Halloween In The Time Of Covid

                                     A woman discovers the naked truth about herself

"Hail Mary"
by Patti Liszkay
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​HALLOWEEN IN THE TIME OF COVID

       This past Thursday night Halloween was celebrated in my neighborhood.
       Or I should say mostly not celebrated, as all but a few houses on my street were dark and shuttered against participating in Halloween during the COVID-19 epidemic. And, had I had my say, our house would have been among the unlit Halloween-non-participating affiliation. Which is saying a lot, because I love Halloween.
        I love the decorated houses and the neighbors out on their porches or on the sidewalk chatting. I love the activity, the parade of young trick-or-treaters bringing the street to life. And I especially love sitting on the front porch handing out treats to the little ones and even the the not-so-little ones, the serious expressions on the faces of the princesses, super-heroes, witches, ghosts, and animals and their polite, serious little voices - "say trick-or-treat," the older ones encourage their younger siblings - as they hold out their pillow cases and  plastic pumpkin buckets and ask for their treats.

          I guess it's that Halloween always brings me back to Halloweens long gone by when my own children were among the little trick-or-treaters.

      But this year I was sadly prepared to add Halloween to the list of things that would have to be reliquished for the sake of safe social distancing during the pandemic.
​         It was my hubby Tom who spotted the idea that was making the rounds on the internet for a  contactless method of dispensing Halloween treats. It involved securing a length of pipe at an angle from the porch to the sidewalk to make a chute to transport candy from a safe disance directly into the bags of trick-or-treaters.

       "I can make one of those," said Tom. And he did.
       He bought a ten-foot length of thin plastic 3" pipe from the hardware store and, because our porch lacks a railing, he decided to use a step latter and a stepping stool to anchor the pipe and create the necessary angle.

    Tom figured that by standing on the second rung he would be high enough to reach the top of the ladder, from whence he'd shoot candy down into the open bags of the trick-or-treaters.

     He secured the pipe to the ladder and the stool with duct tape and a little help from me.

    If the result was in form perhaps a tad inelegant, 

...especially after Tom set up a line of barrier tape to ensure that social distancing was not breached,

....it proved upon a trial run to be nonetheless perfectly functional.

​ And so we had our COVID-safe Halloween candy-dispensing set-up and were ready to receive trick-or-treaters.  Still, though we'd built it, we weren't sure they would come. 

     And at first they didn't.

     But then after a while, in spite of the rain, they did.

    As for the candy chute, it was such an across-the-board hit with the trick-or-treaters,

...that we will indubitably set it up for all future Halloweens, COVID or not.
​    Hopefully not.