Macintosh

I absolutely love/appreciate/adore Yankee’s Macintosh candle scent. Brent and I recently received a gift card to Bed Bath and Beyond (or “BB&B” as Brent loves to refer to it), as a thank you for participating in a friend’s wedding. I hadn’t let myself indulge in the luxury of my favorite Yankee candle, as I have always felt that they are WAY overpriced. However, I convinced Brent to let us use the gift card for a candle I had been coveting for quite some time (I had refrained from using any of our wedding gift cards to purchase one), and that day I left the store the proud owner of a Macintosh scented YANKEE candle. As I carefully held the candle in my arms Brent still didn't quite understand the obsession...his exact words being, "What? It just burns and smells."

We love our apartment, but our neighbors that share a wall with us love to smoke. So occasionally the scent will waft through our cabinets and other crevices, or I’ll cook an, albeit tasty, unreasonably stinky meal, and a candle is simply a necessity. Sure, some may like to use air freshners you spray from a can, or nifty plug ins, but since I was deprived the privilege of burning candles throughout college (which, might I add at this point, even if the college had given us the okay, my roommate, whose father is in the insurance business, would have otherwise convinced us not to burn them), so…I like to “light up.”

So the other night, like so many nights since I have purchased this wonderful (and although I hate to admit it…totally worth the money) candle, I lit the pillar of wax and relaxed in the awesome scent of Macintosh (a very fresh, apple smell, for those of you not familiar with Yankee lingo).

This is when I realized the connection I have to this smell…as “they” say smells evoke more emotions than anything else. As I watched the flames flicker (yes, I appreciate this candle so much, sometimes I just like to watch it burn), the smell brought me back a few years. It was at this point that I realized that one of my favorite teachers in high school always had a Macintosh Yankee candle on her desk. Burning or not, her room typically smelled of this wonderful scent. And as I sat in my apartment here in Louisville so far away from that room in my high school back home, I realized that this smell was helping me remember… and then the next memory flooded in, as if wanting to get its press time as well. All of a sudden I was back in my first car, a little, red ’91 Ford Escort, bumping down the old…beat up…potholed brick street towards the house I grew up in, a little Macintosh Yankee air-freshner dangling from my rear-view mirror.

Isn’t it amazing what smells can trigger? Somehow I realize that my fight to obtain this candle and burn it in our new apartment was an attempt, however weak it may be, to keep drawing some connections to my past…to keep my soul attuned to the life I have been given, both past and present.

Unfortunately, although it says 90+ hours of burn time, my candle of memories is quickly, and quite literally, melting away. I’ve tried cheap imitations, but nothing quite captures everything that Yankee’s Macintosh scent holds for me. So, if you’re ever at a store and see a Yankee Macintosh candle for sale, let me know! Or better yet, buy it, burn it, and maybe somehow you will think of me :)