What’s Burning?

We went to the Botanic Gardens this weekend, it was the peak of the Iris season, which was just lovely. They have one area that is the “smelly” area. Linden, roses, yarrow, just a cornucopia of scents coming at you of varying strengths and sweetness.  Your nose smells something beautiful, and you go and hunt it down, just to have something else come wafting by that’s more pungent, not as sweet, but equally compelling.  Mother Nature does such a great job at this that I’m always hunting for candles or something that can recreate some of that in my home. Never happy with just one thing or one smell, I need the candle, the room spray, the sachets, the soaps.  A house should have smells in every nook and cranny that are different and unique to what you are trying to create, and you should get that surprise of…. What in the world did I have in here burning?

Gratuitous picture of my boys when they were just little, maybe 6 and 3. I look at that picture and think how much they have changed, but that relationship they had then, they still have. I remember reading an old Ann Landers column back when I was young and hated kids and swore I would never have any, and Ann stated she had done a poll and a majority of parents had responded that if they had the choice to go back and do it over again and not have kids, that they would not have kids.  Then I completely agreed, thinking of all the grief I had given my parents, and nobody in their right mind signs on for that in retrospect.  Now, I can intellectually understand why parents would say, well, there is no real benefit to having kids, my life would have been better in material ways had I not had them, they take from you always and never give back or feel about you the way you feel about them.  My response to that is, but of course!  That is the best journey in the world, to give all of yourself to people who can/will never return it in kind and intensity.  You will empty your life onto unworthy, ungrateful objects.  That is the magnificence of being human.

Well, plus being able to torture your children with hundreds of scents in the house. My boys put up with smells everywhere — candles and soaps and potpourri, having something constantly shoved under their noses with a demand to sniff please! and tell me whether they liked it or not.  Weird thing is, they always liked that patchwork of smells throughout the house and still do. They both have a great scent radar, and I suspect they will one day make fabulous fragrance gifts to their wives, well, once they get them..

While we were up in Estes Park this weekend, we ran across some candles and soaps I/we liked. First up  is the Pacifica line.  There were several scents there that were worthy, but our favorite was the Red Ginger. Pungent and spicy, this is just a great scent that made us both happy, which is not normal  Mr. Patty likes all the spicy, woodsy scents, and I like, well, about everything!   Others scents that are interesting — Roman frankincense, Mountain Temple (vetiver in this!), Mexican Cocoa, Mediterranean fig, Thai Lemongrass.  We just got the soaps in this because they only had the little votive candles available, but their website has candles, soaps and lotions.

The next one, I’m having more trouble finding the candle I liked the most. Capri Blue is the brand of the candle. They come in a cobalt blue glass container. My favorite scent was the Tuscan Sun, and they just had one candle left in that flavor, and I’ve searched the web, only to come up empty handed. But the Volcano scent is very nice as well. I found some of them at Aspen Bay Candle Company.

The line I’d like to know more about and get some recommendations for is the Burn. Anyone have a favorite flavor there? Any other lines that must be sniffed?