100 Caramel Apples

We were sitting out on the front porch in the swinging chair I forced you to buy last summer. You hated it at first, but now it was you who suggested we sit outside and dole out candy to the town’s children instead of sitting inside and waiting for the doorbell to ring.
This year’s special prize from the Mortimer family: homemade caramel apples that took me almost a lifetime to prepare. Our quota for children is usually only 50, in a good night, but you told me to make “100, just in case”; just in case you got into them before tonight.
And so we sit on the swing waiting for the children to make the long walk up to our old Victorian. We sit and watch and listen to the sounds of the laughter, the screaming (more in delight than actual fear) and we see the bobbing of flashlights as reluctant parents or big siblings take their innocent ghost-believing brood to reap the rewards for dressing up as a witch, vampire, or ghoul.
You put your arm around me and we snuggle under our blanket, it’s cold outside but the warmth of us together on the swing is warmer than any radiator in any house. A sigh of contentment escapes my lips as we watch and listen to tonight’s festivities.
We’ve been married for over 60 years. For over half a century we’ve been giving the town’s children candy. For over half a century we’ve heard the phrase of “trick or treat!” on our porch, we’ve seen the little ghoulies and have given their greedy little hands a treat or two.
But this year no one comes. And we sit and wait, but no one comes.
If you were a child looking up at our old Victorian, where you see darkness in the windows, we see lights, where you see the door boarded up, we see the open and inviting entrance to our home. Where you see the broken down swing hanging from only one of it’s chains, there we sit, on the swing that we bought only last summer, snuggling for warmth with a basket of one hundred caramel apples.

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Tags:

apples, halloween, spooky, the and unknown