"Why," asked my husband, "do you have a reducer on your desk?"
Well, it's not really my *desk* - it's really our dining room table, but I
have been working from home for ten and a half months and it's not like we're
throwing dinner parties, and yes, I had been rummaging around in the bin of
spare plumbing bits in the cellar, because I needed something to act as a
candlestick. As one does.
Over time, I've accumulated many many candles - mostly tapers, some pillars, a
few in jars or tins. Some I've bought, some were gifts, a couple of dozen were
a score from our local Buy Nothing page (a super useful iteration of
Facebook). And yes, some of the candle stash came home with me when we cleaned
out our mother's house. Since about mid-December, because it's dark and cold
out, we've been lighting candles on the mantle almost every night. I have, as
a result, been working through the candle drawer.
Stuffed way in the back was a plastic bag, clear plastic, the long narrow kind
the newspaper comes in. (My mother was the queen of reusing every single
plastic bag, even the ones that had had newsprint in them and probably
shouldn't have had celery stored in them later.) Inside, wrapped in tattered
newsprint, I could feel several candles. My fingers knew that they were bigger
wider taller than standard tapers, so I've ignored them for years, thinking
they were some kind of utility candle. But the other day, I pulled them out
and unwrapped them. Huh. Two tapers, and one half taper. The half taper had
been sawed cleanly across - so the wick was merely visible in cross section,
no little loose bit of string emerged. More mysteriously, all three were
stamped STA. ISABEL down towards the bottom.
Many questions remain, though. Where did my mother come by three clearly
ecclesiastical candles? Who was
Saint Isabel? Why did someone saw the third candle in half? And how did it take me so
long to surface these mysteries?
