Ken loved candles. Once he found the battery operated flickering candles at Costco, our apartment was soon filled with them. They had timers in them, so they “lit” each evening at roughly the same time. When we’d be sitting in the front room watching TV and one would begin the slow chain reaction of lighting up, the first one of us to notice would say “magic time.” And we’d wait and watch the rest of them begin to glow. We couldn’t help but be filled with a little bit of wonderment at the soft yellow lights dancing before us.

There are easily a dozen of those candles. And they sat unused for nearly a year after Ken died. Clumped together on a shelf in a seldom-used room. I almost got rid of them, but decided to shelve them instead (literally). Magic time had escaped this house like lightning in a bottle.

Then at some point last year they became important to me–almost urgent–and I went about testing them, replacing batteries and scattering them around the apartment again. I’m certain the last person to perform any maintenance on them was Ken. It’s always a solemn and reverent experience to touch something that he last touched. And it’s happened hundreds of times.

There are two sets of candles in the front room. Four on the coffee table and three more on a nearby shelf. And each evening when one of them begins the little parade of light, I say aloud, “magic time.”