Karen Newman Midgarden

These four merry Halloween faces accompanied my brother and I on trick-or-treat expeditions in the small North Dakota town where we grew up in the fifties and sixties.  The two larger pumpkins actually had a little light inside to illuminate the path as we trekked around our neighborhood with the rest of the baby boomer kids of our generation.  My mother once told me that there were 52 children on the short single-family-home block where our home was located. These four hardy survivors were retired from active duty when we became teens but our mother displayed them yearly, as I do now. Happy memories of chilly nights, crowded sidewalks, trying to guess who was under the masks, and greedy anticipation of  treats to come, all return to me when these paper-mache creations emerge from storage to center my Halloween display.