There is a metal bowl of candy on the bookcase nearest the door. The kids are coming up at irregular intervals. I can hear the entire transaction, which seems a lot faster than I recall as a kid. They are up the stairs and off the porch briskly, though each comes with a “trick-or-treat” and also a “thank you.”

One pair of kids came up to the porch, one stumbling up the stairs in their costume. And the the other stumbled down the stairs in their costume.

Maybe those miniature pumpkins we put out are really crash buoys, and I didn’t realize it.

I think we missed at least one kid in the sugar distribution process. Maybe she came back around later. Surely she did not do without.

This ritual gets out of control in some places. Once we lived in a neighborhood where people literally bussed in their kids from afar. They’d deplete your candy stores right away, and that was before the chainsmoking teens showed up. Here, we had one set of young teens, the neighbors we may never otherwise meet, but the rest were fairly young from the sound and looks of things. That’s nice, some of the older folks in the neighborhood have noticed, with a sigh, that the place is aging around them. The sigh comes because they realize it is aging with them. But lately there’s been a youth movement, witness the Halloween traditions! And maybe people are coming from afar.

There may be leftover candy.

We played our part in tomorrow’s sugar coma until about 8:30, and then the door was closed, the lights were off, and the ninjas were deployed from their barracks out back to return to their evening surveillance.

There is leftover candy. No, the ninjas can’t have any. We need them hungry and light on their feet, just in case there are any tricks over night.

Before all of that, I took the recycling to the inconvenience center. When we first moved here I had to take the garbage there, to the place across town, hence my clever little nickname. After a year we got curbside garbage delivery, finally. And now I just take the recycling. Today I loaded the car up with a repurposed outdoor garbage can, an oversized storage bin, a kitchen-sized garbage can and two big armfuls of cardboard.

I tried, and failed, to remember the last time I went there. Maybe it’s been a month. That’d be great. And it would also make sense. The recyclables were threatening to push us outdoors.

Anyway, it’s easy there. You drive up, back in. There’s a great big bin for cardboard. (Break down your boxes! Sometimes I do.) There are two bins for garbage. Another for scrap metal and one for mixed use stuff. This is where the plastic and glass go and I assume it’s all just melted in a weekend bonfire down past the tree line. But it makes me feel better. I have saved the earth. I have dispensed and disposed of all of that, so that some of it may be reused again.

I think we now send out almost as much recyclable waste as garbage, which is … good? We’re pretty streamlined on both. And the cats help with repurposed cardboard.

On the way back home, I was stopped at one of the two red lights right by this temporary installation.

This was set up right in front of the bank. Across the way is the little local performing arts center, and the store front of a nice guy who makes high end fountain pens. He’s currently selling 10 pieces with wood and copper that came from Old Ironsides. You can purchase one for $1,250. As much as I appreciate the novelty and historical heft that you can apply to that, I don’t understand that income bracket. I don’t understand how anyone could lay that out and then put a pen on their desk, or in their coat pocket. Or use it. Or put it in a display case some way. Or even a safe.

One day I hope he’ll let me come in and bring non-historical wood and turn a pen of my own. He invites students to see the process, because junior high kids are always ready throw down big bills for fountain pens, why not the rest of us? Surely he has slow days. Surely this could be an easy way to make a few extra bucks. Surely that chunk of wood I picked up that one time, from that special place, can make a nice, personal piece in no way approaching the price of a mortgage payment.

Maybe I could compensate him with leftover candy.

Happy Halloween!