Yesterday when I raised the shades and looked out at the view, a few lines sprang to mind: Summer is past and day is past. Somber Clouds in the West are massed ... When I start thinking about Robert Frost, winter must be here. I have always agreed with the Celts' view that Halloween marks the border line between the end of one year and the beginning of the next. Even here in the balmy Bay Area, the days are short and the trees that go bare in the cold season have shed most of their leaves. For the past week fog paints out the mountain that normally sits beyond in my living room window and leaves a sinus-headache-white curtain in its place. No rains yet, but (hopefully) soon.
This time of year my life also seems caught up in the rhythm of the world around us. Especially in the past five years, life teeters on the cusp of change every November.
2003 I spent my first Halloween in Oakland. My main memory is being pissed off at being four days past due in Big A's pregnancy. She was an extremely tall baby (over 22 inches long at birth) and I am not an extremely tall person, so by the time we were 40+ weeks along, her feet were tickling my tonsils. And besides being uncomfortable, I was also nervous about the birth and what would come next, of course.
Halloween 2004 was much more fun, with DH and I going out trick or treating with our own kid for the first time. That October Big A was still my baby, but less than a week later she quit crawling in favor of walking and celebrated her first birthday. So Halloween is the last "baby" type memories I have of Big A, before she laid down on the floor and enthusiastically kicked and screamed her way through the toddler years.
Halloween 2005 I was too tired from my doomed T18 pregnancy to go out trick or treating with Big A. Despite my fatigue, it was also one of the last dwindling days of normalcy, when we still thought the baby was fine and hadn't be forced to make a series of gut-wrenching decisions yet. And last year was a bad sequel to 2005: pregnant again, only more tired this time, with more worries already about what my pesky uterine scar from the previous year was up to, and what would happen to the baby and me in the coming months.
I'm grateful to say that Halloween 2007 kicked ass compared to the last few years. I had a baby in my arms dressed like a daisy, and she squealed with delight every time a front door opened and -- SURPRISE -- yet another adult bearing a bowl of candy stepped out. Which is to say that Little A totally hooked us all up with extra buckets of candy. And Big A loved her bag full of candy so much that she named the individual pieces and played with them like dolls after we got home last night.
Here's hoping Big A won't notice that while she was sleeping, I ate "Mommy Snickers"!
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4 comments:
"And Big A loved her bag full of candy so much that she named the individual pieces and and played with them like dolls after we got home last night."
TOO CUTE.
Isn't it great to finally feel as though life has come back, so to speak? I have had that feeling so many times in the past year or so. I would catch myself feeling completely happy, or laughing, or joyful and think to myself, "it's about time!"
I love that Big A played with her candy. That is so something I would have done as a child, and wouldn't put it past Pumpkin either.
I, too, was in throes of a doomed pregnancy on a Halloween past - it fell in the days between diagnosis and loss. The shortening of the days, the change in the weather that used to invigorate me now have a melancholy foreboding. But watching DS contemplate jack o' lanterns and go wild over a lollipop helped the gloom lift a little this year.
I'm so glad this Halloween kicked ass!
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