of pine sap. The small rectangular wood rosin box tucked into a corner of the massive classroom, toted to the stage for theatre week, at once shimmering and powdery. Pliant dancer feet squeezed like gloved hands into satiny pointe shoes ripped, broken, and pieced back together just so, the shod feet standing in the box, wiggling around, crushing, crushing, crunching, crunching, and the crunching thereof releases that distinctive odor into the air that comingles with sweat to yield a singular olfactory experience that will linger in the memory for an eternity. I zip open my mama’s dance bag with all the old pointe shoes in the bottom—they’re not much to look at up close like this—bury my head inside it, and inhale deeply. It is the defining scent of ballet.”

That was the paragraph I wrote at work on Friday for the Morning Scribe, an exercise I give our marketing copy team every day to jump-start their creativity (and mine) before production work has the chance to pound it right out of them. The prompt was to do with scent memories, and those surely are strong, aren’t they.

The ballet scent is profound and stays with you forever when you’re immersed in it for decades. That dance bag was powerful too, and all the objects inside it. I am sure it must’ve been the same one mom carried when she was in residential performing arts school in Canada—not many years earlier!—and continued to carry for a long while afterwards. When I was five it kept me entertained for long hours while I waited on her to finish class or rehearsal (together with a pile of coloring books and crayons).

In the days before knitted legwarmers, innovative Canadian dancers used hockey socks instead and they fit the bill just fine. Inside mom’s bag I found an assortment of them. To hockey socks, add one large bottle of Jean Naté after-bath splash, a mandate when one had to comingle with the general public after class. Mom just called it “foo-foo water.” As in, I need to splash on some foo-foo water so we can stop at the grocery store on our way home.

And here was a curiosity: heavy black plastic castanets, and lots of them, rattling around in the bottom of the dance bag—leftovers from mom’s Spanish character classes, she said. (While most residential ballet schools do include character in their curricula, most do not include Spanish character specifically. Here is a moment in Royal Ballet’s Don Quixote where the character Kitri does use castanets, about a minute in, in case you’re curious. She has significant help from the orchestra, to be sure.)

At some point, I realized most moms didn’t tote around smelly dance bags stuffed with broken pointe shoes and loose castanets. But I don’t remember a defining moment. I think my mom tried as much as she could to make our suburban family life as “normal” as possible within the confines of an impossible schedule that sometimes compelled her to be in two places at once.

Which meant she was running late, always. There was a single occasion when I was maybe eight and the center simply came unglued. A complicated after-school plan entailed my being dropped off at home alone by First Carpool Mom, there to hurry and get myself changed and ready for my own ballet class. Second Carpool Mom would come pick me up and whisk me across town to ballet school, where Actual Mom was already hard at work. Unfortunately we forgot nobody was available to help me get my hair into a classical bun—a thing I was just learning to do. The prospect of showing up to ballet school with my hair undone mortified me. So when Second Carpool Mom arrived and knocked on the door, I did what any self-respecting home-alone eight-year-old child would do: I hid inside the house and refused to answer.

This prompted a sequence of events and consequences I would not live down for a long time. It did yield one eight-year-old child who could fix her own hair for ballet class.

I wonder how ballet smells to young dancers now. The rosin box is all but extinct, thanks to the introduction of vinyl flooring (the original was trade-named Marley by an English company in the 1960s), in widespread use in most American ballet schools by the 1980s. The vinyl has an inherent ‘tackiness’ to it that dancers love because there’s just enough traction to it to prevent slipping, thus making rosin-ing one’s shoes unnecessary, unless the floor is not kept clean. (In fact new Marley flooring usually comes with a mandate not to use rosin on it.) Necessity is the mother of invention, goes the saying. When I was teaching ballet I was glad to dispense with that messy, bothersome box in the corner of my thoroughly modern studio classroom. But I don’t think Marley has much of an odor unless it is brand new.

Rosin’s familiar scent and mom’s dance bag will forever be with me, though, evoking the squirrely ballet world and growing up in it. Reflecting on that now makes me realize, despite not experiencing a conventional childhood, my early life inside a ballet family quite possibly saved me from being a boring kid from a white-bread suburb.