Candle Making

The smell of melting wax
or wood burning fireplace
brings me back to Mom’s warm kitchen
in the winter when I was a boy.
Today eggnog or hot chocolate
helps me feel the joy.
Newspapered table mottled top
colored with translucent spots.

From shoebox and coffee cans
to grab jam-seal paraffin,
broken crayons and string
we’ve collected since spring.
Mom is at the melting pot
pushed back on the Monarch top.
Bernie stoked the stove with
some pitch-wood kindling sticks
and it’s still too hot.

Dad is back from town—
he sold a sow or wiener pig.
We melt, and dip, and dot with
the colors of Crayola’s rainbow—
a child’s scent of heaven outside school.
Rosie hangs a gang of wicks
and waxen shafts to dry and dip again.
I peel off a thimble made
by dabbing thumb with melted wax.

Ouch! There goes the cat
to scatter shoebox lid of ships—
the shells of walnut halves
half-filled with wax.
Help to rig the toothpick masts
and spars of pirate's fleet.
Then sheeted with feahered sails
or set with cancelled stamps.
Two cents, five cents—
what expense to sail the tub
or skid the frozen puddles
by the back porch step.

Christmas candle making
when I was five. The scent
of color crayons, melting wax,
and a fleet of ships,
all a part of this good time
in kitchen warm and winter home.
Some day I’d help
Mary and Jerome like that,
if they’d hold the cat.

           ak 11/01, rev. 12/05