All Souls' Day

This is a little late, but I was commissioned by sisters plural to list 10 memories about our Halloweens together-boy were they amazing. We are German and women, so they were methodical and efficient. We hit the streets right after school let out-I guess more SAHMs in the 70's early 80's-and were gone until after 9pm easily. Pretty much the same route each year-up 85th place, knocking out the houses of people we long wondered about-Crazy Joe and the people with the son who had a basement rock band-weaving our way to more familiar and then less familiar territory.
My Portland pal T'RaySah says it is always raining and cold in Pdx in Halloween. Last week we had blue skies, balmy winds and lots of sun. Truly, in 6 days we are in a cloud of grey. I feel for the kids here. Yankee towns seems to get that Indian Summer ( is that offensive, like Columbus Day, Black Hawks or Seminoles Football?) and I have very few memories about bad weather while T/T-ing. Some wet leaves here and their, but all in all, doable.
So my first memory is a smell. M'Shell mentioned shaving cream fights in the park as one of her memories and b/c we were so behaved that is how we lived that aspect of the Halloween ritual. But for others, it was all out graffiti rock. Halloween smells like shaving cream. Barbarsol to be exact. Big red cans, then when they came out with lemon lime flavor, the neon green. It was a given, every street you turned down, the street signs, stop signs, people's cars-shaving cream. In fact, the warfare ritual included (I am a little fuzzy, again, we were never quite those good of holligans) ripping off some part of the top and inserting a needle and heating it (am i right) which does not sound very safe, to make the cream shoot out thin and far, instead of foamy short (mom, get your head out the gutter) It really was one of the biggest constants of Halloween.
Of course I have the memories of grandiose bounty and the trades that went on upstairs in the big front bedroom for days, and how stakes would change as days went by. Downstairs that night was mostly for sorting and counting (yes, that means you Jennifer) and it reminds me that raising kids is supposed to be about fun and being pretty laid back. I saw a few T/T'ers and they mostly had 3:1 parent ratios, lots of flash lights and even heard mention of "lets go home to eat dinner." Dinner? Dinner was a few pulls off your take to keep your sugar level up so you could cross the next busy street and hit neighborhoods where the kids didn't even go to the same school. Dinner my ass.
So, I guess this isn't a list, but I hope it hits close to 10 things. Seeing the schools hit with shaving cream made it feel like Escape from New York or The City of Lost Children. Having the liberty to knock on peoples' doors we had dreamed about getting closer to was straight up knocking on the porch door of Bo Radley....oh, those people have plastic covers on their couches, oh, their house smells like moth ball, oh, this house has some odd religious statue on a coffee table, that lady cooks with garlic. It fleshed these people out and made us all the more curious.
As for remembering costumes M'shell , yes, I was Dolly Parton in kindergarten circa 1978. I remeber having the balloons in my shirt and the toilet paper roll covered in tinfoil microphone. Even at that young age, I recall adults finding this rather humorous and thanks to Monty Python and Benny Hill, had a rather advanced sense of psuedo-sexual and cross dressing humor. You could never get away with that s**t today. Someone would call DCFS. I was a pirate and gypsy (we took tap and ballet at the park district as kids, so most costumes were black leotards at their core with some aspect of odd clothing layered on top) and one year a bunch of grapes. Grapes kept popping, and again, I was more leotard than balloons by the end of the day. Lastly, gum and pennies in the bottom of the plastic pumpkin after a few days and thoughts about how it would soon be Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Love you both, Drizella and Anastasia. Miss you alot. Gidget, thanks for keeping me in good spirits. T'RaySah, yes we live in the same city and yet, can not manage a date. We need an intervention. Dr. Dave, "don't you say hey to me you ugly gurl." Miss everyone.
okay, does this make up for being grumpy yesterday?
Sorry this pix os so small. B/c I do this in the few minutes the Chicken Pig sleeps, I never get time to really learn how to use this. Any small suggestions would help, like captions, getting pix in other places, L-Lu, I know you know how...let me know..
MamaDuck