Halloween “Fun”

     Over one hundred people filled the north bleacher seats in the grade school gym / auditorium.  The school board had had to relocate from their regular meeting place to accommodate the citizens who wished to attend.

    The attraction?  The month before, the board had voted to prohibit Halloween celebrations in the public schools.  In the face of the public outcry, the board reversed itself.  They might have had better luck at cancelling Christmas.

     When I was a kid, Halloween was an excuse to do some serious destruction.  Pushing over the outhouse was the quintessential Halloween trick.  I remember one Halloween when main street of Genoa was nearly impassible due to junk that had been hauled into the street.  All that wasted energy expended by youth!  I deny having anything to do with such destruction.  (Accurate memory probably fails me.)     I’m sure I was an innocent bystander.  Mark Twain’s definition of “innocent bystander” is someone who doesn’t have sense enough to get out of the way.

       I do remember the old privy on the farm taking a spill or two.  It was a good excuse to dig a new pit and cover up the old one.  It was only for emergency use when the water system failed, anyway.

    Here’s another lame joke.  A father asked his son if he had anything to do with pushing over their outhouse.  The son replied that he could not tell a lie, that he had indeed pushed over the outhouse, whereupon the father took a hickory switch to his son’s backside.  When the son recovered enough to speak, he told his father that George Washington’s father didn’t punish him when he admitted to chopping down the cherry tree.  The father replied, “George Washington’s father wasn’t in the Cherry tree.”

     I don ‘t care much for destruction any more.  But it was time to get rid of the old kitchen cabinet that no one wanted.

      A little tiling back splash will take the dust of destruction out of your mouth.

   A visit to the farm to empty the grain bin put plenty of dust back in my mouth.  Worse than the dust was manhandling the auger by myself.

    The wheat got hauled, and we concluded our week by attending the scattering of Roy

Einspahr’s ashes.  The grandchildren were happy to do most of the work.

   It was a sunny, in the 70’s, windless day.  The family shared a potluck dinner with some of the neighbors prior to the scattering.  Time to catch up with folks we hadn’t seen in a long time.

      Back to Kansas where October is in the air.