December 16, 2014
Candles are my weakness. So are bookstores, chocolate and Diet Coke.
After graduate school, I moved into my first apartment feeling flush with money that, on a new college teacher’s salary, modestly sustained me for the first three weeks each month. Hurrah! I paid rent and bought necessities, which left me with just enough funds for one indulgence — “Oh, grocery store clerk! Bring me the finest aged candle you have. Something vintage, say early 1980s perhaps? Spare no expense! But, keep it under $3, please.”
I chose a scented candle for my domestic extravagance, a $1.99 grocery-store gem I placed on my small kitchen counter. The candle was labeled “Ocean Breeze,” but it smelled more like ocean seaweed. Still, I bought more candles, lighting my place throughout. It looked like the set from “Game of Thrones.”
Through the years, I honed my candle purchasing to find quality candles that not only smelled good, but also kept a flame longer than half an hour. I got fancy, splurging on Italian and French candles because the Italian and French are known for their exceptional candlemaking skills — or at least that’s what their labels claimed.
I was moving up in the world of wax. Perfumed and soy, here I come! Amore candele!
For all the varieties I’ve owned, I have an old favorite, first purchased when I was living in my Limited Income Ocean Seaweed Chic apartment. It was winter, which begged for a different scent. I picked up a pine-scented candle that, once lit, reminded me of the fresh-cut tree my dad brought home for Christmas and nailed to the floor.
He wanted it to be secure.
It was.
It also shed needles like a rainstorm after five days of no water and 15 nails bolted through its base. But, for one glorious week, that tree smelled great. I bought cases of those candles.
I made a troubling discovery when I ran out of my retail favorite — I couldn’t find a basic pine-scented candle anywhere. I found bayberry, balsam and cedar, apple spice, Christmas Thyme, cinnamon, frosted pine, pine bark (bark is a coveted scent?). There was even a pine, peppermint and gingerbread candle that would’ve made Will Ferrell’s “Elf” proud.
But a simple pine-scented candle?
No such luck. I returned home with a pine-pear-cardamom purchase that just made me hungry.
I hated it.
Well, hate is a strong word. I just wanted my dad’s-tree-impaled-to-the-floor candle slowly flickering into the evening and lighting my life a little. And that’s what I was really looking for, some familiar link to a time when my teaching colleagues and friends piled around my tiny apartment kitchen table on Friday nights listening to good music, savoring cheap wine, rehashing funny college stories while mulling over some philosophical issue because our minds were fresh and eager to mull philosophically. We did this as a nearby pine candle burned until the night’s end.
I have a candle burning as I write this. Its fragrance is more pine-ish than the one of my post-grad apartment years.
But its light burns bright, illuminating a change of season is underway and flickering with beloved long-agos.
