My mom buys the grossest-smelling wax candle melts I’ve ever
smelled. They’re all Better Homes and Gardens scents like Cinnamon Spice and Iced
Winter Cranberry and Orange Cream
Cupcake. Which, ok. If I want my house to smell like baked goods, it’s
because there are in fact baked goods. Coming home to Buttercream Cookies wafting through the house, only to find an
empty kitchen and no cookies and another wax melt on the warmer, should be
illegal.
But the worst of all, the one I hate with a passion, is Line-Dried Linen. If you’ve never
smelled it, this scent is like a field of cotton saturated in too-sweet perfume
on a windless day, where the lack of breeze makes the scent stagnant and thick.
Or like sitting behind a row of little old ladies in church with their perfume
and hair spray and vague, moth ball smell. Basically, it gives me an instant
headache. And mom loves it.
Every evening after dinner, and occasionally on afternoons if
the house doesn’t smell fresh enough, my mother will drop two or three cubes of
these wax melts into her ceramic, leaf-shaped warmer. She’ll settle down at the
kitchen table, only five feet away, and read the newspaper in her bifocals.
(Front page, Sports, Nation, Comics, and TV listings, like clockwork.) At which
point, I’ll find an excuse to leave the room. While it’s impressive, the amount
of superhuman strength she possesses in order to breathe in such proximity to that
toxic scent, I never stick around to ponder it. I curl up on the couch with a
stack of papers to grade, or on the green rug of my bedroom floor with my
laptop, like I am now, and try to ignore it.
I’m sitting here right now, by the way, because Line-Dried Linen is slowly melting in
her ceramic warmer. But this time, I’m home alone.
You see, my mother is in the hospital as I write this. The
word echoes in my head on a loop, mom mom
mom, settles in the pit of my stomach like a stone. As I cleaned the house,
did the laundry, and scrolled through my tumblr feed, it was a stream of
constant dread needling at me. She’s going to be ok, but I keep thinking, what if. What if her simple staph infection gets worse? What if the hospital
germs make it worse? I once saw an episode of Grey’s Anatomy where a patient went in with the hiccups and died;
there was another where a lady died of a staph infection.
So when I got a text saying they’re keeping me another 24 hrs L the panic that had been floating quietly
around me all day solidified into a lump in my throat and I put the damned Line-Dried Linen on the wax burner. It’s
funny because you look around at all the reminders of a person—the trappings of
a busy, meaningful (if cluttered) life like they indicate permanence. You say,
well that’s her fleece jacket draped over a kitchen chair; those are her
treasured violets in the windowsill, she’s not going to just leave them. She has to come back. But if
there’s one thing we as humans should know by now, there is no life in things. They
do not contain light, only reflect it like the moon. We can’t take them with
us, and they can’t tether us here on Earth.
I never stopped to wonder what the Line-Dried Linen smells like to my mom until now. I don’t know if
the convenience of a strong scent distracting from a dirty house is its main
advantage, or if it reminds her of something special. Maybe she associates the
smell with something special and rare, like I do the scent of jasmine and
lavender. Maybe it’s the one moment of clarity in her busy, scent-rich day that
jolts her awake.
Here’s what I know, as I sit here alone: the familiar,
overpowering scent of a wax melt burning in an empty house, the hum of my
laptop, the now-familiar dread sinking in my stomach. And this is what I think
love is: burning a loved one’s favorite scent, throwing open the windows, and
praying the breeze will carry it to them and guide them home.
