October Thirty One

Are you dressing up for Halloween?
My costume is an elderly old lady with gray hair, glasses and a recent root canal.

Will you turn on the porch lights, wait for the doorbell and hand out candy?
I'm a grouch and won't do any of that. Jim and I plan to turn the lights off and go out to dinner at the Rio Chama Steak House. Our neighborhood has few children -- the only little one we know is Alyssa across the street and she's barely two and doesn't "get" Halloween yet.

Did you turn on the heat yet?
We've had such cold nights, several of them, well below freezing, and the furnace roars.

Has it snowed where you are?
It has here. Well before Halloween we had a real Christmas snowstorm, with accumulations that coated everything and sideways blowing white in the wind. I like winters but not out of season.

Do you smell the sharp tang of roasting chiles in the air everywhere you go now?
We do. Every parking lot, every roadside gravel patch has a pop-up roaster tub rotating over a propane fire. The scent is heaven.

Do you have orange dahlias at your farmer's market?
We do.

Are peaches gone by?
Sadly, yes.

Do your aspen trees twinkle in the breeze? Are they golden yellow?
Our aspen trees flutter and twirl with an agitated unease now. They shivered wildly when it snowed. This morning when I got up it was 16 degrees F and the aspens looked scared.

These are the questions that October 31 raises. And answers.