Candy and strangeness

Never trust a grown-up.

A grown-up is just the sort of person who will come bounding home from the shop with four pumpkins, grinning like a loon.

Smashing pumkins. 

A grown-up may then neglect her responsibilities and devote an entire afternoon to carving giant robot jack-o-lanterns with you.

A grown-up might put on Thriller and dance all over the sofa in a most un-grown-up-like fashion.

Any grown-up worth her salt will then cut holes in an old white bed-sheet so that you can run around the house like Casper, clocking the walls with your forehead because you've got the eye-holes on backwards.

A grown will bring you a cobwebby Halloween witch hat. And when the excitement reaches fever pitch, a grown-up will take you by the hand and lead you out into the gathering Halloween darkness.

For candy.Your one true love in this life. Your first thought upon waking, and your last thought before sleep.

Not a turnip. 

A high quality grown-up will make sure you get plenty of candy. She will then take you home and attempt to thrust your now candy-explosives-fueled self into pajamas. This act will look like a clown trying to squeeze a rabid lion into a jam jar. Sometimes your grown-up is a turnip.

You will break free from your now slightly twitchy grown-up and  run to kiss your  magical giant robot jack-o-lanterns goodnight, sleep tight, don't let the robot bugs bite.

Pacified and straight-jacketed at last, your certified grown-up will hold you tight and sing you a song. She will tell you how much she loves you and plant kisses on each cheek. You will fall into a contented slumber, the memory of kisses warm and velvety on your cheeks, like melting butter over Saturday pancakes.

Fly my pretties!

At this point your formerly grade AAA rated grown-up will softly close the door and tip-toe to the kitchen. Here she will proceed to skin all four of your lovely giant robot jack-o-lanterns and turn them into soup.

This is why you should never trust a grown-up. In spite of the fact that soup is delicious.

As your grown-up stirs a molten vat of giant robot carcasses, she will hum 'Thriller' contentedly to herself. She will think silly thoughts in the quiet of her cozy post-bedtime world. Thoughts like: 'First of all, it was October, a rare month for girls...'

You will eat the soup for lunch tomorrow and never suspect a thing. Which is another reason.

Voodoo child

My autumn garden is full of spiders. Yesterday I watched a fly go from creature to cadaver in the skip of a heartbeat and the twitch of eight legs. Webs loom everywhere I walk, ghost-like apparitions right at head level. My face has been snared a few times and I suspect it might be me, not the flies, they are after.

Tonight I put on my shoe and felt something soft and leathery squish up against my toe. My brain said mouse, but reaching inside I discovered it was just a shrivelled, slightly fuzzy chunk of green pepper. I recognised the bite marks and the modus operandi. 'Don't mess with me Mama,' the pepper implied in Ana's voice, 'I know where your shoes live.'

Garden-variety Shelob

Ana is an old hand at threats. When she was 18 months old we drove to an old fisherman's cottage on Anglesey for a weekend. In the evening she slept like an angel in her travel cot, while Papa and I watched little fishing boats cast their nets into a peaceful sea. A tentative sense of calm crept back into our lives; we decided that everything was going to be okay and that travelling with kids could even be fun. But it only lasted until the following afternoon. Halfway through nap-time I heard a loud smack from Ana's room, followed by an angry roar. A moment later, vengeful toddler footsteps thundered down the hall. Papa and I were trapped in the sitting room, mugs of tea still in hand as a shrieking, wild-haired toddler came for her revenge like something out of a horror film.

Travelling with Ana was out of the question now that she could shimmy out of a travel cot head-first and pursue us to the ends of a holiday cottage. Naively, we thought she could still be contained behind the trusty wooden jail-bars of her cot at home. Not long after the Anglesey incident, I went to Germany for a weekend, leaving Papa home alone with Ana. My first morning away, he rang to say that Ana escaped the cot and woke him with a very sweet 'Papa thirsty?' and a very cold cup of water in the face. Ana got a proper bed and a gate across her door after that.

We don't get too many Houdini-style escapes these days, except when a very sleep-deprived Mama forgets to shut Ana's gate. Tonight I put the kettle on for peppermint tea and tried to forget about the shoe-pepper threat. I turned around to get a teabag and nearly dropped my mug in fright. There stood Ana in the middle of the kitchen floor, grinning cheekily with her plastic Halloween pumpkin in one hand. 'Hi', she said with menace. Then she turned and slunk silently back up the stairs to her room. I followed and shut the gate tight.

Ana doesn't fully understand Halloween yet, but her prankster instinct has been on override for weeks. This year she will trick-or-treat, rather appropriately, as a crocodile.

It's a trick

My good childhood friend, OneArmGirl, has just reminded me of our childhood candy-missions. A lovely French lady down the street (our neighborhood's sole European representative) used to call us 'the Halloweeners'. The thing I really loved about Halloweening (and can only admit to now as an adult) was that on one trusty October night every year, us big kids got to re-enact the magic of being little. Candy was the excuse for all the dressing up and childish larking about. It was the act itself that was magical--heading out into the wood-smoky darkness, painted faces pressed against the cold car windows, wide-eyes focused on distant candy-beacon porch-lights in the black rural night, bright and remote as the stars.

I find that one side-effect of having kids is that my brain likes to revive dusty childhood memories like this from the mental attic and replay them to a sentimental score on my internal nostalgia-projector. For me, the season of 'pumpkins ripening toward the knife' (Ray Bradbury) has been one of birth, death, upheaval, love and migration. The stuff of life, good and bad. Certainly no shortage of memories to mull over as the light closes in for winter.