The Letter • No. 001
Light the Candle
October 1. 2026
I don’t remember exactly how old I was, but I know I was young.
I remember going to Bath & Body Works with my mom, my Aunt Darlene, my Nana, and my cousin LaJoyce. We would spend what felt like forever in there, picking up candle after candle, taking off lids and passing them around.
Smell this one.
No, smell this one.
By the time we left, we’d smelled so many candles you almost had a headache from it. But eventually, after all that sniffing and deciding, we’d found the ones worth bringing home.
And then we’d bring them home. And never light them.
They’d sit in a closet or a cabinet. One might make its way into the hutch in the dining room or sit somewhere looking pretty. But actually strike a match and burn the candle we’d spent all that time choosing?
Hardly ever.
Maybe someone was coming over. Maybe we wanted the house to smell especially good. Maybe there was an occasion.
But just because?
No.
Even as a little girl, I never really understood that.
I thought about it again recently when I turned thirty.
For my birthday, my mom, my sister, and three of my cousins surprised me with a trip to the mountains of North Carolina. One day we spent the afternoon downtown, wandering in and out of little local shops.
These days, whenever I find one of those small, locally owned candle shops, I’m probably going in. I love finding candles that feel like they were poured on someone’s kitchen table.
So, naturally, I found one.
One of my cousins said, “That’s going to be such a great keepsake to remember your thirtieth birthday.”
And I immediately thought: Oh, I’m going to remember it.
But I’m also going to burn it.
Because somewhere along the way, I’ve realized that using something doesn’t make it less meaningful to me.
Sometimes using it is what gives it meaning in the first place.
I think part of that comes from how deeply I remember my life through scent.
My Granny Gran, my great-grandmother on my mom’s side, wore something from Avon. I couldn’t tell you today whether it was a lotion or a perfume. She died when I was seven years old, and I’m thirty now, so I certainly couldn’t tell you what it was called.
But I know that smell.
Every so often, in some completely random place at some completely random time, I’ll smell it. I don’t know where it comes from. I doubt people are still walking around wearing the exact same Avon scent my great-grandmother wore all those years ago.
But for just a second, there she is. And it is comforting in a way that’s difficult to explain.
There’s another smell I couldn’t name if you asked me to. It’s the smell of my Nanny’s house in Gloucester. I don’t know what makes it smell that way. I couldn’t tell you if it’s something she cooked, something she cleaned with, the house itself, or some combination of a hundred little things that my brain decided belonged together.
I just know it as Gloucester.
Even now, as an adult, every once in a while I’ll walk somewhere or catch a scent in the air that is even remotely like it, and without thinking I’ll say, “Oh, it smells like Gloucester.” Not it smells like Nanny’s house. Apparently, in my mind, an entire place has a smell. Which is a little ridiculous and pretty funny when I think about it.
“Most of our lives will happen on Tuesday morning.”
But I think that’s what memory does. Somewhere along the way, the smell of one house became the smell of a place, and the smell of a place became part of what childhood smells like to me.
I think scent does that to us.
Apples can put somebody back in their grandmother’s kitchen while she’s making a pie. Pumpkin can take somebody back to childhood trips to the pumpkin patch. A perfume can bring back a person. A certain smell in the air can bring back a house you haven’t stepped inside in twenty years.
We don’t always decide which moments become memories. Sometimes our senses decide for us.
And maybe that’s one of the reasons I’ve become a person who lights the candle.
Every morning, I wake up and take Westyn outside. I give him his food and fresh water. Then I walk through my home, take my cute little wick trimmers, trim the wick of that candle I bought in the mountains, and light it.
Then I walk over to my coffee area, brew my three shots of espresso, make my latte, and settle onto the couch for a little while.
Sometimes I watch television. Sometimes I read a devotional. Sometimes I listen to music. There’s nothing particularly extraordinary about any of it. It’s just morning.
And maybe that’s exactly why I love it.
Because I’ve started to wonder when we decided we needed a reason to use the beautiful things. Why did we spend an hour smelling candles only to put the one we loved in a cabinet? Why do the good dishes wait for company? Why do we save certain dresses for an occasion worthy of wearing them? Why do we make our homes especially beautiful when someone else is coming through the door?
Why are we so willing to make beauty for the extraordinary days of our lives while treating the ordinary ones like something we simply need to get through?
There will be weddings and birthdays and Christmas dinners and dinner parties and celebrations. There will be days that announce themselves as important while we’re living them.
But most of our lives won’t happen there.
Most of our lives will happen on Tuesday morning.
They’ll happen while the dog is eating breakfast and the espresso is brewing. They’ll happen before work, while the house is still quiet. They’ll happen in the same rooms, doing the same little things, with the same people we see all the time.
And those days are worthy of beauty, too.
Maybe twenty years from now, I’ll smell something that reminds me of that candle from my thirtieth birthday and suddenly I’ll remember these mornings. I’ll remember this version of my home. This version of Westyn. This version of myself. I’ll remember sitting on my couch with a latte before the day had really begun.
Or maybe I won’t. Maybe the candle will simply have made my house smell beautiful for a few weeks. I think that’s still reason enough.
I’ve spent enough of my life watching beautiful things wait for an occasion. And I’m beginning to believe that waking up and getting another ordinary Tuesday morning is an occasion all its own.
So use the dishes.
Wear the dress.
Make the coffee in the cup you love.
Put the flowers on the table even if nobody is coming over.
And please
light the candle.