As Halloween quickly approaches and colors of dark red, yellow and brown surround the streets I am reminded daily of many childhood Halloweens of the past.
    Growing up, I was fortunate enough to live in a relatively large rural neighborhood. At the time, most of the other children in the neighborhood where within a few years of myself. We would spend our days having squirt gun contests and nights playing hide-and-seek. During fall we would spend endless hours playing tackle football and seeking adventure on the trails that spread like veins throughout the neighborhood.
    For many years, I spent Halloween night trick-or-treating with those same neighbors. I can remember the excitement of “costume time.” Since I spent most of my life playing sports, every year seemed to be an upgraded version of my “hurt basketball player” routine.
    I would spend hours on make up, perfecting the art of a bruised eye or cheeck bone. My dad had fallen off the roof of my parents house when he was building it and hurt his shoulder - so I would use his arm sling and sport tape to recreate the broken arm look. A number of injuries I had during my younger years left me with a set of crutches to top things off.
    Once the first few toddlers had knocked on my door while screaming trick-or-treat greetings, the rest of the children in the neighborhood met up and began their annual trick-or-treating adventure.
    Of course these adventures usually only consisted of “who likes who” and “who was holding hands with who,” but they were our adventures nonetheless.
    We would tackle the first few houses, nabbing candy bars and candy corn, then we would strategically switch masks or uniforms for the next few houses.
    If anyone fell behind, and every year someone did, the rest of us would hide in the ditches and in the woods and when the person finally caught up we would scare them by jumping out at just the right timing.
    We knew when the best houses ran out of the best candy. We knew the houses that would just leave candy in a dish on the deck. We knew the few houses that actually gave out quarters instead of candy. And we knew the one house, only open for an hour or two, that gave away king sized Snickers and Three Musketeers bars.
    Toward the end of the night, we would venture out of the development to a small family owned business that held an annual Halloween haunted house. Every year they would host more than 200 individually carved pumpkins, Halloween decorations, frightening music and hand-made candies. If you were under the age of 14 you could walk through their garage, which hosted flat black caskets, pure white skeletons, dark green Frankensteins and thousands of small candies, wrapped separately and in multiple flavors. Each piece of candy was a different Halloween character from witches to ghosts to pumpkins. Each carved pumpkin was lit, providing just enough light to see ghosts and goblins right in front of you. Small smoke machines clouded the view and gave an extra eerie feeling to the already scary atmosphere.
    If your parents were the ones who escorted you to the house, it was almost a sure thing that they would spend half an hour gabbing about the latest neighborhood news.
    And I ate all of it up.
    As I have developed into an adult, my thoughts about Halloween have changed. And although I can’t trick-or-treat, or snag a piece of candy at the annual Halloween house, my memories of those things will always bring me joy this time of year.