W hat distinguishes a candle from other lights is that it appeals to our soul, not our eyes, says the Turkish playwright Mehmet Murat Ildan.
When I light a candle, or blow one out, it speaks to more than my soul. The smell of the wick igniting or being extinguished places me 60 years back in time.
For precious moments I am once more lost in my earliest and best childhood memories. I am back in my granny's kitchen in her mudbrick house on the northern side of Kempton Park.
I see the hissing Tilley paraffin lamp with its little pump in the middle of the enamel-top kitchen table and the adults sitting around it talking about politics every time the radio announced the news broadcast with a series of Morse code peeps. I smell the bag of Kenna brewing in the yellow enamel coffee pot on the coal stove. My sister and I sit on the floor and play and we look at the silhouettes of the adults’ shapes and the moving shadow hands against the wall. We see fairy stories playing out in the shadows. Dragons, and a prince who lives in the towers of Ouma’s pantry cupboard.
Years later, my gran's few hectares of land became part of a golf course, and then came the cluster housing. Ouma went to live in town in a house with electricity and the enchantment of
