MYSUESTORIES: My Candle in The Wind

Another fundraiser. Every year the kids come home from school with brightly colored pamphlets urging family, friends, and neighbors alike to buy over priced gift wrap or chocolates or seeds.
The evening of my now seventeen year old's parent orientation to preschool at the Cult of the Resurrection, we, the parents, were handed fundraiser packets before the kid ever stepped foot in the school!

Every year for the next ten years, he brought home fundraising stuff. For five of those years, we obligatory ordered from two sons with usually the same exact catalogs.

We have spent more on wrapping paper some years than we have on gifts! We have paid exorbirant amounts of money on candy and chocolates we neither like nor needed on our hips! And the sunflower seeds! One year we spent $50. on ten bags of sunflower seeds, each, according to the package, containing 200 seeds. We dug, we planted, we sowed, we watered. How many plants did we reap? Not. A. Single. Damned. Plant! But, in all fairness, we did have the happiest squirrels in town!

Then, suddenly, after our last sixth grader headed to junior high, the sales pitches stopped. NOBODY was happier (and richer!) than me.

Imagine my surprise the other day when the twelve year old brought home a large, bulky white envelope.
"What's that?" mysuestories inquired.
"Oh, yeah. We're raising money for something. You gotta buy candles," says the child who shall one day teach dachshunds to dance.
"It's a real cool catalog, too. You can scratch and sniff some of the candles," he continued.
He then proceeded to scratch and have me sniff each sniffable page in the book.
He put the catalog down on the table, and I completely put the fundraiser out of mind by the time the magazine was out of hands.

Don't get me wrong. We here at mysuestories manor love candles, and we have loads of them everywhere (although I AM partial to vanilla scented, we have quite the variety of scents-usually determined by the color of the room in which it will be housed....hunter green in the bathroom, ocean blue for the kitchen....)
So, it's not really a question of whether we like candles. See for yourself:

From Goodbye Norma Jean

So, you get the picture...get it? The picture, I mean.

From Goodbye Norma Jean

Anyway, the Mountain Man comes in later and notices the catalog. He picks it up and mutters something about another over priced fundraiser, but don't some of those candle scent names sound nice.
"And," mysuestories speaks, "you can scratch and sniff them."

Now, I should preface this by saying that the Mountain Man was in the paper printing business for many years before mysuestories came along---We call all those years B.M.
No, dear reader, it does not stand for Bowel Movement, although truth be told, life simply had to be shitty without me around, right? No, B.M. simply stands for life Before Mysuestories. And it ends there. It also does not continue as in life Before Myesuestories made it hell. (Nobody likes a wise ass, Mountain Man!)
Anyway...Mountain Man proceeds to pick up the magazine and he is making these great big sniffing noises.

From Goodbye Norma Jean

"That's funny, mysuestories," says the man who can answer EVERY question on Jeopardy correctly, "All I smell is rubber based ink(!?!) and clay coat paper."
I walked over to where the man of my dreams is sniffing this magazine like a dog licks his own balls, and immediately zoomed in on the problem.
"Um, Mountain Man? The only ones you can smell are the ones with the great big circle on the candle that says "Scented Page. Gently rub jar candle to experience Midnight Jasmine. The page you're snorting like a junkie? That page doesn't have any scratch and sniff circles on it."
Days like this make the Mountain Man go from this