There was a lot of hard work going on down on the family farm as the growing season came to a rapid close. There would still be some good eatables in the garden that needed picking or dug up and stored before that first frost arrived. It took a bit of effort staying one step ahead of Old Man Winter but amongst all that work there was some fun to be had, too.
Of course the kids were having fun at school, putting up colored paper cutouts of jack-o-lanterns and black cats. This was the time to be sizing up those big orange pumpkins, that had been growing at the back of the garden all summer, and making the major decisions on which ones would be transformed into scary faces.
For some time now the kids would have been trying to make up their minds about what kind of costume to wear, too, for that grand trick-or-treat night. Hobos, cowboys, and princesses were usually the rural choice since the costumes were collected from what ever was already at hand around the home. What with the pumpkins all carved and displayed on a shelve at school waiting for the prize to be presented to the winner, and your costume collected, now came the big anticipation for that special night of traipsing around the neighborhood collecting candy. This could take a few hours since the neighborhood consisted of farms, all a few miles from one another.
Though out this scary event everyone sort of held their breath, so to speak or in some cases for real, in anticipation of whether any older kids would pull off that age-old trick---dumping someone's outhouse over on it side.
This happened to my grandparents once, way back before my time. It seems Grandpa Trotter had a habit of going out to the outhouse during the night and while he was setting there he'd fall asleep. Then Grandma would get to missing him there in their big old feather bed and wake up. She'd have to haul out of bed and truck out to the outhouse to wake him up and bring him back inside. Well, one particular Halloween Grandpa went to make his mid-night visit but this time Grandma evidently didn't wake up and get to missing him--at least not in time. Seems some teenagers came by, bent on doing a little mischief, and dumped the outhouse over. They swore later they didn't have any idea that old Mr. Trotter was perched there snoozing inside. Daddy use to tell this story but I don't recall him ever saying just where he was when all of this was going on. It kind of makes me wonder.
