Trimming the Wick

By morning the wick is a ruin. Where last night there was a clean small tongue of flame there's now a blackened stalk, curled over at the top into a little charred mushroom, brittle, grey-black, leaning where the draught pushed it. The wax around it has set again into a shallow crater, and the glass of the lamp, if you didn't trim it in time, has a bloom of soot up one side, a grey ghost of every hour the flame guttered and smoked.

You take the wick between finger and thumb — cold now, the char coming off on your skin in a soft black smudge — and you feel how fragile it's gone. The burnt part has no strength left in it. It crumbles. You can pinch the dead mushroom clean off and it breaks away with a tiny crackle, leaving the wick shorter and ragged, and that ragged edge is the whole problem, because a wick that burns unevenly burns dirty, throwing up a thread of black smoke and a smell of scorched cotton and a light that jumps and shrinks.

So you trim it properly. Small scissors, or the little curved snips made for exactly this and nothing else, and you cut the wick square across, an eighth of an inch of it standing proud of the wax. No more. A long wick makes a tall greedy flame that smokes and blackens the glass; a wick cut too short drowns in its own melted wax and gutters out. There's a right height, and it's small, and you find it by eye and by the memory in your fingers of how last night's flame stood — too tall, so a little shorter today.

The snipped end falls away, a curl of spent black cotton no bigger than a comma. You brush the crumbs of char off the rim so they won't be drawn up into the flame. If it's an oil lamp you check the level in the well, and top it, and the smell of the oil rises thin and clean and faintly sweet. You wipe the glass — the soot comes off on the cloth in a grey film, and the chimney goes clear again, and you can see through it to the other side of the room the way you couldn't an hour ago.

Then you light it. The match, the small sulphur flare and its bitter smell, held to the trimmed edge of the wick. It catches along the cotton with a soft crawl of orange, and for a moment the flame is uncertain, too big, feeding on the last frayed fibres, guttering. You wait. You let it settle. And it does settle — the flame drawing down into itself, narrowing, steadying, until it stands there clean and still and pointed, a small even leaf of light, blue at its foot and gold at its tip, drawing the wax up through the wick as fast as it burns it and no faster.

That steadiness is the whole reward of the trimming. An untended wick fights you all evening — flaring, smoking, blackening its own glass, dimming as the char builds until you're squinting to read by a light you should be able to trust. A trimmed one just burns. Quiet. Even. Undemanding. It asks nothing more of you for hours, and gives back a light that doesn't waver, and you forget it's there, which is the highest thing a flame can do for you.

It's a small maintenance, and it returns every single day the lamp is used. The flame does its slow work and, in doing it, spoils the very thing it works by — chars the wick that feeds it, sooties the glass that lets it shine. Left alone it will strangle itself on its own leavings, guttering down into smoke and a bad smell and, finally, dark. It only stays honest because someone comes each morning with small scissors and a cloth and cuts away the burnt part, and squares the edge, and wipes the soot, and gives it back its eighth of an inch of clean cotton to stand up and burn.