Last night was lashing rain, - a damp, dark, depressing, downpour - which served as a serious deterrent to the child monsters who would otherwise have been busily trick-or-treating.
However, last year, (and it was not raining), the carer (with impressive and wholly admirable foresight) had requested some more from me - a full fortnight before Hallowe'en - I was most impressed at the demonstration f forward planning - to purchase sweets and chocolates (what Our Transatlantic Cousins term "candies") for the children who might visit.
Anyway, I would estimate that last year we had around four callers - four groups of children - and the carer and I greeted them together, and dispensed sweets and chocolates. Their costumes were fantastic and wonderfully creative and imaginative, and most were shepherded by adults hovering discreetly somewhere in the background, waiting patiently outside the gates at the end of the driveway.
This year, as it happens, much has changed: For one thing, my mother is no longer with us (having moved, last December, on solstice night, to another dimension, one masked behind the impenetrable veils and walls and worlds of the afterlife), and that means that the carer is no longer with us (for she is now caring for someone else's mother with exemplary kindness and devotion and dedication), - although she did text me yesterday to say "hello - trick or treat?"
Thus, as part of my shopping expedition yesterday, shortly before the rain decided to descend in torrents, I purchased sweets, candies, and small packets of Italian chocolates.
There were no trick-or-treaters, not a single ring of the door-bell, even though a bag of Italian goodies awaited them, attached to the newel post on the bannister of the stairs.
While the unwelcoming weather certainly served to keep the kids at home (and dry), the fact that ours is an old, established middle class area, with many deaths (and executor sales) in recent years, and quite a few elderly, retired folk, all means that there are not all that many kids around to engage in the business of careful and age appropriate exploration on the night of Hallowe'en, when kids can dare death in their minds and imaginations, under the safe protection of parents or guardians.
