This Halloween came and went with a grand total of seven properly masked and socially distant trick-or-treaters.
They dropped by one at a time throughout the night and waited at the bottom of our front porch steps as I sent fist-fulls of miniature candy bars down a 12-foot long chute.
When you live in a small town … in a house with a long driveway … the lack of costumed revelers doesn't seem especially novel for circumstances. But rigging up new technology for the conveyance of complementary confections was a welcome distraction.
Of course, as usual, I'd bought too much candy.
I'd mindlessly drop a package into the shopping cart here and there for weeks beforehand. Stashing them all over the house.
And for weeks, I had been dipping into the bags I'd hidden from the kids as I waited for my morning coffee to brew or as I tidied the kitchen or flitted through the house doing other chores. I'd even carefully hidden the wrappers at the bottom of the trashcan where no one would ever paw through and be the wiser.
Not that the children would care. They prefer the sugar-coated rubber products that make your mouth turn inside itself from the sourness.
I'd bought the large hybrid bags with nuts and nougat and new formulations of old favorites expressly because they were nobody's favorites, and hidden them away to make doubly sure the candy wouldn't magically disappear during the new hybrid school days.
And now ... as Election Day came and went, and with it the realization that an immediate tidal wave of repudiation would not wash this president out to sea. But as vote counts started to show a fuller picture as the week wore on, I understood the real horror of my situation.
No one was eating ALL THIS CANDY except for me.
Every time I walked past the bowl, I'd swipe a Snickers or a 100 Grand or four. I'd leave the Whoppers and the Butterfingers for dead. Of course, I'd wait until no one was watching, then I'd pop an entire unwrapped miniature bar into my mouth, dispensing entirely with the decorum of dispatching a confection with multiple and delicate bites.
As I watched the news breathlessly announce nothing with verifiable facts, I mindlessly crammed one sweet after another into my anxious mouth.
Had it not been the nuts cemented together by nougat, I might not have bothered to chew. And there is very little hyperbole in the idea that by the announcement of a winner, I will have eaten the same approximate weight in candy as the largest of our two cats.
It occurs to me as the week wears on, and I sift through what remains of Halloween's spoils, finding my favorites have grown scarce, that we're all just waiting to see if the winner of the election will actually win the election.
And yet nothing I do from now the bowl is empty will stop me from devouring each and every individually-wrapped candy, no matter how repellant.
"I mean … really … who would buy all these WHOPPERS if they weren't mixed in with the Almond Joys?"
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