Candle (brief memoir)

The wick of the soy candle we bought last November stretches its neck up high out of the wax.  The wax has melted in layers, like tiers in a sports stadium.  Like sections of a theatre, ready to hear the stories the
wick has to tell.  The yellow flame on the wick starts small, slow, rising like the tired sun of late fall, barely able to burn through the gray, matted clouds.  The day my wife and I bought this candle was like that.  Only small streaks of cool blue able to peak through the pillowy, low hanging grey.  Sun too, beaming through the clouds and onto the trees at a low angle, like the flame, now stronger, growing, shining through the white residue on the top half of the jar.  Finally the scent reaches my nose.  Hazelnut coffee.  We sniffed so many candles that day.  We had too, they were all the same creamy white.  From Orchard Peach to Chocolate Chip Cookie, the soy farmer who made these candles added no coloring, only the label warned your nose of what was coming.  The elderly woman behind the counter told us so, her voice soft and calm like a librarian but with a laugh that popped like a log burning on a fire.  The pool of melted wax below the wick is almost yellow, or a wet creamy white, and it reflects the light of the bouncing flame upward, on the grooved rim of the jar, on the computer equipment behind it.  There was very little electronic equipment in the candle shop.  Just a credit card machine surrounded by pencils and paper and candle wax and pennies.   And shoppers, grinning as they passed candles back and forth, the lids off.  "Smell this one."  The Hazelnut scent has now filled each corner of my room, and it passes my nose in waves.  Like the first time I lit the candle and my daughters searched around for my cup of coffee.  That second Sunday cup, one daughter likes to smell it, the other taste it.  We all laughed when they figured out it was a candle.  "How does it do that, Dad?"  How does it do that?