When I'm down, I open the drawer where I keep old tubes that are nearly finished. Not the good ones, the ones I'll never be without, the dregs. Each one smells different, and it brings back the studio I was standing in when I used it up. The Naples yellow from my teacher's atelier, that one smells of turpentine and dust and his pipe. The raw sienna I squeezed the last of while my daughter was teething, I can still place the year. No one warns you that oil paint keeps memory better than you do. You think you're the one doing the remembering, and then you uncap a tube and you're twenty-nine years old again.