Today and tonight will be in the 40’s. The weekend will be in the low 6o’s, but I know the cold is coming. It is nearly winter after all. Today is a bit drab and raw. The sky is now cloudy though we did have sun for a while, and it is supposed to return. I’m just a little impatient. There is a wind. I can hear the creaking of the pines.
This Halloween I had more trick or treaters than I’ve ever had. I only had two candy bars left, a Milky Way and a Snickers. If you think that seems a bit serendipitous, you’d be right. I saved them for myself. I even gave out all the bags of pencils and stuff. One little girl, after I told her there were stickers, yelled to her mother in the street, “I got stickers.”
Halloween is on the counter ready for the bins. I always think it’s sad when any decorations are put away. A bit of color is gone. I do have Thanksgiving bins so I’ll be on the hunt for them in the cellar.
I don’t remember decorating for Thanksgiving when I was a kid. I suspect we may have put the cute little cardboard Pilgrim couple on the picture window and maybe a cornucopia or two bursting with veggies. We never counted the days until Thanksgiving. The best parts of it were the days off from school and the parade. Turkey always seemed the meal which never ended, the meal which lasted days from the roasted bird to the soup.
When I was a kid, my after school ensemble in winter was always girly jeans, the ones with the zipper in the side pocket, and a long sleeve shirt, a plaid flannel shirt. I wore sneakers except in the snow. The sneakers were the low white ones with sort of pointed toes. They were always a bit dirty even after wearing them only once.
The house in the project was small, especially the kitchen. The living room held a couch, a table, one chair and the TV console which took up one whole corner. There were three bedrooms. There were six of us. My sisters and I only noticed the house was small in retrospect.
In the project, all of our families were pretty much the same. Most mothers didn’t work. There were no two car families. None of our parents went to college. They were the high school generation. Every father was a veteran of World War II. The backs doors always slammed when the kids ran out to play. They were also the means of communication, a chorus of mothers always yelled out the back door. I loved living in the project.
