If you’ve never been to small-town rural America, you are missing out on really good corn and potatoes, traffic jams caused exclusively by slow tractors, and the potent scent of manure wafting on the breeze. But as delightful as life is in a small farm town, trick-or-treating becomes a strategic exercise when your neighbors are scarecrows.
If your mom was willing to make the drive to the nearest party store a few towns over, then you were one of the lucky few with a real costume. My mom was never willing, and thus, like many others, my sister and I were forced year after year to craft our costumes out of hand-me-downs and paper maché.
Because I’m from a small, rural town in the northern part of these United States, and October in New England gets real cold real quick, I was forced every Halloween to “wear a jacket.” After slaving away for hours over my homemade costume, plastering paper maché over inflated balloon molds and embellishing my neighbor’s old turtleneck in glitter, I dreaded hearing those words. And yet they always came, and the effect of the costume that I’d worked so hard on was inevitably ruined as my mother forced my arms into a fleece and zipped it up to my chin.
Finally, layered up like the Michelin Man, I was ready to go.
Describing our neighborhood as sparsely populated would be generous: trick-or-treating there would have meant trudging two miles for only a handful of candy. So, us and the other neighborhood kids piled into our parent’s tractors (just kidding, we drive normal cars too) and were shuttled to the most populated section of town, Primrose Path, a quaint street lined with actual houses (they weren’t even barns!).
Everyone in the town came here to trick-or-treat for the sake of convenience. Because the population was so small, this meant not just that you would inevitably run into someone you knew, but that everyone you ran into was someone you knew. This is bound to happen when there are only twenty kids in your class. Most of the teachers lived on Primrose. Reese’s from Mrs. Baranoski, Swedish Fish from Ms. Majewski, Hershey’s Kisses from Mrs. Ryczek. They handed us our candy while asking if we had completed the spelling homework, which made trick-or-treating feel a lot like a test and not a lot like fun.
After making sure we’d seen every person in the town, we would roll back through the pumpkin patches to our farmhouse to count our spoils.
Throughout the next cold months the single piece of candy my sister and I were each allowed per day would complement our wholesome diet of beans and squash. We ate it all happily—everything except the chocolate, which we fed to the cows to make chocolate milk.
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