My husband's Hallowe'en pumpkin.
You light a pumpkin to indicate you are home and 'receiving' - but only 3 groups of kids, all older, came this year. I have two boxes of mini chocolate bars left - so I put them in the freezer.
My husband had stayed home just to help me, as the dogs go berzerker every time the bell rings. So I need help.
Some years we get no one, and some years a steady stream from 6 pm to 10 pm.
But even though the weather was mild, we got few trick or treaters. That's because most homes around us kept their lights out for the evening.
Lots of people hiding in their homes. Watching Hallowe'en themed sitcoms.
I live way way out in the burbs, you see.
And I don't like it. Never did. Despite the fact the view from my porch is quite beautiful. The neighbours have a spacious treed lot and it has a French Impressionist feel.
I moved here to the boonies off-island when 9 months pregnant with my second son. In 1988. I actually broke water on the carpet that first day we took possession of a little bungalow beside a garage.
We lived, at the time, in an apartment in the Town of Mount Royal, and the downstair's tenant (the owner's daughter) kept banging on my door and complaining about the noise my older son made. She asked me to keep him from running. A two year old!
So we moved to the distant suburbs, way out in Hudson and made a hasty ill-considered decision on the purchase of a house. Just as the market was peaking. There was no Internet back then, the agent had you at hermercy. And we got taken, big time. (And I was in a hormonal stupour and let my husband and father-in-law run the show.) Alas, can't cry over spilled milk.
As it happens, the Hallowe'en edition of How I Met Your Mother had a theme that echoed my experience 25 years ago. Lily is given a suburban house by her grandma and because she is dumbed down with hormones, she accepts.
I watched the episode on tape, alone. I wish I had watched it with my husband. He knows I HATE this burb (where he grew up) and if I could do it all again, I'd stay in the city... West London preferably.
Now all I can do is dream. And visit anywhere I want on Google Earth and snap a picture of some perfect house with a perfect view somewhere, something my style, not too grand, and put it on my desktop and pretend. Hey, I can even visit people's homes on the real estate sites.
When I see that a house in Hammersmith about the size of mine, without any appreciable lot, costs 5 million pounds, it makes me feel a little better. But just a little. A very little.
Hey, considering no one talks to their neighbours anymore, and that all the stores all over the Western World are the same, it's not a totally crazy or pathetic thing to do. It's an imaginative thing to do. Right?
How I Met Your Mother also had a Canuck theme. Poutine in Chicoutimi. Pretty good research! I think only Quebeckers would get that joke!
Anyway, once we'd moved to the suburbs and my kids started school they REFUSED to move, until school finished. And then they said, "I'm outta here."
