Halloween queen

Again this year Dana made up little plastic bags with fossils she has collected from around here. She wanders sites that are pre construction after the earth has been turned and finds them by the thousands. She takes the best small ones and adds a slip of paper with the name of the creature it was and the approximate age. Most are hundreds of millions of years old (or 6000 if your dinosaurs were on the ark). She hands them out to the kids, she handed out 130 this year, along with information about them and some candy. There are kids who have a collection from every year she's done it going back five years. 12 year olds grateful for the strange old lady who gives out fossils with her candy.





I did not, first time I saw this, get the joke. 1692 was the year of the Salem witch trials. I got the shirt for Dana and it arrived ON Halloween. Kismet.

We have, in this neighborhood, all the good things that everyone says are gone. It is miraculous in a way. Halloween is an example. A couple of blocks away we had a haunted house set up. At the culdesacs in the area people set up tables and had multi-house get togethers. Hundreds and hundreds of urchins prowling the streets in all kinds of costumes.

This is the third year I've really paid attention and it gets better every year. It is heartening to know how many children will have positive memories of the neighborhood they grew up in with the crazy fossil lady.


She had a stream of kids until she ran out of fossils and candy and had to wrap it up. The shots are not great, screen grabs from my security camera, but it gives you an idea of how many there were. It is hilarious to listen in to the conversations.