The box arrived in a paper bag from the drugstore, usually the week before school started, and it was yours before you even opened it.

Not the 8-count. Not the 16. The 64, with the built-in sharpener in the back, in the yellow and green box with the diagonal stripe. Your name was going to go on it in your mother's handwriting, or your own careful printing, once you'd decided where. The cardboard flaps were still tight. The crayons inside were arranged in their rows the way they had been arranged at the factory, untouched, their paper wrappers smooth and unpeeled, their tips sharp in the way that crayon tips are only sharp once.

You know the smell. Everyone who grew up in mid-century America knows the smell. It came from the paraffin wax and the pigment binders -- a warm, slightly chemical, slightly sweet smell that has no exact equivalent anywhere else. Crayola kept the formula largely stable for decades, which means the 1958 box smelled roughly like the 1972 box, which smelled like the 1983 box. The smell was consistent enough that it crossed generations, which is why a parent handing a new box to a child sometimes paused for a second with an expression the child couldn't read.

What the box actually represented

It was the beginning of something. The school year, yes, but that's only partly it. The box was an instrument of possibility that arrived completely unused. Nothing had been pressed too hard and broken at the paper collar. Nobody had peeled the wrapper off Burnt Sienna to use the side of the crayon for shading, the way the art teacher would eventually show you. None of the colors had been worn to a blunt nub that couldn't fit the small spaces in a coloring book.

The box was potential in a tangible form, which is a thing children don't have much of. Most of what a child owns has already been used. The toys have been played with. The clothes have been worn. The books have been read. But the new box of crayons was a reset. It was a before-anything, in a life that had already accumulated a fair amount of after.

There were 64 colors, which was more colors than you needed and exactly right for that reason. You were never going to use Thistle. You were probably never going to use Outer Space, the dark gray-blue that sounded like it belonged in a science fiction paperback. But they were there, and their presence meant that the possibility space of what you could make was wider than it needed to be. The excess was the point.

The ritual of first use

The question of which crayon to use first was real. Younger children didn't agonize over it -- they grabbed whatever color was in front and started. But somewhere around third or fourth grade, some children started to understand that the first crayon used would never be new again, and that the decision was therefore meaningful.

Some children saved the prettiest ones. They'd use the browns and grays and ordinary yellows first, leaving the pure reds and cobalt blues and the silver for later, as rewards. These were the same children who saved the best Halloween candy for last and ate the inferior pieces first, by category, over weeks.

Other children used the best colors immediately, on principle, because the best colors were what you had the box for.

Both strategies made sense. Both said something about the child. The box revealed you, a little, in how you approached it.

The smell itself

Crayola crayons got their smell from stearic acid, derived from beef tallow, combined with the paraffin base. The pigments added their own notes. The paper wrapper had a smell. The cardboard box had a smell. The combination was distinctive enough that it has been included in lists of the most recognizable scents in American life, ranked in various surveys somewhere near the smell of peanut butter and Play-Doh.

There's a reason for that. Most recognizable smells are tied to food, because food is consistent and emotionally loaded and encountered early. The crayon smell is one of the few non-food smells that achieves that level of recognition across a whole population. It worked because the smell was specific to a specific moment -- the beginning of school, the arrival of something new -- repeated reliably across years and years of childhood. The smell got attached to the feeling, and the feeling was good enough that the smell carried it for the rest of a life.

Adults who pick up a box of crayons now often go quiet for a second. That's the mechanism. The smell retrieves something that was stored alongside it.

What's better now

The 64-count box was not actually the best tool for the work. The colors weren't lightfast -- they faded. Pressing hard snapped them. The built-in sharpener in the back ground the crayons down faster than ordinary use did, and it left a gummy mess in the sharpener chamber after a few uses.

For children who took drawing seriously, the 64 Crayolas were an early limitation. The color mixing was flat. The waxy quality that made them satisfying to hold and smell made them difficult to blend. A child who wanted to actually draw, at some point, needed something better.

The art supplies available to children now are, in technical terms, considerably better. Quality colored pencils. Washable markers that actually wash out. Watercolor sets that don't turn into brown mud after three uses. Pastels. Digital drawing tools that undo mistakes and allow color in ranges the Crayola factory never attempted.

A child who wants to make art today has access to tools that would have seemed extraordinary in 1975. Some of those children are producing genuinely impressive work at ages when their counterparts were still struggling with the built-in sharpener.

None of this is small. It matters that the tools got better.

What the better tools don't do

They don't come in a yellow and green box with the diagonal stripe.

They don't have a smell that retrieves anything.

They don't arrive in the paper bag from the drugstore the week before school starts, with your name going on them in your mother's handwriting. They are ordered from a website with a product number and free two-day shipping, and they arrive in a brown corrugated sleeve, and they are fine.

The ritual of the new school year was never really about the quality of the supplies. It was about the reset. The annual permission to begin again, to be the person who had not yet pressed Cornflower too hard or let Periwinkle roll under the radiator. The supplies were the props of that ritual, and they were enough, and the smell was the part of them that lasted longest.

The 64-count box was worth about a dollar and a half, in 1975. Its contents were paraffin and pigment and stearic acid and paper. What it carried was out of proportion to all of that.

The box still exists. Crayola still makes it. The smell is still there, because the formula is still largely the same. If you want to know whether the memory holds, you can buy one at any drugstore and open it slowly and find out.

Most people who do this pause for a second with an expression the people nearby can't quite read. Then they hand it to the child who came with them, or they keep it on their desk for a while before throwing the box away.

Do you remember which crayon you used first from a new box? Did you have a strategy for keeping the box organized, or did it go to chaos by October? Share your story in the comments -- we're listening.