I’m not generally big on nostalgia, but Halloween is a bittersweet day. Halloween is not much of a holiday in the country, the distances are too great, so people take their kids to Dorset, Manchester, Cambridge where there are Main Streets for them to walk on. But I gather that in our stranger-phobic time, trick–or-treating is fading away. Cutting connections. The holiday does bring back vivid memories of life with my daughter Emma, who lives well away from me now. I love the farm, but never grasped the meaning or impact of moving away from your family like that. My head just wasn’t working right.

Em and I would go out right after dinner. We would rush around to markets stocking up on candy and jelly beans and I would go into Manhattan to buy costume parts for her. Em was always rational about candy, she never took too much or ate too much, and I always thought the best part of the evening was when she would gather at the kitchen table and trade with her friends – wheeling and dealing over M & M’s, Hershey Bars.

The Boomers were already nibbling away at the ritual, dressing up along with their kids, obsessing on candy health and safety, over-producing the costumes. But it does bring back a wave of mourning for the time when parenting a small child was the most intense thing on the earth to be doing. I miss Em, all the time, and am sorry life didn’t work out in such a way as we could live near each other, but I am very proud of her and she loves her life as a writer in New York City, the right place for her.

I ran away from a lot of people over the years, and as happens in life, a lot of them are popping up again. I am not interested in memory lane, or in swapping old yarns, or romanticizing the past, surely not mine, but I see that a lot of people had connections to me that I fled from. I am learning not to do that.

There will be no trick-or-treaters on this quiet country road, there never has been a single one, and that is too bad. I miss seeing them in their costumes, and was especially delighted to have a fairy in the barn. I saw the shadows of the tree on the Pig Barn