The day after a very nostalgic Halloween, Huck woke me up from an after-work snooze in front of the fire to tell me that A) I forgot to order his yearbook, B) He needs his fancy choir pants hemmed by Saturday, and C) He needs new dress shoes also by Saturday. And I need to order his All-Region t-shirt by tomorrow. And he needs a fancy baking pan for French Week, which is next week. Oh, and at some point we really need to try to fix his cracked phone that he keeps dropping, breaking, fixing, dropping, breaking and fixing.

As we went into a full-blown debate that rivaled Hamilton and Jefferson’s Cabinet Battle #2 with Troy playing a slightly biased Washington, a part of me began to sink back into my sweet memories of the day before when life was so much simpler. Back then I was finding old pictures of Huck as a baby scarecrow, Huck and Troy as the spider and Miss Muffet, all three of us as Pumpkin Heads who spent Halloween blind and deaf. I was thinking back to our many New York nights and then our limited Fayetteville nights of trick or treating with dear friends, none of whom I saw this year (but many of whom I sentimentally texted). I realized that Halloween is the most bittersweet holiday of all, but I’ll take it anyway.

Now it’s November 10th, the glorious peak of fall around these parts, and all those things from the first paragraph have come and gone, just like trick or treating, just like the tree’s leaves, just like my students’ plays last week, just like Huck’s all-region choir concert, just like daylight savings, just like my strep throat, just like Troy’s scarecrow.

But don’t worry; they always return.