The Morning After

I moved through October with heightened senses -- sweeping stores for creepy decorations since even in the most unassuming places, there can be contorted, bloody, rotting-faced masks...

Halloween used to be my favorite. I could not begin to understand the people who forbade trick-or-treating or only took their kids to harvest festivals. How grossly over-protective.
But then I met a soft impressionable child with wide eyes and a leaping imagination whom I had to protect. And the world looked different. Experiencing horror on his face -- his first real fear -- because of a "decoration" in a store last year changed me and reminded me that images stick.

Last week, I tried to get to the YMCA with the kids over and over. But there was weather, a cough, a loss of motivation. We didn't go. At the end of the week, I finally went alone. In the entrance hung the most horrific decorations I have ever seen in a public space. They were unavoidable and larger than life. I couldn't even think how Silas would have responded (for days after).

the entrance of the Y:right inside above the front desk:


Today the stores will be drained of witches, masks, fake blood, bones, rotting corpses and spiders, and will be prematurely filled with fake snow, elves, stockings, shiny balls and candy canes. This November morning I can feel my guard melting. Once again, Halloween is over.