—from Without Regret, by Eleanor Wilner

Our wet season is winding up, but we are getting a few days of hard, straight-down, heavy-as-lead rain, as a kind of encore before the monsoon trough relinquishes it’s hold on the weather. Soon it will be winter in Australia—cold down Sydney-way, yes, but it’s a fantastic time to be in the tropical North. Everyone in Darwin is looking forward to the change of season.

One recent morning was so dark and wet and miserable that I lit a few tapers…not so much to see by, but because I needed the emotional warmth, the flickering energy and golden color of those nibs of flame. Candles are a great comfort to me…I love the way they send shadows dancing around a dark room, and I can sit and stare at them for hours. My mom was a candle maker for many years…she didn’t make everyday taper candles, but one-of-a-kind art candles—tall, heavy pillars of translucent wax which glowed from within, revealing trapped dried flowers and fern tendrils curling inside the wax when lit. Her candles were widely exhibited, pricey, and sold to collectors…

But that didn’t stop my mother from using them as everyday candles in our home; she loved the 8-hour scheduled blackouts that the government instituted, for one year, in an attempt to cut down on national power expenses. She would come in from her workshop with armfuls of candles, and light them all. There were candles everywhere in the house on those nights—fifty of them, standing in groups of three or five, sitting on every piece of furniture, shining down from high ledges, throwing their light far up into the wooden beams of the pitched roof. The house looked like a medieval chapel, it was magical.

And there’s a teensy bit of the candlemaker passed down to me, too, because I spent many hours sitting with my mother in her workshop…it was where we had most of our mother-daughter talks. I even did some work for her, when she was swamped with orders, so I have the rudiments of candle making. Maybe someday I’ll do that for a spell.

This post was a bit random…just a bit of blather and procrastination before I get to work on some sewing projects I swore I’d finish today.

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