Imagine the setting: It is 1990; you, at 9 years old, are about to go running around trick or treating unsupervised with your older cousins Emily and Abby. Your little sister Erica tags along as well. First, you rush home from school with Mom and Erica. A quick dinner and you get ready. Due to an interaction between your dishwater blonde hair, already turning dark thanks to a lack of summer sun, and the yellow spray hair dye your mom bought at Kmart for your costume, it will always be remembered as the Halloween you were Cinderella with green hair. You look magnificent wearing the flower girl dress you wore in Aunt Allie’s wedding last summer, a white eyelet dress with a blue satin sash, lovingly made by your grandmother, along with a pair of long, white cotton gloves that once belonged to your great-grandmother. Who cares about green hair?
Your first stop is the “neighborhood.” You stop at Joyce and Carl’s, and then on to Aunt Belle’s. They are your only neighbors. Aunt Belle, Joyce’s aunt whose full name was Laura Belle, remains the woman who most closely reminds you of a true witch. Her wild white hair and missing teeth created the aesthetic, but her treatment of Joyce, witnessed over several years as Joyce cared for her in every imaginable way, cements the connection. Every year, the same treat from Aunt Belle – a sleeve of Rollos. Decades later, you still can’t decide if it is one of the best or one of the worst Halloween treats.
Next, Mom runs you and Erica, and later, Garrett, all over Omer before heading over to Aunt Robin’s house and the best part of the evening where we could run house to house. This particular year, Abby made a magnificent Dracula. Somewhere in the archives, you, Emily, Abby, and Erica are immortalized in a photograph about to hit Orchard Street. Abby is posing as Dracula about to devour or kiss her favorite candy, a full-size Crunch bar. As for you, you are doing your best Cinderella pose, ensuring your green curls are perfectly coiffed. For the life of you, you do not remember Emily and Erica’s costumes.
You’ve known these tiny suburban streets since before you were born. These are the same streets Mom and your aunts trick-or-treated in the 60s and 70s. In fact, Mom is probably over at Grandma and Grandpa’s chatting while you trick or treat. By the end of the evening, you will be in negotiations with Emily, Abby, and Erica in the ever-important candy trade session to be held in Aunt Robin’s formal living room. Somehow, you are naive enough to trade chocolate for Smarties. Every. Year. You are old enough to know better but gladly make the trade anyway. It is a scene directly out of Stranger Things. What comes next is still unresolved.
The next day, you and Abby find a dropped bag of Halloween treats among the dirt and leaves in an enclosed lane separating different parts of Orchard Street. None of the candy is salvageable. However, there is a note. It states “He stinks in the basement” – at least that is how you remember it all these years later. You and Abby think this is the greatest thing ever, and you head back to her house. Unfortunately for you, the notorious Doberman Pinchers that live a few houses down from your great-grandmother and on the edge of the elementary school playground, with a large enclosed yard and “Beware of Dog!” signs no less, get loose and chase you both all the way back to Abby’s house. The door slams shut just in time. Now on to the real mystery … Who stinks in the basement? Why is he there? Why does he stink? Every Halloween should have at least one mystery.
