It’s amazing how cheap old technology is.
My wife and I have been using an oil lamp up at the cabin. It gives far more light than candles, but somehow it’s not quite as romantic. Also, the glass around the flame gets hotter than glass ought to get without turning another color or beeping or something. It didn’t come with a Surgeon General’s Pithy Tip printed all down the side, so I found out the hard way. A couple times.
Anyhow, this was all manure on the compost pile of my subconscious, so to speak, (don’t blame me, that’s a genuine Ray Bradbury metaphor there, straight out of Zen and the Art of Writing, a title I did not make up) when my wife and I went to the thrift store the other day. This incredible little gem is not only the same place I found a manual typewriter for two dollars (less than the new ribbon cost), it is also home to a wider selection of useful old technology than I have ever before encountered, generally for under five dollars.
So, to make a long blog short, though we didn’t find what we wanted, we did find shelves full of candle holders. The pricier items, such as a stylish candleabra, ran to twenty-five cents. Steep, but we bit.
Now as you bathe in the glow of your monitor screen and the ‘daylight’ light bulb, (You do have one, right? Almost not entirely unlike sunlight.) you may wonder what is so exciting about candle holders. Obviously, you aren’t a serious candle user.
Neither were we when we stocked up for our cabin. Back then, last November, we were young and foolish, and what serious flamers term ’sentimental’ candle users. We’d flick off the lights and light a thick, gorgeous candle and sit in the dark and feel like we were one step away from moving into the Little House on the Prairie.
We never noticed that the second or third time we did this, the flame disappeared into the bowels of the wax and became a rosy glow. We didn’t notice because we weren’t trying to do anything, like read or brush our teeth or walk across the floor without tumbling over our discarded, manure-festooned boots. We just sat there and felt quite rustic. There’s nothing more relaxing than sedentary homesteading.
The cabin brought a certain disillusionment. A thick candle, however lovely in the daytime, couldn’t hold a candle to a lean, mean, boring taper. (That’s a thin candle.) Due to physics not yet understood (by me), the way wax melts, the thicker the candle, the longer you must burn it at a stretch. When you blow the candle out, the wax is funktified and next time you burn it, (this is key) the wax will only burn out as far as you burnt it last time. This is extraordinarily hard to explain without pictures. Basically, if the candle is three inches wide and you only burn it long enough to melt a one-inch wide circle, that one-inch wide circle is all that will ever melt. The flame will tunnel down into the belly of the candle and soon be imprisoned by a thick crust of light-slurping wax.
The taper’s advantage is clear. It’s so thin in the first place that it would take a real effort to light it for too short a time. Maybe to read “The Collected Wisdom of Bill Clinton, His Wife, and People Who Still Think They’re Cool, Plus Whoever Invented Parking Meters”, or some pithy tract like that.
But the universe can have cruel wrinkles, and the very thing that makes the taper so lovable is also its undoing, i.e., it can’t stand up. Try it. This is a real setback when you’re planning to light a candle and then do something besides hold it.
Hence candle holders. We got several. I also got a little shelf that used to hold a mirror for fifty cents (subtle grammatical humor there, see if you can spot it…) which I mounted next to the front and only cabin door. With two candles in their new holders and a box of matches, the shelf holds a rustic light switch. I walk in and voila, light! I no longer have to crawl for the matches and the oil lamp on the far table. I hope. I’ll be trying it tonight for the first time, if I ever finish this blog.
I also have candles in their new holders at key points around the room, such as where we brush our teeth. One thing an oil lamp can’t do is avoid shadows, whereas several candles working together can achieve, well, less shadows.
So that’s the story on candles. I’m realizing that the resolution to be short and the resolution not to edit much don’t go together well for me. Must work on that.
I won’t sign off without mentioning that after all that pioneer excitiment in fitting our cabin with candles, I decided to spend today (which was then tomorrow) on the computer and watching a movie I’d gotten from the library. Usually we work on Friday, but the farmer folks were going to be out and, after doing some work, my wife and I would have the place to ourselves.
Well. There was a lovely storm this morning, so striking that I actually stayed out to watch it. Nothing like trees getting whipped back and forth when you’re out in the forest with them. Unfortunately, that work of art knocked out the power here. So I, cabin man, trudged down expecting the bliss of electronics to find that nothing worked. No blog, no e-mail, no movie for the young homesteader.
Yeah. Like I said elsewhere, there are some thick training wheels on this bike, and I get grumpy when they’re off for even a few hours. Not quite Pa Wilder yet, I think.
Of course, no one ever said you can’t have electricity on a homestead. Pa Wilder sure would have. But I think he’d have done it the way I want to. You don’t have to wait all day for the power company to fix it (’it’ being the TV, the computer, the sink, the toilet, etc.) when your power spins in your backyard. I can’t wait for my windmill.
At least the wood stove worked. We’re solid friends now, believe me. Solid.
