Halloween 1997

It would be neater to proceed through my memories in tight chronological order, but the mind doesn’t store memories in neat little file folders marked with the day and year and organized in ascending order. Rather, a phrase, a smell, a song, a season, will set a memory free and you have to snatch it and pin it down before it escapes from your reach.

We just “celebrated” our first Halloween without Emma. Actually, “survived” would be a better word. Emma loved to dress up in costumes and loved to eat candy even more, so it was surprising to some that she was not a fan of Halloween. The costume parades were fun and she did like getting candy, but the ghoulish decorations that appeared in the neighborhood as Halloween approached each year made her anxious and uncomfortable.

The fall that she started Kindergarten, she had been off to a fine start until sometime in the beginning of October, when suddenly she seemed a little clingy and out of sorts. We were having a difficult time getting to the source of her anxiety until I finally realized that it had begun about the time the Halloween decorations started appearing in our neighbors' windows and on their doors. I asked Emma if she was feeling a little nervous because Halloween was coming and the story spilled out. It turns out that her music teacher had put some Halloween decorations up in the music room. One of the decorations, a cardboard figure of a cartoon=like vampire, was scaring the daylight out of Emma. We devised a plan. Over the weekend we made a cornucopia basket out of brown construction paper and then Emma carefully cut out multi-colored fruits and vegetables that she pasted into the basket we had created. On Monday, she presented the cornucopia to her music teacher and suggested it might be a nice substitution for the vampire which, she told her, was really quite scary. The music teacher quickly exchanged the decorations; horrified that poor Emma had been frightened. At the end of the day, Emma bounded off the bus with a big smile on her face and a noticeably lighter demeanor. Problem solved!