Punishing Ms. Mcgregor

I remember Halloween night 2002 as if it were yesterday. In the company of the neighborhood kids, we went trick-or-treating from house to house. It was a beautiful, cool night with a full moon, so big that my eyes couldn't stop gazing at its beauty. However, it would be another event that would mark in my mind a memory difficult to forget, after so many years.

Like every Halloween night, many were the adults who gave us candy, but Miss Mcgregor was an old curmudgeon who hated her neighbors' children for some strange reason. Mom said it was because "life had not given her the joy of being a mother". My grandmother, on the other hand, used to be more condescending to her. I used to think she knew the secret behind her bitterness and would scold me when I tried to say something bad about our neighbor.

The truth is that even though my parents would have forbidden me to knock on that wicked woman's door, I in the company of John, another of my neighbors, decided to knock on Miss Mcgregor's door, after all we were in disguise. I had a real Batman costume that my grandmother had made for me. We knocked and knocked on the old lady's door, until she opened it and to our surprise, handed us a bag of ghost figurines.

She didn't let us say "Trick or treat?", she simply handed us the bag and then invited us to leave her property. Excitedly we rushed home to enjoy all those goodies he had given us, but something wasn't right. When we opened the bag we discovered that the old lady had actually tricked us.

A huge pile of coffee and sand came out of that bag, before our astonished eyes. Obfuscated, I left my house to John's incessant question, "Atticus, what are you going to do? What I did was to throw the entire contents of the bag on the lawn that our neighbor took care of so carefully, after all, she could not know who had been the cause of such evil, because surely she had done the same to every child who came to her door.

The next morning Miss Mcgregor knocked on our door and accused me in front of my parents of damaging their lawn. My grandmother gave me a disappointed look, but I denied everything. My grandmother leaned close to my ear and confessed that it was none other than our bitter neighbor who had made my Batman costume and that I would remove every ounce of the coffee and sand I had spread on that lawn.

As punishment, she would force me to spend every afternoon for the rest of the year in that horrible house. I didn't know what to feel, but I was shocked to imagine the evil old woman creating a disguise for me. Then I understood what my grandmother used to tell me "you can never judge people by their appearance, you might be in for a surprise" and boy did I. It was an amazing Halloween surprise!