I found an old Camel Cigarette matchbook in the new farm, one of the many evocative old things Florence kept. When I was a kid, I always noticed that real men smoked Camel cigarettes. The men with the muscled forearms, the rolled up shirtsleeves, the hard men who worked outside. When I dropped out of college and drove a truck for awhile, I smoked Camels, and I remember riding up and down the highways smoking my Camel cigarettes, feeling like a real man.

It takes a brave person to smoke these days. A friend of mine smokes, and lives in New York City, and he says he feels like some political refugee in the old Soviet Union, banned from restaurants, offices, even yelled at smoking on the street. Our culture has evolved quite a bit and I have no idea what the real men do these days. I doubt too many of them smoke. Still, the matches seemed beautiful to me, evocative, and I spent an hour this morning trying to photograph this pack. I put up an album on Facebook. I am always struck by the pride and craftsmanship that went into even the smallest and most mundane of things in the Lost World.