Our Last Trick or Treat

Somewhere in my memory, a porch light is still on.

I don’t remember the year. I couldn’t tell you if it was ‘86 or ‘91 or ‘94. What I remember is the weight of the pillowcase, the way the plastic mask made my breath hot against my own face, and the elastic string that left a line behind my ears. Most of the porch lights on the street had gone dark by then. People had run out of candy, or patience, or both. But one was still shining at the end of the block, and somebody in the group said it: “One more house.”

Nobody argued. Nobody ever argued about one more house.

I honestly don’t think we knew. That’s the part that gets me now. There was no ceremony, no feeling in the air that something was ending. We climbed those steps the way we’d climbed a hundred others, rang the bell, shouted the words, and held our bags open. The candy dropped in. That sound, a soft, crinkly rattle of fun-size wrappers landing on a pile of other fun-size wrappers, is one I’d know anywhere. I’d know it blindfolded.

And then we walked home, trading the good stuff and dumping our bags on the living room floor, and it was just another night. Except it wasn’t. It was the last one.

We thought it would go on forever. Kids don’t think in endings. Halloween was the one night a year when the whole neighborhood agreed to play along, when strangers handed you free candy and called your costume scary even when it was a bedsheet with eyeholes. It never crossed our minds that there would come a year when we’d be too old, or too busy, or too self-conscious, or just not that interested. We didn’t decide to stop. We just didn’t go one year, or we went along with a little brother and carried his bag, or we stood at the edge of a party feeling like something had quietly shifted without telling us.

Some of us felt it coming. You could sense the last few years getting thinner, the costume getting lazier, the route getting shorter. Some of us didn’t feel anything at all. We found out later, looking back, the way you always find out the important things.

That’s what I mean when I say we grew up that year. Not in a dramatic way. Somewhere between that last October 31 and the next one, the door closed, and we never heard it click.

The kids after us got a different Halloween. Maybe a better one in some ways, with organized trunk-or-treats, daylight hours, apps to check which houses were participating. But they never had the dark streets and the packs of kids roaming free with nobody’s parent in sight. They never had the feeling that the night belonged to us. We lived it, and we’ll never live it again.

But I can still see it. That costume. Those friends. That candy. That cold October night air. And that last porch light, glowing at the end of the street, waiting for us.

One More House