Twoku:
A cold night cannot / stop the costumed children from / begging for candy.
(Original version, circa 10/31/2011 — right after the snowstorm)

Well, Halloween is now officially a bittersweet holiday.  Sure, it’s the birthday of our two Sphynx cats (they’re 7 today), and everyone loves to dress up in costumes, but the holiday has now been ravaged twice in two years by “100-year storms” slamming the East Coast and Northeast US.  A freak snowstorm in 2011, and this year a hurricane with a killer high tide, which surged over the shorelines, berms and walls, causing Wall Street to close for two consecutive days in a row, for the first time since the 1880’s! Oh, and Manhattan is still without power from roughly 30th street south for the most part… The big NYC Halloween Parade has been re-scheduled to next week…

With my disappointed daughter at her mother’s home, still in blackout, this Halloween is a bust. Many of my friends and family members are in darkness, or running on a generator to power their refrigerator and one lamp to live by.  Others are at shelters, friends’ homes, or on cots and blowup mattresses in offices where the employers (those with power) are doing what they can to ease the difficulties…  Many offices, buildings, shops are still unable to open and traffic lights are still dark, giving rise to unexpected kindness and good sense among drivers (much needed!) as they approach intersections and think before leaping…

This year we are lucky enough to have our power on, so the children came, undeterred, emboldened by our glowing, inviting porch light, and a beckoning, cardboard, life-sized Jack the Pumpkin King…

Our hearts go out to all of princesses, wizards, vampires and ghouls, who are dealing with carnage left behind by the real monster of this Halloween — Hurricane Sandy!