I’d like to talk for a moment about candles. Ordinary, everyday candles. Because right now, I hate ‘em.
Yes, I know the candle has a noble history and that countless generations of honeybees have given up their wax so that civilization may progress to a higher plane. Yes, I’m aware that the exalted candle was burning brightly while Shakespeare quilled his greatest tragedies, and that it was candles that kept hope alive during the darkest nights of the black plague.
Whatever.
Why am I so waxophobic, you wonder? Why am I advocating candlemaker-bashing? Well, it’s because someone in this house—not I—apparently has a bad candle habit, and it’s slipped unnoticed until now.
While our house was up for sale, the one thing I kept hearing from people who had no idea of what to say about about selling a house but wanted to indicate that they were savvy watchers of HGTV was, “Oh, bake some cookies before each showing!” Well, people. I don’t really care what you’ve heard on your curbside appeal shows. When your house is up on the market for almost eight months, there are only so many cookies one can bake. Seriously. I had forty-five showings during the month of March. Do I really need to bake four dozen batches of cookies?
Do I look like a Keebler elf?
“Oh,” they’d say, when I would balk. “You don’t have to bake an entire batch. Just buy some of that pre-cut cookie dough and bake one or two!” No, people. One or two cookies doesn’t even make enough of a smell to cover up the scent of a hamster pellet. You go out and buy some pre-cut cookie dough and put it . . . well, I’m too much of a gentleman to tell you what to do with it.
But you know. I got the general message. Prospective buyers like to walk into a clean-smelling house. I might not want to bake dozens of batches of cookies (and don’t tell me I could merely throw them out. That’s insanity. Do you know how many starving Africans my parents told me there are?), but I don’t want to walk into a house reeking of kitty litter and last night’s stir-fried curry noodles, either.
So I compromised. It occurred to me that over the years, my husband has picked up a scented candle or two. Well. We’re not able to pass a candle store without stopping in, really. Yankee Candle franchises tend to get really excited when they see him approaching. Like a connoisseur, he’ll investigate the new scents and delicately sniff, then consider, and then pronounce his verdict like a wine critic. “Earthy, with a citrus zest.” Or, “The resemblance of this waxen version of candy corn lies mainly in its appearance, yet not in its too-heavy overtones of vanilla without the leavening of dairy.” Something like that. Then, clutching his purchases beneath his arms, we’ll finally be able to exit the joint.
At some point during the eight months, I thought to myself, “Hey, candles are smelly. How about instead of baking, I light a few of those suckers?” We’ve always kept our candles in an inaccessible cupboard behind the baby grand, but I managed to wrench open one of the drawers and pull out a couple—a buttercream-scented pillar for the first floor and a cinnamon-scented jar for the basement, where there’s less air circulation. A couple of hours before each showing, I’d light the candles, let them release their scents, and then right before I left during the showings, I’d cap the candles and disappear, confident in a sweet-smelling house.
Well, it must’ve worked. After months and months, the house finally sold a couple of weeks ago. The buyers intend to close on June 1; we’re supposed to be out of here within a few days after that. My last couple of weeks have been a flurry of meeting with moving companies and trying to clean out the crap that I don’t particularly want to take with us—like old electronics boxes, or books I no longer want, or the odd little drawers of ephemera that I don’t want to be paying a moving company vast amounts of dollars an hour to pack for me.
And then I got to the candle cupboard.
It would seem, to put it mildly, that my husband might have more of a problem than I thought. He’s concealed it well, these many years. The real addicts always do. I’m not even sure he’s aware he has a problem.
Yet, when I opened those two drawers and pulled ajar the doors to the cupboard, hundreds and hundreds of pounds of scented wax tumbled out. It honestly was a bit like a Looney Tunes short in which Elmer Fudd opens Bugs Bunny’s closest and is instantly crushed by its contents. Complete with whistling tweety birds around my cracked cranium.
And oh my god, the smell. Between the vanillas and the cranberries and the fresh pines and the sweet fruits and the almond mocha bean clean linen pineapple cilantro pomegranate mango madness, my nostrils shorted out. Basically it smelled like Lisa Frank had cut a really enormous fart in there.
That wasn’t the full extent of it. There were boxes and boxes of candlesticks. It would seem as if every time we went to a post-Christmas sale or pre-school sale at Eddie Bauer or Ikea or Bed Bath & Beyond, my other half would see candles on sale and think them a good deal. “Oh,” he’d say. “Look at these boxes of twenty-four white candlesticks! Only five dollars! Let’s buy four of them!” Then he’d toss them into the cupboard and not think about them again. Do that several times a year for the thirteen years we’ve been living here, and folks, that’s a hell of a lot of candles.
Obviously, I could throw away the three candles out of that enormous stash that had actually been used. I could probably with a clear conscience get rid of the ones that had yellowed, or had gone lop-sided from melting in the summer heat. But that still left an awful lot of freakin’ candles. Since then I’ve been giving them away to whomever will take them. Hey, friends—thanks for driving me to karaoke! Let me leave you some candles in your back seat as a token of my appreciation! Hey, other friend! Listen, are you interested in taking some of my spare liquor off my hands before my move? I’ll throw in some candles! Listen, neighbors—have you thought about your lighting contingency plans in case of worldwide dystopia?
Once I’m reunited with my husband, however, something has to be done. I’m having a candle intervention. I’m sending him to whatever is the candle addict’s equivalent of the Betty Ford Clinic. Yankee Candle might take a heavy hit in their next quarter’s earnings, but I can live with that.
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