Ghouls are out early this year, in candy shops, post offices, grocery stores, coffee shops. Everywhere you look -- chalky white faces with dark circled eyes, nooses around necks, rubber knives through catsup bloodied hearts.  And these are just the grownups.

     Chocolates and gummy bears, Dots and Caramilk bars are bartered for. Trick or Treat? What, no trick?

     All this and now it’s 8:30 pm and I click off the television and hear pounding at the door. Loud pounding. Not the type you’d expect from little kids wanting peanut butter cups.  It continues because I’m in my flannel pajamas nursing a rotten cold, and want to stay where the tissue is.

     The pounding doesn’t stop. 

     I drag myself out of bed and look out the window.  Whose car is that behind mine?

     Pound pound pound pound pound.

     I shuffle to the door.

     “Who is it?”

     “Trick or Treat!”                       

     Reluctantly, I open it.  Standing before me is my good friend, Bette.  Her face is painted ghoulishly white, and tire tracks cross her neck and continue down the front of her ankle-length white nightgown. 

     “Bette,” I say, grinning from ear-to-ear.  “What in the world are you supposed to be?”

     She looks at me, and with absolute dead-pan says: “I am tired and run down.”

     We laugh. She hands me an apple. It’s all backwards, who gives who gets.

     “C’mon in, I’ll make us some tea,” I tell her. “We can chat in the living room.”

Despite having the energy of a gnat, I get a lovely fire going in the large stone hearth, and before you can say: wacky witches of Eastwick--I’m serving tea to my oldest ghoulfriend.

      Bats fly into windows. Flying pumpkins dance. The room spins--inside our heads.

      “How long did it take you to come up with: tired and run down?” I ask her.

     “When I told Jack that’s how I was feeling this morning. Ding! Ding! There it was.”

     “Just like that.”

     “Yep. Just like that.”

     “Inspired.”

     “My muse always surprises me,” she says, grabbing a shawl and warming her shoulders. “Who’da thought she’d show up while I was doing laundry?”

     “Ah, the magic of detergent.”

     “And rinse cycles.”

     “And rinse cycles.”

     “So where is hubby Jack tonight?”

     “Bowlin’ in a Jack-o-Lantern costume.”

     “You’re kidding.”

     “Yep.”

     “You ARE kidding?”

     “Yep. He’s bowlin’ in an Elvis outfit.”

     “Jesus, Bette. I thought you told him, no more Elvis impersonations.”

     “Couldn’t do it. It’d be like tearing his heart out."

     “Nah, too messy.”

We laugh a lot--the spirit of black cats and cardboard skeletons taking us captive. The moon shines through talk glass windows. The fire crackles and glows.

       Bette, my sixty-year-old bud looks like death warmed over and is the best medicine I could ask for. There is no trick tonight. Just treat. And, it's all mine.