Trick or ???????
Scott and Angela came home from work in their costumes. Angela made her own costume and she made a great bee. Scott was, well, scott was....um.....I'm not sure but with those glasses I am going for dork.
Living in a rural community we don't have many trick or treators. We had three children come last night.....a snow queen, a flaminco dancer and Jason. I had made special bags for them with both candy and other stuff in them.
I loved seeing these kids dressed up. Reminded me when we were kids and would dress up and go trick or treating. There were hoards of kids back then and we would run from house to house with our trick or treat bags and practically stand in line at the door because there were so many of us. Our parents never went with us, we didn't have glow in the dark sticks or reflector tape on our costumes. We were with our friends and everyone knew everyone because the housing area where we lived was small. Then we would all go back to one house and dump all the candy out in front of us and trade the ones you hated. It was fun and part of our childhood. Like playing baseball in the street. Can't do that today because 1) you will get run over by a car that is going way too fast through the neighborhood and 2) if that ball hits someone's car your parents are going to get sued. Back then we didn't think of that, the cars drove slower and were aware of the kids playing in the street and people weren't sueing people left and right just because they can. I had this magical childhood where my friends were right down the street from me, I had my horses and would ride through all the fields around the houses (they are no longer there - there are houses where the fields used to be), in those fields too we would dig forts underground - how we didn't die in those is beyond me. Those fields were places to meet your boyfriend, dig forts, ride motorcycles and horses. The children living in that neighborhood don't have that. They will never experience building a raft out of junk lumber and floating it on mud lake - which was really just a huge mud hold about as deep as your calfs but to be able to make something and float out on it was really something - they will never take tadpoles out of mud lake and bring them home and fill your friends bathtub with water and tadpoles and have her mother scream at the top of her lungs when she finds them. We would catch horneytoads out in those fields and keep them in shoe boxes filled with sand and feed them ants. The fields were magical and now the magic is gone. There are now houses on top of houses on top of houses. There is no place for those children to make their own magic. I am so grateful that we had those fields and the halloweens that we had. They made for magical memories.
1 Comments:
At 7:30 AM, Wanda said…
You are so right. It's not really bad, here - we are still just a rural community with lots of large unmanicured yards and vacant areas. We had 149 trick-or-treaters this year. Cars would stop and the kids would walk (run!) from our house to the one on the opposite corner, and then maybe around the block with a parent accompanying them before getting back in their car. We had 3 decorated flatbed trailers of kids too. A fun alternative for families to have a sort of co-op trick-or-treating experience.
But, yeah, I remember digging big holes in our backyard and the vacant lots behind, as a child. We climbed trees, built rickety treehouses, explored brushy woods, builting forts and all that ...if not here in town, then out at our grandparents farm. It was a good life.
Some of my grandchildren still have that, only with more modern day cautions. But some of them, and my sister's grandchildren live in cities with only small, securely fenced backyards, no vacant areas to explore (not that it would even be safe to do so, nowadays!), or worse yet, live in apartments with no yard, just a pool and a busy nearby park to walk to, with supervision very necessary.
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