Tag Archives: Books

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The Scent that Was, and Wasn’t

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There, in the middle drawer of the marble topped washstand in the hallway of my childhood home is where my mother kept them, neat and in their boxes, the wicks blackened and waiting from one holiday season to the next.


She kept them there because we couldn’t abide the smell, or thought we couldn’t, and I wonder now if we just said that because, wretched children that we were, we found it hard to let Mother have anything of her own, truly her own. It went against the script, somehow, and if she got used to this one small thing, what could be next?


She kept them there because that was where she lit them, in all their wobbly glory, on the one surface in the house that was the least likely to be set aflame.


Bayberry candles.


Fragrant and the color of split pea soup, they perfumed the small hallway when she lit them and freighted the drawer on the odd summer day one of us might open it in a last ditch effort to find a pair of scissors or paste. There was never any misplaced treasure or tools in those drawers, just folded tablecloths and real napkins, lacy things dragged out for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner when we still did that.


Maybe a small portrait in a Victorian frame of some relative no one remembered rattled between the candles and a small dish of errant buttons, straight pins. But as for a good place to prowl, that washstand was a gasping disappointment.


Mother loved bayberry candles because they reminded her of her childhood, perhaps her own mother, whom she lost when she was eight. We irritated her and drew sharp words when we complained about her other eccentricities, but as for the scent of bayberry, it was if she didn’t even hear us, would smile in a way that was unfamiliar, and tell us, gently, to use the backdoor if the scent was too much.


Which is why I sit here this morning with a lit votive of bayberry, trying to coerce the scent of my childhood, the better to remember my mother and that smile. It is tough going. The candles I ordered were crafted of the waxen berries of the bayberry shrub. The packaging is beautiful, with a little card explaining the significance of bayberry in colonial times, especially at Christmas and the New Year.


The color of the votive and the tapers I also bought is right. The same green that is neither bright nor dull but its own color, distinct and evocative. I opened the box with much anticipation, expecting to be hit with the smell, one I have come to love. But nothing.


Well, I reasoned, being made from the real thing, of course the scent would be subtle, coming into its own once lit. And still, nothing. I see now the fancy box says the candle is “real bayberry wax,” and maybe that makes a difference. My mother ordered hers directly from a shop in Colonial Williamsburg, a place near to her heart, and in our family this must surely have been a big splurge.


Maybe her candles weren’t “real” bayberry at all. Or, maybe these candles of mine are sub par and I was seduced by the packaging. And, perhaps this is important as the holiday season approaches because I am missing my mother.


I see now I have to replicate, not the candle, but the scent. And not just any old bayberry, but the right bayberry. Research must be done. I have long given up trying to replicate that one great party, the one big time at the end of summer. The perfect birthday. The spontaneous drop in visit that lasted deep into the night, all the world’s troubles solved.


But I must replicate the bayberry of my childhood.


The old washstand sits in my living room now. The top drawer holds boxes of handwritten recipes, the tops of the cards furred with age and use. The remaining drawers, all the things I don’t know what to do with–DVDs, pulled pages from glossy magazines, journals and calendars.


As we welcome a new generation of family, most so little yet we can’t risk open flame anywhere near them, surely there is a place for a box of fragrant tapers packed away in a drawer, with scent of bayberry escaping through the joinery, somehow whispering the important thing.
Surely, this thing I can find.

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A Life, and Living, in Books

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The ottoman at the foot of my grandmother’s chair was always stacked with books. Novels, history books, all dressed in their shiny stepping-out jackets, neatly cosseted in plastic by the staff at the Carnegie Free Library. She visited the library on Wednesday so she would have books for the weekend. My dad visited on Sundays, a quiet lull amid all the noise at home. I often tagged along and helped carry the huge photography books encasing all the atrocities of World War II or Mathew Brady’s grainy images of Antietam and Gettysburg.


No one at my house seemed to think this was unsuitable material for children, and we pored over those books, our legs gone numb as we sat side by side with them on our laps, turning with solemnity the heavy pages.


I accumulated my own stack of books, those Arrow Books we ordered a few times a year at school. I loved to watch my little pile grow on the end of my desk as my teacher sorted and delivered the books, always a little frazzled and put out. She never loved book delivery day as much as we did. I kept my little pile by my bed, reading under the covers, and sometimes sleeping with a particularly good one next to my pillow.


I still do.

My pal, Alice, though, raises the love of books to a level that borders on worship, or adoration, or personification. Maybe all of it. She thinks books have feelings. She will tell you she knows they do. Out shopping, she frets if she picks up a book and puts it down, worrying she has hurt its feelings by rejecting it. I used to think she was making a joke. I have come to realize she believes this on some cosmic, bizarre or daft level.


Her books are her friends, and she is at peace and her breathing slows when she is surrounded by them. They comfort her, the very sight of them, and when she looks at her books lined up on shelves all around her, it is as if she is looking at her loved ones, for she is. She doesn’t just see the covers and titles, she sees deep into the pages, knows her books like she knows her grandchildren, knows their first words, their first steps, hesitant or sure. All the ways big and small we know and love a thing, a child, a life.


She inherited her love for books from her parents, her mother, especially. As an adolescent her mother, Fannie, was assigned “Les Miserables” by Victor Hugo as a summertime punishment for her behavior in school. She devoured it. She quoted from it all the rest of her days.


Alice would take her mother a book she had just read, even if it was late at night, especially if the book made her “squall.” Alice and Fannie loved to squall over books. They returned to their books like old friends, noting on the back the date and time they turned the last page. Fannie, wrote in ink, Alice in pencil. They re-read them often. They included the page numbers where they marked passages against the time they might grow lonesome for their friends, or wanted to remember, exactly, the beautiful words.


One winter’s evening I sat with Alice, trying to remember the name of a book we both read and loved. She went to her bookshelf, a big and heaving thing, and found it, brought it me. Yes, it looked like the book, and I flipped the pages looking for something familiar to assure myself she found it. In pencil, almost too faint to see, were paragraphs marked, sentences underlined.


I read them, then read them aloud to Alice. Listen to this, I’d say. After, we looked at each other, stunned, or moved, or both. Minutes went by, or did they? The room seemed to hold just the books, and us, and the thinnest of light to read by.. And in the back, Alice’s name, and date and time. And someday, perhaps another signature, a date far distant, or near. A good visit with an old friend on another winter’s night. But more than that, too.