The connotations of the word “intimacy” were flooding through my mind on the way home from work. Is intimacy the tiny details we pick up from daily interactions with people? I shared an intimate secret with a woman who is most easily described as a customer. We know nothing about each other’s lives except her love of cooking and her passion for inspiring ingredients. Her unconscious aroma is lemon. We talked about essential oils and I shared my signature scent, the perfume I have worn daily for over 30 years; Annick Goutal’s Eau d’Hadrien. I first found it while working in Harvard Square. There was a small, hole-in-the-wall shop that carried only finest European soaps and perfumes. You could find a real, boar’s bristle hairbrush, exotic toiletries, and you could test out wondrous scents from decades of ago.

The intimacy I witness in other arenas of life are the ones…