Anyway, the wind blows

“Do we have to give it back?”

The sentence immediately reminded me of every sitcom in which a family found a dog and the owners were located toward the end of the episode.

But we were talking about a plastic pumpkin.

Two things were very certain in the last week: Halloween was coming up and it was very windy outside.

These facts converged when a plastic Jack-O-Lantern with a cartoon face showed up on my front steps after a long press day.

I asked Wyndi about the newest addition to the patch she was gathering on the stoop and realized she didn’t know about it.

It was placed at the bottom of our stairs and was lit with an electric light inside so it certainly seemed like we had been gifted a plastic pumpkin.

However, no one among our friends would fess up to putting the Jack-O-Lantern there.

The mystery was solved a couple of days later when the entries for the Chamber of Commerce’s decorations contest were uploaded and I spied the plastic pumpkin among pictures taken earlier of our neighbor a couple of houses down from us.

The lightweight decoration seems to have rolled down to us and was put in place by someone passing by who assumed it belonged to us.

It was a cute pumpkin but I made sure to give it back once I noticed where it belonged.

(To our neighbors: thanks for the accidental loan of the pumpkin!)

We had a very pleasant Halloween weekend watching scary movies and having a couple of get-togethers. The bigger of the two was a costume party which I attended as the werewolf preacher from “Silver Bullet” while Wyndi was decked out in steam punk fashion. (It’s a kind of Victorian sci-fi for those uninitiated.)

We brought a charcuterie tray which we snacked on alongside a ‘meat man’-a grisly but delicious platter of meats arranged underneath a skull covered in shaved ham to look like we had gone cannibalistic. We also had deviled eggs that were dyed to look like they had gone rotten and skulleritospizza pockets in the shape of a skull and filled with typical burrito ingredients.

I watched five movies over the weekend, and there was always at least one person in the room that didn’t like whatever movie was on. That didn’t seem to matter because it was nice to just spend time in celebration with friends. It was also the first time Wyndi and I got to hand out candy in the house on main street and we had a good crowd.

Between the safe trick or treat on Friday and weekend festivities, I noticed a lot of Dublin dressing up and having fun with the holiday. There may have been fake blood and corpses around but it was just nice to see the community getting together and having a good time.

Paul Gaudette is the managing editor at the Dublin Citizen and can be reached at 445-2515 and publisher@dublincitizen.com.