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.