The time one of those sand candles from the 70’s almost burned our house down (not an Advent story)

I’ve had mercy in places you wouldn’t believe, so much mercy that I sometimes get cocky about it. Like when one of those sand candles from the 70’s nearly burned our house down. That ramshackle on Saanich Road I wrote a famous song about. (No? I’ll play it for you sometime.)

Candle: squat, bowl-shaped, and at four pounds of industrial wax, it burned for days and nights — thought it would never die. It was the summer we lived in the basic detritus of a continual party. Pilsner empties (the odd Mateus), hash pipes made of tinfoil, blackened butter knives, ashtrays made of melted disco LPs (that’s what you did with disco back then), and sleepers — I mean us, six, eight, ten, depending, splayed across a crusted carpet. (I could give you names but they know who they are.)

Anyway, I don’t remember who started to cough, then started yelling, fire! But I remember running to the sink to get pots of water to throw at the corner of the living room. Walls scorched, our bed-sheet picture window curtain, singed; the candle, now, a greenish-black canopy caked over a charred speaker tower, a puddle of paraffin on the floor. We opened the windows, the doors, front and back, and returned to sleep.

A month or so later we abandoned the house and left for a smaller island. On the final night we had a house wrecking party. Sounds bad, I know. But listen, a week earlier the landlord showed up, “Sold to developers, you need to get the hell out before the bulldozers come.” “When?” queried I, “Not to worry,” quoth he, “you’ll know.” That was the longest and deepest talk we ever had.

Moral? as you predicted, there is none. I’m sorry. So I’ll just cut to the end: One fine day the following May (or May-ish), after wintering on Salt Spring, we returned to Saanich Road (we could be sentimental) and found, growing on the mound of that demolished house, a healthy and happy crop of cannabis. Some plants were already in bud, others too young, still, we harvested a large garbage bag full. And to think (stretching the thing about mercy), we used to curse the amount of seeds you’d get in a dime bag.