Candle Set 01 - The Odd Couple

My grandfather cooked dinner for about sixty years. My grandmother sat at the table and ran the room.

He pulled her chair out for her every meal, even in his own home. He made the food. She made the noise. Neither of them ever proposed a different arrangement.

They were nothing alike.

A while ago, I decided I wanted to make something in their memory. I settled on candles, although at the time I had absolutely no idea what either of them should smell like.

Which is a strange problem to discover you've given yourself.

So I started thinking about them.

Ronnie was easy. He didn't talk much. If you were looking for him, he was probably in the garden. It was maybe 4 x 30 feet, where he somehow managed to get tomatoes, beans, garlic, zucchini and some unknown type of peppers out of the ground every year.

He could stand at the end of a row staring at nothing for an hour. Ask him what he was thinking about and he'd say "nothing," or quite literally not say anything at all.

I think he wore the same three sweaters for about ninety years.

Grandma knit all three.

She was the exact opposite of him.

Isabel put on makeup to go to the pharmacy and dressed like there was a gala waiting at the end of every errand. Jewellery up both arms. I'm still convinced she slept in it.

The woman could not make toast.

This never appeared to damage her confidence in making conversation.

Somehow, they worked in perfect harmony for a very long time.

And the more I thought about them, the more I kept coming back to Sunday afternoons.

By 4pm, Ronnie would still be outside. Eventually he'd come in and wash his hands at the kitchen sink, which never really worked.

The smell of fresh vegetable plants gets on your hands and stays there. Green, warm, a little sharp. Not the vegetables themselves. The leaves. The plants. The vines.

Meanwhile, Isabel would be upstairs at the dresser doing her earrings.

Her perfume went on last. It always went on last. Deep rose, heavy, a little powdery, and strong enough that it came down the stairs about ten seconds ahead of her.

When I was a kid, none of this registered as anything worth remembering.

It was simply Sunday dinner.

Garden on his hands. Rose wafting down the stairs. Everybody waiting for Isabel. Ronnie getting dinner ready.

It was just what it all smelled like.

And I probably wouldn't have thought much more about it if, years later, I hadn't walked past somebody in a store wearing something close to Isabel's perfume.

For about a second and a half, I wasn't in the store anymore.

I was back to being 11 years old, standing by the front door in my boots, waiting for her to finish talking so everybody could finally leave.

Then I was back in the store.

I'd forgotten all of that. But apparently some part of me hadn't.

And that's when it occurred to me.

I already knew what the candles should smell like. I'd known for years. I just hadn't known I remembered.

So I found a candle maker here in Toronto named Monica.

I didn't give her fragrance notes because I wouldn't have known how. I just told her about my grandparents.

I told her about Ronnie's garden, the four o'clock hands and the sweaters he never took off. I told her about Isabel's dresser, the earrings and the perfume that made it down the stairs before she did.

Which, when you think about it, is a ridiculous way to brief a candle maker.

How do you turn a man standing in a vegetable garden into a fragrance?

How do you make ten seconds before someone walks downstairs smell like anything at all?

I wasn't even sure you could. Monica, thankfully, did not point out that neither of these things was a fragrance note.

She poured what she thought I meant.

When they were ready, I brought them home and lit them both one Sunday afternoon. One in the kitchen, one at the front door. Then I went about whatever I was doing.

I wasn't sitting there waiting to feel something. I wasn't even paying much attention to them.

A few minutes later, I walked into the kitchen and looked at the sink. That's it. I just looked over at the sink.

Ronnie always washed his hands there when he came in from the garden.

Later I caught the rose and, without thinking, looked toward the stairs.

And that one got me. I hadn't deliberately thought about the sink or the stairs in years.

But apparently some part of me still knew exactly where everybody was supposed to be.

The house just smelled right. That was enough.

Anyways, there are two candles.

Ron's Garden. Fresh tomato vine, green leaves, basil and a little citrus. It's quiet, green and earthy. Like Ronnie, it doesn't announce itself. You notice it a little while after you sit down, and then you keep noticing it even though it doesn't pay attention back to you.

Isabel's Jewellery.​ A deep, warm rose, rich and a little powdery. That one has considerably less restraint. Your neighbours will know when you're home.

And once we had them, there was never really a question of selling one without the other.

You never got one of them.

If you rang the doorbell on a Sunday afternoon, you got both. If you called the house, both picked up the phone, but only one said hello.

They were nothing alike. Somehow, they belonged together. So I called the set The Odd Couple.

And we don't sell them separately.

There are 96 sets.

Not because 96 is a particularly clever number. I just wasn't sure anybody besides me would want candles that reminded me of my grandparents. Plus, Monica had to pour all 192 of them by hand.

I don't think she's used to people showing up with assignments like this.

I suspect Ronnie would find the entire idea unnecessary. Or ask me why I didn't pour them myself.

Isabel would want to know why her name wasn't first.

Thanks for reading.

I hope you enjoy them as much as I did making them.