People have written poems about it. It has been imitated by candles and air fresheners. At least one person has even fought in court for the right to produce it naturally.

It’s the smell of line-dried laundry.

Some atmospheric chemists like that scent, too. In a paper published this year in Environmental Chemistry, researchers examined line-dried towels at the molecular level, to try to pinpoint the source of their specific fragrance.

Silvia Pugliese led the research while she was a master’s student at the University of Copenhagen. When Ms. Pugliese was a child, her mother line-dried laundry, and she still does it whenever she can.

“The fresh smell reminds me of home,” she said. So she was excited to rigorously pursue such an everyday research subject.

In between their more official thesis work, Ms. Pugliese and two labmates, with their adviser Matthew Stanley Johnson, commandeered two little-used areas of the university’s chemistry building — a dark, empty office and a small, fifth-floor balcony — and obtained materials, including ultrapurified water and a set of cotton towels from Ikea.

Each towel got washed three times in the water, and then hung out: inside the office, on the balcony under a plastic shade or on the balcony in the sun.

When they came across the drying racks, “a lot of colleagues laughed,” Ms. Pugliese said. “But we had a lot of support.”

When a towel finished drying, the researchers sealed it in a bag for 15 hours. As the towel sat in the bag, they sampled the chemical compounds it released into the air around it. The researchers performed similar sampling on an empty bag, an unwashed towel and the air around the drying sites.

By comparing the experimental towels’ chemical profiles to those controls and to each other, the researchers were able to tease out which compounds popped up only when they hung wet towels in the sun, Ms. Pugliese said.

Line-drying uniquely produced a number of aldehydes and ketones: organic molecules our noses might recognize from plants and perfumes. For example, after sunbathing, the towels emitted pentanal, found in cardamom, octanal, which produces citrusy aromas, and nonanal, which smells roselike.

Why is that? It may have to do with exposure to ozone, an atmospheric chemical that can transform some common chemicals into those aldehydes and ketones.

A more fundamental contribution, she thinks, may come from the sun itself. When exposed to ultraviolet light, certain molecules “get excited” and form highly reactive compounds called radicals, Ms. Pugliese said. Those radicals then recombine with other nearby molecules, processes that often lead to the creation of aldehydes as well as ketones.

It’s possible that the water on a wet towel gathers a lot of these excitable molecules together, and then works “like a magnifying glass,” concentrating the sunlight and speeding up these reactions, Ms. Pugliese said.

Similar processes are likely occurring on any number of natural outdoor surfaces, including bare soil and individual blades of grass — perhaps part of the reason that sun after a rainstorm makes the world smell fresh. (Although the scent seems to last longer on clothes, potentially because aldehydes bond with cotton, said Ms. Pugliese.)

Ricardo López, a chemist at the Lab for Flavor Analysis and Enology at the University of Zaragoza in Spain who was not involved in the research, thinks the aldehydes and ketones may not tell the whole story.

“When testing for key flavor compounds, sometimes compounds in low concentrations are as important as those in high concentrations,” he said. Additional forms of testing might be helpful to get the full bouquet.

Ms. Pugliese has, for now, moved onto headier things — her doctoral research involves artificial photosynthesis — but she hopes to dig into similar topics in the future.

“I thought it was a really nice way to do science,” she said.

Some people bring home magnets, key chains and maps from their travels; I bring home accessories. Floral scarves, beaded headbands, colorful hats, kitschy coin purses. But more than anything else, I bring home jewelry.

Not crazy, need-a-bodyguard, can’t-check-my-luggage jewelry. Fun jewelry. Some of my frill is extra, but most of it isn’t; some of it is pricey, most of it is not — a pair of almond-shaped silver studs from the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul that cost a few lira; a pair of triangular gold dangling earrings bought from a store in the center of Athens on the day I found out I was accepted to graduate school; a pair of blue circular earrings from the Malcolm Shabazz market in Harlem some 20 blocks away from my apartment (local travel, am I right?).

Some has been bought for me by friends on their own trips. Over the years, my friend Ari has given me earrings from Uganda, Ethiopia and South Africa, as well as a necklace from Kenya and a bracelet from Paris. Oluseyi gave me a necklace made of the black, white, red and green paper beads that are popular in French Guiana. Selina gave me sparkling teal earrings from Istanbul when I graduated from college. And it was a long purple wooden necklace, given to me the summer before my senior year of high school by my friend Imani after her trip to Spain, that first had me daydreaming about when I too would visit the Mediterranean.

If this all sounds like a lot, you have to understand that everything about my sense of style is maximalist: I love bright colors, feathers, fringe, animal print — typically not all together, but sometimes … all together. Let’s just say that I prefer to ignore Coco Chanel’s advice to take one accessory off before leaving the house.

But my proclivity for holding onto ornaments doesn’t exactly conform to an age where a Marie Kondo-endorsed sense of minimalism is in vogue. There’s also the practical matter that my apartment is a 400-square foot studio, and one woman’s cheerful collection of objects is another’s sanity-stretching clutter. Sometimes I am both of those women.

In March, as quarantine began, like many others, I set some personal goals. I promised myself that I would declutter my closet. I would use this extra time at home to tidy up and redecorate, to care for my plants and to finally organize my jewelry. I would accept that I will not, in fact, turn the remaining earring of a lost pair into a necklace or a ring. I would let go of the items that I’ve outgrown and haven’t worn in years, along with the earrings that have been given to me that I could never work up the courage to re-gift out of fear that the person who gave them to me would one day ask if I still owned them.

As I confronted my collection, I realized that my reluctance to get rid of jewelry over the years has been less to do with personal laziness or a maximalist style ethos, and more to do with what these souvenirs give me. Stuck at home, going through my jewelry has been an escape to past adventures and a reminder of friends who are now far away. Each time I wear certain items, I’m transported to a certain city and moment in my life.

The chunky, oversize blue, turquoise and aquamarine beaded necklace that my friend Paola picked out for me from her mother’s store in Abruzzo, transports me to the final weeks of our senior year of college, a time of trepidation and joy. Days after Paola gave me that necklace we submitted our theses, and soon after our parents arrived in Rome. When I wear it, I am right back in those heady days of feeling like the world was opening up in front of us.

The sequined navy, silver and black band that doubles as a headband and necklace reminds me of romping through Paris in the winter at 21. The neon rainbow fringe earrings from Marbella remind me of my best friend’s wedding there a few years ago. A silver floral pendant was a gift from my primary school dorm mates, given to me days before I left Zimbabwe for the United States. Friends who recently visited Lisbon gave me a pair of winged gold earrings created by a designer whose work I stumbled upon years ago. Those earrings remind me of the friends who gave them to me, but they also remind me of the day I spent exploring Lisbon, and how I tripped and fell on the front step of a boutique. I got up, walked in and came out with new earrings and a necklace.

One of the reasons we travel is to connect with other people. In years of shopping for jewelry around the world I’ve always come away with more than just a new bauble: I’ve learned about the history of a town while having a bracelet made; about the customs of a country while trying on rings. I’ve met fascinating artists and business owners, people who shared their stories — and their favorite local haunts, the kind that you’d never find in a guidebook — with me. I’ve also made lasting friendships.

Years after I left Italy, I met a colleague who had a silver ring inspired by the Roman aqueducts that for 500 years brought water into the city’s center. She’d studied in Italy about a decade before I did and upon visiting Rome with her children years later, she bought the ring. When I returned to Rome, I went to the same store and bought the same ring in gold. And so the ring has come to encapsulate something slightly different: that Rome, stoic and unchanging, has imprinted its effects on new generations of visitors and inhabitants, uniting us all in shared reverence.

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Strawberries may grace the supermarket produce aisle all year round, but the juicy, brightly colored varieties that come around in late May and June are almost a different species, altogether soft and delicate and needing to be devoured as quickly as possible. You can smell their floral, candylike aroma at the market before even laying eyes on them.

Still, all strawberries have a place in the kitchen. The key is to know which to use when. Out-of-season berries are great for baked pies and cakes, since cooking or macerating them concentrates their flavor. But those in-season beauties are best used gently, in applications that accentuate their essence with as little heat and manipulation as possible.

That’s why, when strawberries are at their peak, it’s time to make a fresh strawberry pie.

This one starts with an easy, press-in cookie crust. Using store-bought shortbread minimizes the amount of time the oven has to be on in the summer, and the buttery cookies create a pairing reminiscent of strawberry shortcake. Keep in mind that some brands of shortbread have more sugar than others and may require a little less sweetener in the crust mixture. Graham crackers or chocolate wafers would be nice, too.

Inside is simply a mixture of fresh, quartered strawberries and a quick jam of cooked strawberries, strawberry preserves and cornstarch. Some recipes rely on strawberry gelatin to hold it all together, but, here, real strawberry is the star: The preserves help bind the filling, while adding even more fruit flavor. A quarter-cup of cornstarch may seem like a lot, but you’ll need it with those height-of-season gushers to ensure that the final dessert is sliceable. (Deep-dish fruit pies made with strawberries may taste good, but they can cascade like a burst dam when sliced.)

Finished with a cloud of lightly sweetened, freshly whipped cream, this pie is a sight to behold. All in all, its simplicity makes fresh strawberry pie so special. The fruit has been gussied up, but only enough to allow it to shine.

Recipe: Fresh Strawberry Pie