Our friend Rhonda says the first day she can see her breath in the fall is a highlight of her year. She finds it exhilarating. She must be one contented person, today. She popped immediately to mind, this morning, when I realized I could see the dog’s breath. If he noticed, or cared about it one way or another, he didn’t make it known. He spent much of our walk exercising his superpower.
He is a leaf magnet. As we walk through the woods, leaves leap upon him. They attach themselves to his fetlocks and undercarriage. They decorate his back. They dangle from his face and tail. He gets bigger and bigger, a living snowball of leaves, till it’s a wonder he’s able to locomote under his own steam. A superpower is not an unmitigated blessing.
Also, Rascal’s family makes it worse. We would really rather he not shake the leaves off in the house, and we like to remove long, naked petioles before they knit their way well into his fur. Rascal feels he should be free to rid himself of excess leafage if, how, and where he desires. Poor fellow.
Halloween has now come and gone, although Halloween decorations are almost all still up around the neighborhood. People added to them practically until the first trick-or-treaters started their rounds. One house on Georgetown went uber-spooky on the last day. The people created a whole host of ghosts along both sides of their front walk, ghosts the size of adult humans. Did the householders dress themselves up as ghosts and infiltrate their spectral creatures on the big night? Not having been a trick-or-treater, I can’t say. The very possibility might well have kept me from their door.
It took a foot of snow to keep trick-or-treaters from people’s doors on the west side of the state. More than one town in the Muskegon area officially postponed Halloween from Tuesday till Wednesday. In fairness to the area’s children, let it be said that they would have gone out anyway, if the question were just one of snow, however. It was an all-out winter storm with lightning, thunder, and downed power lines.
As a topic of conversation in French class last week, our teacher asked us to share Halloween memories. Kathy told a great one. It seems that when she and her friend Kay were little, they decided to play a prank one year. Under cover of darkness, they snuck over to a neighbor’s house and soaped her window. The next morning, Kathy’s mom got a call from the lady of the pranked house, who said that her window had been soaped and that Kathy and Kay had done it.
“How do you know it was Kathy and Kay?” Kathy’s mom asked, curious.
“Oh, the girls wrote their names on the glass, in soap.” Kathy’s mom asked her if she and her friend had done the deed, and Kathy fessed up. The girls had to clean the window, of course. It took them all afternoon.
Molly, our teacher, also pulled a prank when she was little. She and one of her buds let the air out of the back tires of a neighbor’s car. Somehow, word of the perpetrators’ identity got back to the owner of the car: a police officer. The children’s punishment? He handed them a bicycle pump, and had them use it to reinflate the tires. Neither Kathy, Kay, Molly nor, presumably, her little chum chose to continue a life in crime.
The memory I shared was of doing an errand in a store where staff were wearing costumes. One man wore a whole-head gorilla mask. I’d kept the children well away from him while we shopped, but my little guy caught sight of the gorilla as we headed for the exit and stopped in his tracks, too terrified to move or speak. I didn’t have an arm free to lift him up and carry him out. We were stuck there, until I prevailed on a passing customer to ask the employee to step out of sight so that we could leave.
The customer saw the frozen toddler, he hustled off. We could tell he’d reached the employee when we saw the man take off the mask. He had a kind face and looked taken aback at how thoroughly he’d scared a child. Could he really have been surprised, though? While shopping, I’d kept track of where he was in the store by the screams of children. In any case, we could all walk again, and walked ourselves right out of there.
Hope your Halloween was happy. We know Rhonda is.
3 November 2023