Loving Halloween has nothing to do with this. Yes, it is one of the best holidays, but trick-or-treating through age 26 was because of something else.
1990. The air was crisp and the sun had set over the Las Vegas Country Club, where my grandmother lived. Trick-or-treating had commenced. I was 3, and dressed as an angel.
My mom, sister, aunt and cousins set a record pace against cutthroat teenagers pillaging the unguarded candy buckets, our pillowcases overflowing with king-size treats. We came to the very end of the neighborhood, to a dimly lit house with cobblestone bricks and white roses leading to a glass door with a sheer curtain. No jack-o’-lanterns, no ghosts hanging in a tree, just a bucket filled with candy. And no one else discovered it.
We took almost all of the candy, figuring whoever set it out might be disappointed to find it mostly untouched. This was the beginning of an unspoken tradition, a strange sort of kindness to someone I never met.
Halloween 2015
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I knew an older lady lived there, as my grandmother mentioned her once in a while. Every year I returned to her house on the corner. Every year I found a full bucket until I poured it into my pillowcase. Even after I passed the socially acceptable age to ask for candy from strangers, I still visited that house late at night to take its sweet offering. As time went on, the once vibrant neighborhood began to tarnish. There were fewer and fewer traces of Halloween, yet the house on the corner always had that bucket delicately placed on the walkway.
This past year, the bucket was gone. I knew the woman was, too. Staring at the cobblestones, at the empty place where her candy had always been, I cried for her. For the childhood I had known. I walked away with the pillowcase swinging lightly at my side. Over all the years I’d felt this bond with a total stranger, I hoped that even though I never saw her, she’d been watching from behind the curtain.