lost-and-found trick-or-treater

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With the help of friends, owners of a house in our current town carve 100 jack-o-lanterns every Halloween

I don't know how the olfactory organ manages it - the blessed nose - the way it skips decades like a stone on the surface of water and brings back October thirty-firsts from forty years ago in a nanosecond. I just know it works.

On the drive home from the university this week in the early evening dusk, if I smell burning leaves from someone's yard, instantly I am walking fast in that I-will-not-be-overly-excited-and-run walk that trick-or-treaters commence from their own porch into a dark but streetlit Halloween night (unless you're my husband as a boy and you just full out run door to door, pillow case slung over your shoulder to be stuffed with as much candy as you can carry, go home, dump it out on the living room floor, and go back out again, running).

For blocks and blocks my small town neighborhood angled off in rows of sidewalks covered in crispy brown leaves, lined with beacons: porch lights inviting me and hundreds of other kids to walk up to a friend's or a stranger's door, reach a hand into a big Melmac bowl and help ourselves to candy - politely take one, or impolitely grab a handful - to what I hoped would be Snickers, Reese's peanut butter cups or sour apple bubble gum, but please no Tootsie Rolls or apples.

We were little fishermen docking for a few seconds at ports of call, lit like lighthouses, where we filled our nets with what the neighborhood sea had stocked.

One Halloween, I was lost at sea.

Little Ruthie got invited to go trick-or-treating with a grown up friend of an older sister. Was it the year Nancy sewed me an 18th century Martha Washington costume complete with black lace mask, shawl and fingerless gloves, white wig dotted with blue satin rosebuds, and lovely draped blue satin garniture hanging from the waist? Impossibly, I managed to go off with Charlene and have a blast without either of us informing my parents. Have you ever seen a police car parked in front of your house, complete with spinning red and white lights? Whatever fun you were just having disappears like a wave seeping into sand.

But no doubt, the catch I emptied onto the carpet, sorted into piles of keepers and undesirables, then eaten a few a day, mollified my guilt into mid-November.
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