I should go to bed. I am going.
But first I’ll write this, because my house smells like bayberry.
I have always loved scented candles. I remember standing in front of the candle displays in the candle display sections of my childhood stores, selecting candles of different colors and sniffing at them until my smeller was on overload and I could no longer distinguish one scent from another.
We had the basics back then: vanilla, lemon, orange. It was like candy, really, except that it tasted bad.
Then Yankee Candle Co. took the scented candle to new heights. It was always a good time to come across a selection of those babies, with their jasmine and their powder blue seaside scents and their candy apple. My sister in Massachusetts lives near THE Yankee Candle Co., and you can smell its blend of scents in at least a mile radius.
But now we have scented candles of all varieties in the Target and in the Wal-Mart, and it’s hard to get one’s shopping done– really it is– when you have all that sniffing to do.
The scents, even in Wal-Mart, are fancier now. Yes, they still have your basic vanilla, but they also have scents like Asian Pear (what does that mean, one wonders? What, really, is an Asian Pear?) and Cinnamon Toast (which smells disturbingly of maple syrup), and Cucumber (!). It’s stunning, really, the selection.
When it comes to buying, though, I mostly I stick with vanilla. Over-scented scents are Too Stimulating for me. I need Not to be accosted with the scent of imitation Apple Pie wafting through my house. If I want that scent, I’ll bake the pie, thank you very much.
But yesterday, in Wal-Mart, I saw a scent I haven’t seen in Years: Bayberry. Plain old, dark green bayberry. My mother had bayberry candles at Christmastime when I was growing up, and so this now old-fashioned scent for me conjures memories of the indistinguishable Christmases of my childhood: of sweet and sour meatballs and wassail at Christmas parties and candles burning in rooms not bothered by electricity and coming home from church on Christmas Eve too excited to sleep and the hallowed quiet with which we removed the nativity scene figures from their tissue wrappings to display them on the shelf.
Bayberry is a quiet fragrance, subtle, not sweet. I bought the bayberry candle. It is sitting on my kitchen table, on a plate, surrounded by some holly leaves and berries that I cut from bushes in our yard. We burned it tonight while we ate dinner, and afterwards I didn’t blow it out right away.
I can still smell it Right Now.
Good-night.
