Out of Office Candle

Notes: Spearmint, Pineapple, Bamboo, Coconut

Cut a cold pineapple open on a hot afternoon: that first juicy, sweet-tart hit off fresh fruit, greener and sharper than the canned kind, is the first thing you smell here. Over that, a cool green line of spearmint, sweet and soft, the kind you get from crushing a fresh leaf between your fingers.

Underneath it, the green, watery smell of fresh-cut bamboo, the air you walk into between tall stalks after rain, damp and grassy with a thin thread of pale wood and the sound of leaves moving overhead. The base is coconut, soft and milky, the last inch of a piña colada with the ice still knocking around the glass, the fresh split-open kind.

Cold fruit and cool mint up front, warm coconut and damp green behind. You end up in the shade at the edge of a beach, a breeze coming through the stalks while the sun stays out on the sand.