Before sunrise, October 28, 7:15am
I won’t lie to you… starting life over in a new place is not easy. In the same way that all the newness is exciting, mysterious, breathtaking and refreshing, it is also equally strange, unfamiliar, scary, intimidating and sometimes unwelcome. This past weekend, I missed my home in Havertown alot. Halloween is a big shindig in H-town. We would get 75 trick-or-treaters on our stoop, and I would dress up for them, and we would always run out of candy too early. But we would also have fun drinking wine with our next door neighbors as we handed out whatever candy we had. Some people really would get into it… turning their 1920s tudor or dutch colonial home into a haunted mansion for the evening. You could see strobe lights through cob webs and hear haunted house soundtracks playing throughout the neighborhood. And this year, I missed it.
Halloween itself was uneventful here… Andrew had a bad day at work and wasn’t up to attending the festivities at the local Pub. So we had a quiet dinner and watched every scary movie we could find on basic cable. (Was there really a Halloween 4?) Two nights before, we did witness a costume contest at another establishment, and had I known, I might have dressed up.
One spooky thing did occur, on Halloween Eve… aka Mischief Night. Andrew and I were tucked away in bed by 10:30pm. Nights are really quiet here, so it is easy to drift off pretty quickly. Then suddenly, at midnight no less, we heard them… it started with a howoooooooool, followed by a chorus of cackling, shreaking and barking. The sound rose and fell, echoing throughout the valley in a most haunting manner. If I didn’t know any better, I would have sworn that a dozen witches flew by our window, up over the roof and above the mountains, laughing about their mischievous deeds of the evening. More believeable would be that a pack of coyotes ran up the hill in front of us, found the sack of trash someone left outside the dumpster in the parking lot, had their way with it, then relished and fought over their spoils. Either way, it was enough to get Andrew and I both out of bed, squinting out the window into the inky darkness around us. BOO!
So that was my Halloween… not quite Havertown style, but just like everything else here, strange, new, not necessarily bad–but different.
And just 2 weeks til ski season begins…!
