Best Halloween Ever

Halloween night I sat on the parlor stairs, playing on my computer, waiting for kids to show up at the door. Since the doorbell doesn’t work, and the house is huge, I wouldn’t hear the kids if I wasn't right there. I turned up iTunes and tried to enjoy the aloneness.  That's become my new normal. The kids are too old to participate in the things that parents would be along for, so I'm often left to myself. It was while I sat on the steps, mindlessly surfing the Internet that I thought back to another lifetime.
We were poor as church mice. Didn't have a penny to our names, but a friend had gone on a trip and brought the kids back plastic rain capes. The hoods looked like animals. It was a warm but rainy evening, so the capes made perfect sense.  We drove over to Bateman Street, a good neighborhood where nearly every house turned on their lights. Lots of people still gravitate there; it's like something out of Rockwell. Robby was a green dinosaur; reptiles were his fascination those days. Joe was a red dog; we called him Clifford, and Bailey and Jacob were yellow ducks. We walked along the sidewalk while the kids, Robb leading the way, ran at full throttle up every walkway, screamed “Trick or Treat!” into the face of a startled homeowner before bolting off to the next house, yelling “Thank you!” on the fly. Poor Jake was just over two years old, so he couldn't keep up to save his life. Bill and I scooted him along, sometimes carrying him to catch up, since it seemed Robb'd be tearing out for the next house just as Jake made it to the door. I remember people being knocked over by how cute the kids looked. We were just glad they had ‘costumes’ and were staying dry.
What’s most vivid to me about that night was walking down the street with Bill. We commented on the beauty of the evening while shuffling through wet piles of leaves the color of fire, stirring the aromas of fall.  The night was lit up by yard lights played against a soundtrack of people laughing and calling out to one another up and down the block. We walked side by side, our children, still babies around us. That was the best Halloween ever. We were so poor, but we had so much. Hell if I could see it at the time.