Summer Leaves, Autumn Nights

     I don't know what's it's been like where you live. But where I now reside, in southeastern Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia, the weather is still warm -- 74 degrees today -- and because of the unusually warm September and October, the leaves have yet to turn in any significant way.

     My windows are open. The air is humid. And darned if I didn't get a little sunburn when we were lying out in the backyard yesterday afternoon.

     Still, the season is upon us. And no matter the weather, the ghosts and goblins and skeletons come out to play.

    What I didn't know, before we moved here, is that Halloween is taken quite seriously around these parts. We used to live in the Hudson valley of New York, where Washington Irving's headless horseman haunts the byways and highways.
  

    
     But something is spooking the Delaware valley as well, though I don't know what it is. Even a harmless lawn chair makes you wonder: Who was sitting there, where have they gone, what happened to them?

   
     To bolster our defenses against the encroaching darkness, B sent me out to buy a treasure chest full of candy. If our clean living is not clean enough, if our good deeds are not good enough, then we are prepared to bribe any and all specters and phantoms to entice them to go haunt other victims.

   
     I happen to know, from previous experience, that Skittles are a favorite of any beguiling young enchantress who might happen by the house one evening.

    And we now have sugar-coated ammunition to fend off the pirates who might wash up on our shores in the dark of night.

     So beware, don't let the benign summer weather, the pleasant breezes that linger into fall, lull you into thinking that all is right with the world. Be afraid of the darkness, my friends. Do not venture down that empty lane, for you know not what evil lurks on the other end.