Sally Breslin: My Life

Tuesday, November 4, 2025

I CAN'T FIND ANYONE BRAVE ENOUGH OR CHEAP ENOUGH TO PLOW MY DRIVEWAY THIS WINTER

I realize the skiers, snowboarders and snowmobile enthusiasts might dislike me for saying this, but I’m hoping for very little or no snow this winter.

It’s not that I don’t like snow…as long as I don’t have to drive in it. I think it gives everything a fresh, clean look (especially when it covers the dog poop I failed to pick up in the yard), and I’m particularly fond of the powdery kind of snow that sparkles in the light.

No, the problem with snow is my driveway (a.k.a. the asphalt menace from Hell). It has fought against and defeated even the bravest of souls who have dared to attempt to plow it throughout the years. And as a result, I now have no one to remove any snow that will defy my threats and still land on it this winter.

At least not for a price I can afford.

This driveway has been a curse since day one, mainly because the town wouldn’t grant a permit for the driveway that already existed on the property when my husband and I purchased it. Why not? Because that driveway exited into the exact spot in a cul-de-sac where the town piled up the mountains of snow its road crews plowed every winter.

After much debate, the town finally did approve a new location for our driveway...six acres away on the most overgrown, isolated part of the property. Clearing that area was the equivalent of clearing the Forest Primeval.

By the time the new driveway was completed and actually reached the site of our future house, it was over 220 feet long and had so many curves in it due to all of the boulders it had to avoid along the way, even a snake would break its back trying to follow it.

And to this day, people still mistake my driveway for a road.

But despite my careful placement of fluorescent driveway stakes each winter, nearly every plow driver I’ve hired has managed to wipe out most of them, knocking them down as if they were bowling pins. By now, I've purchased so many stakes, I figure I probably own stock in at least two of the companies that manufacture them...and I still have fiberglass splinters embedded in my skin to prove it.

Even though I always made certain to clearly mark where the asphalt area in front of the garage ended and my front lawn began, those stakes also promptly were plowed right down, as if they were invisible. Then the trucks plowed right across my lawn and scraped it up into a giant jelly-roll that took until July to fully melt.

The sides of my driveway, however, always have been the biggest problem because they contain an assortment of ravines and ditches that have caused damage to at least three trucks. One hit a tree, one ran over the remnants of an old stone-wall and tore off some major part underneath his truck, and another dented a front rim when it struck one of the culvert walls.

As a result, the first two plow guys I hired said, “Never again!” and quit. The third one stuck around, but said he would have to charge me by the inch for each storm. Up to six inches was $60. From six inches to a foot was $80. Anything over a foot was $100. And a blizzard was a flat $120.

So during each snowstorm, I’d be outside with my ruler every hour, measuring the inches and praying the snow would stop before it reached the next price level. I was a wreck, because even a mere quarter of an inch could force to me to cough up an extra $20.

Finally, an angel of mercy came to my rescue in the form of a guy named Chris, who read about my plight on Facebook and messaged me. He said he enjoyed helping people and would be more than happy to plow my driveway for $30 per storm, no matter how deep the snow was. He added, “And if you don’t have the money right away, don’t worry about it.”

I couldn’t believe my good fortune. But I was smart enough not to get too excited, mainly because I knew from experience that once the poor guy took a look at my driveway in person, he’d either break all speed records getting as far away from it as possible, or he would increase his price by about $85.

But Chris was amazing. The driveway didn’t seem to faze him at all. He plowed it in record time, and with everything – his truck, my lawn, his essential body parts – all still perfectly intact. One time, when he noticed how icy my driveway was underneath the snow, he returned with a truckload of sand, free of charge. “I didn’t want you to slip and fall while walking out to get your mail,” he said.

I had to pinch myself to make certain I wasn't dreaming.

But what really made me want to canonize Chris was one brutal winter when he was hospitalized with Covid. After several days he, still weak and tired, finally was discharged late one afternoon. The moment he got home, he jumped into his truck and headed right over to plow my driveway because it had snowed the day before and he was afraid I’d be trapped in my house.

Unfortunately, Covid eventually took its toll on Chris’ health, and he ended up with chronic lung and breathing problems and had to give up plowing.

So last winter I became plow-less. My friend’s husband was kind enough to offer to come over to plow for me, but after he knocked down a small pine tree and got a big scratch on the top of his truck from a low-hanging, snow-weighted branch, he said he feared for his life and wouldn’t be returning.

I wasn’t surprised.

Twice last winter, out of sheer desperation, I, using only a shovel, tackled the driveway myself. It took me about six hours…and half a bottle of Tylenol. The huge snowbank at the street end of the driveway – the snowbank that came up to my waist and contained chunks of ice the size of basketballs – nearly led to my premature demise. At one point, I became so exhausted and desperate while struggling to clear it, when I saw a plow truck approaching from a distance, I draped my body over the top of the banking, hoping the guy would stop to see if I was alive, and then take pity on me.

Instead, he almost ran over me.

“Sure,” I muttered, sitting up and glaring at the truck's tail-lights as the vehicle drove out of sight. “I’ll bet if I were some 20-something hot chick wearing only boots, a hat and a fur bikini, he would have stopped to help me!”

Instead, the guy probably was thinking, “That old lady hasn’t got long for this world anyway, so why bother?”

Alas, now that winter soon will be rearing its fiendish little head once again, I’m feeling panicky. I can’t find anyone even remotely close to my price range (no more than $40 per storm) to tackle my driveway. And I sincerely doubt the first snowstorm of the season is going to say, “Oh, poor Sally! She has no one to plow her out. So I'll be merciful and won’t allow even one flake of snow to land on her property.”

MY DRIVEWAY

I’m also concerned that if I attempt to shovel the driveway myself again this winter, I’ll end up becoming a missing person until the spring thaw reveals my well-preserved frozen body lying underneath all of the snow.

There’s one other thing I might try first, however, out of sheer desperation… hire someone to exorcize my driveway.

That is, if the exorcist charges less than $40.

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Tuesday, October 28, 2025

WHEN IT COMES TO CHOOSING CAREERS THAT EARN VERY LITTLE MONEY, I'M A REAL PRO!

They say if you choose a career you really enjoy, then it never will seem like work or a job.

Well, when I decided to become a writer I discovered this was true – it’s never seemed like a job or real work to me…mainly because it’s barely earned me any money.

My first job as a writer, a correspondent for a weekly newspaper, earned me 25 cents per column inch. So after my articles were printed, I would whip out my trusty ruler and carefully measure each one. In a good week, I could earn about $15.

I quickly learned not to appreciate people who spoke in abbreviated terms. I wanted everyone I interviewed to ramble on endlessly, spewing out words like a slot-machine spitting out jackpot coins.

There were too many times, however, when I spent more for gas to drive to an interview than I earned for the story itself. Take, for example, the night I was assigned to interview the newly-installed president of a local women’s club.

When I arrived at the specified time and location, the members were just sitting down to dine on a pot-luck supper. I was informed that after they ate, they then would conduct the business portion of the meeting. But in the meantime, they graciously added, I was welcome to join them for supper, which I appreciated.

Nearly an hour later, after the members had finished eating and were exchanging recipes for the casseroles, salads and desserts each had brought to the pot-luck, I figured I’d finally be able to interview the new president…only to discover the official installation hadn’t even taken place yet…and was about to begin.

So I had to wait until the new president actually was sworn in as the new president.

By the time I sat through the lengthy installation of officers and a variety of speeches, it was close to 9 PM, yet the outgoing president still was onstage, thanking everyone from her ancient ancestors to her current mail carrier.

But instead of being discouraged because I was getting paid only by the inch and not by the hour, I was encouraged. These women were talkers, and talkers meant a lot of words…which translated into a lot of inches.

When I finally was able to interview the new president, however, the conversation went something like this:

ME: “So, as the new president, what are your plans for the club in the upcoming year?”

HER: “Oh, I have quite a few major changes in mind, but I’m not prepared to discuss them yet.”

ME: “Are you pleased to be the new president or are you feeling a bit apprehensive right now?”

HER: “I’m pleased.”

ME: “What is a main goal you would like to achieve during your term?”

HER: “To do my very best.”

The interview went progressively downhill after that. Whenever I give my dogs the command to “speak,” even they say more than that woman did.

I ended up earning a whopping $1.75 for the article. But on the bright side, I did enjoy and get the recipes for Grace Benson’s lasagna and Edna Turner’s apple cobbler.

When I later became a columnist, I was paid $25 per column, which sounded like a fortune after earning only 25 cents per inch. And I wrote eight columns per month, so that was a hefty $200.

And after only 20 more years of writing those columns week after week, I finally received a raise and earned $35 for each one.

I did manage to write some decent-paying articles for publications like New Hampshire Magazine and Chicken Soup for the Soul, but they weren’t regular enough to make me financially self-sufficient. In fact, if I’d had to support myself solely on what I made from all of those years of writing, I’d probably be living in my car right now.

No, on second thought, I wouldn’t even have been able to afford a car.

I think it’s because, for some reason, writing isn’t considered an actual career by many people. I can’t count the number of times newspapers and other publications asked me to write for them, and when I enthusiastically responded with, “Thank you! I would love to! How much do you pay?” the response usually was, “Pay? We don’t pay.”

“Um, then what exactly is in it for me?” I’d ask.

“Exposure,” too often came the typical response.

Let me point out here that after writing for most of my life, I’ve already had more “exposure” than a convention of Playboy bunnies. What I need is money…cash, moolah, dinero, checks, even gift cards…anything that will prevent me from having to resort to reading my poetry on street corners.

Alas, in 2009, I decided to try my hand at writing books. Surely, I thought, a novel would earn a lot more money than a column. All I had to do was sit down and create about 100,000 brilliant words, find a publisher and then sit back and wait for the cash to come rolling in, especially after the book made it into the top 10 on the New York Times Best Seller list.

Sure…simple.

It took me over two years of writing, rewriting and constant overthinking before I finally finished my first book. And then I spent another year receiving rejection letters from agents who were hoping to represent someone like Oprah Winfrey or Meryl Streep, not some unknown writer from small-town New Hampshire. I guess I really couldn’t blame them. Heck, why settle for crumbs when they could have caviar?

Frustrated, I decided to self-publish. I figured I had nothing to lose, other than my sanity. Amazon was offering free publishing, along with royalties based on a percentage of the profits from the number of books sold. That sounded good to me.

So I researched self-publishing and even joined a few writing groups online that dealt specifically with the subject.

As I read their advice, however, I rolled my eyes so much, I was afraid my eyeballs were going to fall out and land on my keyboard.

“An attention-grabbing book cover is essential,” the published writers said. “You have to make sure it attracts readers. So plan to spend at least $2,000 to $3,000 on a professionally designed one. It will be worth every penny in the long run.”

“And you definitely need an experienced editor to correct all of your errors, like plot holes and inconsistencies,” they added. “So set aside a minimum of $3,000 or more for editing.”

“Also, don’t forget to hire the best narrators for the audio version of your book,” another advised. “I sell more audio books than both the paperbacks and e-books combined. However, if you have a narrator with an annoying or robot-like voice, that can be a death sentence for your novel.”

“But the biggest part of your budget should be spent on promoting your book,” the majority of them emphasized. “You are competing with millions of other writers, so how do you expect to be noticed? You have to aggressively advertise and promote your work or no one will even know it exists.”

Their advice made good sense, I thought.

But as someone who hadn’t even earned enough to classify it as poverty-level income from my writing over the years, my "budget" had a grand total of only about $50 to spend on my book.

So I decided to try to create my own book cover, even though I had no idea how to go about it. I drove around with my camera and snapped scenic photos. I sketched pictures or painted them. I downloaded free fonts for fancy lettering. I even found several photographers who said I could use their work, royalty free, for merely an acknowledgement in my book’s credits.

And then I actually did design all of my own book covers – except for the very first one, There’s a Tick in my Underwear! I splurged $35 for a cover creator from Smashwords to design that one because I wasn't satisfied with the cover I created. I mean, hanging a pair of granny panties on a tree limb and snapping a photo of them flapping in the breeze might have seemed like a great idea for a cover at the time, but the end result proved to me it definitely wasn't. So once I paid for the professional cover (well, maybe semi-professional), I was able to use it as a guideline afterwards for creating the rest of my covers. I also did my own editing on my manuscripts and then would ask a couple of my friends to read them and be brutally honest…which they were.

As I wrote more and more books, I learned that the best way to be “found” was to offer a few of the books at no cost…and then hope the readers would be impressed enough to actually pay to read more of them.

I also learned that when you offer a book free of charge, readers really don’t care much about what the cover looks like. Free is free, after all. The same with sequels. If the readers enjoy the first book and develop an attachment to the characters, then they’ll want to read the sequel, even if the cover looks as if someone drew it an hour after undergoing cataract surgery.

Since 2012, I’ve written and self-published a total of 12 books, two of which have been in the top 20 in their respective categories for all 13 years. My books have been purchased and/or downloaded (including the free ones) over 250,000 times.

Sounds pretty impressive, right?

A GIFT FROM ONE OF MY FRIENDS

Wrong. Depending on the price of the book, Amazon pays me a royalty of anywhere from a mere three cents to a “huge” $1.75. So the way I figure it, I would have to sell about three million books a year just to earn the minimum wage.

And forget about creating audio versions of my books. I tried the free virtual-voice audiobook conversion Amazon offers and the voice not only sounded robotic, for some reason it also decided to read all of the punctuation out loud along with the dialogue, so it sounded like this:

“Open quotes, Oh, darling, exclamation point! Of course, comma, I will move to Boston with you! Exclamation point, closed quotes.”

Not exactly oozing with romance.

I did price professional narrators for audio books, but quickly nixed that idea. The only one I could even come close to affording was an 86-year-old retired disc-jockey with an equally ancient reel-to-reel tape recorder. When I told him my book's narrator was a young female, he said he could talk in a high-pitched voice if I'd like.

But I’ll never stop writing, at least not by choice. It’s in my blood and always will remain my chosen career, even if it forces me to eat rice and assorted chicken parts six days a week. And I’ll never give up hoping that some big film-producer might read one of my free books someday and offer me a six-figure contract for the movie rights to it.

Don’t laugh! Exclamation point. An old woman still can dream, can’t she? Question mark.

In the meantime, I’m seriously considering changing my pen name to Oprah Winfrey…or maybe even Taylor Swift.

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Monday, October 20, 2025

HONEST...THE NUDIST NEXT DOOR WAS TO BLAME!

It’s funny how one trivial incident can conjure up memories of a much bigger incident that happened years ago.

Take, for example, early last month when I had to decide on which fuel plan I wanted to use for the upcoming winter. Automatic delivery? Delivery only per request? Pay in advance? Pay monthly on the budget plan? Pay upon delivery?

At my age, I’m not good at making so many decisions in one day. My brain barely can handle even one major decision per year.

But after weighing all of my options, I finally decided upon the automatic delivery, mainly because I’d probably forget all about ordering fuel until I’d already run out and stalactites were forming on my ceilings. I also chose the monthly payment plan because…well, I couldn’t afford either of the other two options.

Anyway, all of this made me recall a time many years ago, when my husband and I lived in a mobile-home park in the country and also had to make a decision about our fuel. Our oil tank, because we had no basement, was located outside, above ground in the yard. It was a real eyesore, big and ugly and covered with so much rust, I honestly was tempted to paint it black and white like a cow and stick a papier-mâché cow’s head on it.

But the tank didn’t belong to us, it belonged to the park, so I couldn’t touch it. Keeping it filled, however, was our responsibility, and the kerosene and oil mixture it required was pretty expensive, much more than just regular heating oil.

We were on automatic delivery back then, which meant the fuel provider would pop up unannounced whenever he was in the neighborhood and fill the tank. I’m the type who likes to plan my budget in advance, and in my opinion, the fuel was being delivered a little too often. So when it came time for the next heating season to begin, I called the oil company and asked if we could be taken off their automatic-delivery list and put on their delivery-by-request list. That way I could control our expenses more easily because I’d be able to save up money for the fuel before calling them for a delivery.

The employee said there would be no problem.

But a week later, on a Friday morning in September while the weather still was warm, I woke up to find an envelope hanging on my doorknob. Inside was a bill for an oil/kerosene delivery, to the tune of nearly $500. Needless to say, I wasn’t pleased.

Even worse, when I let the dogs out into the yard, they went running out of the side gate…which apparently had been left wide open by the delivery guy. I ended up having to run the equivalent of the Boston marathon to catch up with the dogs and bring them back home.

Furious, I grabbed the phone and was fully prepared to call the oil company and say some really un-nice stuff to them before demanding that they come and siphon out about $250 worth of their crummy oil, but my husband told me to calm down.

“Oil prices actually are lower right now than they’ve been in a while,” he said. “They might go way up again later on this season. So this just might be a blessing in disguise.”

At that moment, the thought of having to cough up $500 I hadn’t budgeted for didn’t seem much like any great blessing to me.

That night, the temperature plummeted, and the next morning, I awakened to the strong smell of oil. I walked out to the living room where my husband was watching TV and asked him if he could smell it. When he shook his head, I realized I’d asked him a dumb question. In the past, countless baked chickens and casseroles had been unceremoniously cremated when I’d told him to keep an eye on dinner in the oven, because the man never smelled anything burning.

Trusting my own nose, I went outside to check the oil tank. To my horror, oil was spewing out of the top of the tank’s fill-pipe and running down onto the ground.

Our neighbor, Jennifer, an attractive blonde who’d just recently moved in and had introduced herself as a former exotic dancer who also was into nudism (much to my dismay and my husband’s delight), was outside at the time and said hi to me.

I asked her if she’d seen anyone delivering oil the day before.

“Definitely!” she said with a giggle. “I was doing some yard work and the guy couldn’t stop staring at me while he was filling the tank.”

I didn’t dare ask her what she had (or hadn’t) been wearing at the time, which probably would have explained a lot.

I dashed back into the house and called the oil company to complain.

“That’s impossible,” the representative said. “You’re not even on our automatic delivery list. You couldn’t have had oil delivered yesterday.”

“Well, I have a delivery bill for nearly $500 from you and a puddle of oil on the ground to prove it!” I shot back.

He finally said he’d send someone over.

A young man arrived about two hours later. He opened the fill-pipe and peered into the tank. “Wow!” he said. “This thing has really been overfilled! There’s no room in it for the oil to expand.”

THE PHOTO I TOOK FOR EVIDENCE!

Visions of the tank swelling up like a hot-air balloon and blowing my home to smithereens filled my mind.

“Got anything I can use to siphon off some of this oil?” he asked. “That’s crazy that it’s so full. The guy must have fallen asleep or something!”

I already had a pretty good idea what the “or something” was.

I couldn’t believe he was asking me for a siphon hose. I mean, I figured he’d at least have some kind of hose with him in his repair truck.

Coincidentally, I’d just bought a battery-operated liquid transfer pump for my aquarium, to make cleaning it easier, and it still was new in the box. I didn’t know if it would handle oil, but I figured it was worth a try. I went inside, opened it, shoved some batteries into it and then handed it to the guy.

He removed the hose from the pump, stuck the hose into the tank and then used his mouth to suck up some of the oil. He then proceeded to choke and spit it all over my lawn. Still, no oil flowed into his awaiting bucket.

“Um, maybe if you connect the hose back onto the pump, which is battery-operated, it will save you some trouble…and prevent you from getting an oil slick in your stomach,” I suggested.

Sure enough, the pump, which had cost me only $15, pumped oil into the bucket with lightning speed. By the time the guy was done, he’d taken five gallons out of the tank to release the pressure. I made a mental note not to pay for those five.

“That’s a great little pump,” he said, handing the oily, drippy thing back to me. “I’ll have to get one!”

“I’ll sell you this one cheap,” I said, frowning at it. “I don’t think I want to use it in my aquarium now.”

He didn’t take me up on my offer. Instead, he set to work digging up all of the contaminated soil around the tank and then washing the tank with some kind of biodegradable product and sprinkling the soil with a powder.

When he was through, he handed me a bill for $225…$200 for labor and $25 for supplies.

I, for the first time in my life, was rendered speechless. “You don’t seriously expect me to pay this, do you?” I finally managed to ask.

He shrugged. “I just hand out the bills, and this is considered an emergency weekend call. You’ll have to take it up with the office on Monday.”

The minute I opened my eyes on Monday morning, I reached for the phone, called the oil company and asked to speak to a supervisor. When the woman answered, I blurted out everything – the unwanted oil delivery, the gate being left wide open, the oil spill and the bill for cleaning it up. I think I might even have thrown in the word “lawsuit” for effect.

The woman sounded extremely sympathetic. She told me I definitely didn’t have to pay the service bill. She also said she would deduct the cost of the five gallons of oil that had been siphoned, and best of all, she would give me a substantial discount on the unwanted oil that had been delivered in the first place. All in all, we ended up paying only $175 for the full tank.

So I hate to admit it, but my husband was right. The delivery did turn out to be a blessing in disguise after all.

And we owed it all to Jennifer, the nudist.

I sure wish she lived next door to me at this house because I really could use her as a distraction for my next fuel delivery.

On second thought, she'd be about 65 years old now...

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Sunday, October 12, 2025

NOW THAT I FINALLY KNOW WHAT TRICK-OR-TREATERS WANT, I CAN'T AFFORD IT!

For a while now, mainly because the stores have had their Halloween displays out since the end of July, I've been thinking about what I should buy to hand out to trick-or-treaters this year.

My past efforts to buy treats I hoped would make the kids squeal with delight, however, have been slightly less than a rousing success.

Take, for example, the year I decided to give out packs of stickers instead of candy. The stickers were decorated with smiley faces in all sizes and colors. And what, I thought, could be happier than those? I was certain the trick-or-treaters also would have smiles on their own faces when they saw them.

I was wrong.

The really young kids didn’t know what the stickers were and tried to eat them. And the older kids’ expressions clearly told me they had better things to do than play with stickers. Although, the next morning when I spotted smiley faces stuck all over my car out in the driveway, I managed to convince myself that my stickers had helped unleash the children's hidden creativity.

So the next year, I bought small paper Halloween bags that were decorated with bats, witches and pumpkins, and painstakingly filled each one with exactly 10 pieces of assorted wrapped candy (fireballs, root-beer barrels, caramels, Tootsie Rolls, lollipops, etc.) then stapled them shut.

The kids actually looked scared when I handed the sealed bags to them.

“What’s in it?” one little boy asked as he hesitantly accepted it from me.

“It’s a surprise!” I said.

“Will it bite me?” he asked.

The next morning I found dozens of the empty bags scattered across my lawn. Apparently the kids hadn’t been able to wait until they got home to tear them open and see what was inside.

And apparently the kids also were a bunch of juvenile litterbugs.

But through years of trial and error, I finally found something that no red-blooded trick-or-treater could complain about…full-sized chocolate bars. The first time I handed them out, I finally got the reaction I’d been seeking for so many years.

“Wow! Big candy bars!” one trick-or-treater after the other shouted. “Awesome!”

Not so awesome, however, was my husband’s reaction when he had to eat things like canned spaghetti for dinner three nights in a row because I’d spent all of the grocery budget on Halloween candy.

“Exactly how many chocolate bars did you give out anyway?” he asked me as he lifted a forkful of spaghetti up to his mouth and then stared at it as if he were trying to conjure up some magical super-power to transform it into a T-bone steak.

I shrugged. “I don't know...about 75, I guess."

His eyebrows shot up. “Really? There didn’t seem to be nearly that many kids, judging by the doorbell.”

“Well, that's because a lot of them had sick sisters and brothers who couldn’t come out trick-or-treating,” I said. “So they asked for candy bars for them. One poor little girl, her brother told me, broke both of her arms. And another one fell off her bike and lost a few teeth. So I made sure to send home a Hershey bar for her rather than a Snickers. I mean, she wouldn’t be able to eat those crunchy peanuts without her teeth.”

My husband rolled his eyes and shook his head. “Those kids were pulling the oldest scam in the book on you! There are no sick sisters or brothers. If they like your candy, they'll make up stories like that just to get extra for themselves. Either that, or they'll run home, change costumes and come back for more candy later on.”

I paused for a moment before saying, “Now that you mention it, there was this hairy-looking, deep-voiced fairy princess who kind of resembled and sounded like a pirate who’d been here earlier...but without the eye patch.”

So the next year I bought fewer chocolate bars and vowed not to give out any extras for sick brothers or sisters. If the kid wasn’t well enough to go trick-or-treating, I decided, then he or she probably should be eating chicken soup, not chocolate anyway.

Unfortunately, it rained so hard that Halloween night, the only kids who ventured out were dressed like the Gloucester fisherman. So I ended up with loads of chocolate bars left over. My husband and I ate so many of them during the next few weeks, I actually could see the cavities popping out in our teeth and hear our arteries clogging.

Alas, this year, with Halloween just around the corner now, I once again am faced with the dilemma of what to buy for the trick-or-treaters, mainly because the price of chocolate currently is high enough to qualify it as gourmet fare.

“I was thinking that maybe I should just get a bunch of quarters and give one to each kid,” I said to one of my friends the other day. “After all, what kid doesn’t like money? And it will be much cheaper than buying Halloween candy.”

“Quarters?” he repeated with a laugh. “Are you still living in the mid-twentieth century? There's nothing a kid can buy for a only a quarter nowadays." He lowered his voice and his tone grew serious as he added, "But hey, I do have a great suggestion, and it will save you tons of money."

He'd piqued my interest. "What? What is it?"

"On Halloween night, just do what I do...lock the doors, shut off all the lights and don't answer the doorbell.”

I think Mr. Halloween Grinch could use a smiley-face sticker.

And I just happen to still have plenty of them...

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Monday, October 6, 2025

OCTOBER WAS MEANT FOR FUN...RIGHT?

October always reminds me of my late husband because it was our favorite month – not only because it was part of autumn, our favorite season, but also because it was the month of both my birthday and our wedding anniversary. So we designated it to be our “fun” month every year. Part of the fun included taking a week off from our jobs and either traveling somewhere for the week or staying close to home and venturing out on day trips every day.

The only problem we had when it came to day trips, however, was my husband and I often had different ideas about what we considered to be fun.

For example, I love zoos. I could spend hours just watching the animals. But for some reason, my husband always thought zoos were about as exciting as spending the day cleaning out the roof gutters. So he was less than thrilled the first time I convinced him to take me to Southwick’s Zoo in Mendon, Mass., about a 100-mile drive from our house.

The weather that October day was perfect – sunny and crisp with bright blue skies.

“Isn’t this great?” I said to my husband after we paid our admission and stepped into the zoo area.

He frowned as his eyes scanned our surroundings. “Have you noticed how many steep hills this place has? If I have to climb all of them, I’ll be grunting so hard, some wild African boar might break out of its pen and attack me, thinking it’s a mating call!”

I suppose he did have a reason to be concerned. After all, his idea of a strenuous workout was raising and lowering the footrest on his recliner.

“I see benches everywhere, though,” I said. “You can just sit down and rest whenever you feel tired. There’s no rush.”

As we walked past the wallaby and kangaroo exhibits, I “oohed” and “aahed,” but my husband barely gave them a glance. He was too busy staring at the next bench and judging whether or not he’d be able to make the distance to it.

When he finally plunked down on one of the benches, I noticed a nearby booth with a peephole in it and a sign below it that said, “Red Bat.”

“While you’re resting,” I said, “I’m going to go look at the bat!”

I climbed the steps up to the booth, cupped my hands around the peephole so I could get a good look, and peered in. There, hanging on the wall, was a baseball bat…painted red. I couldn’t help it, I started to giggle.

I ended up giggling a lot while at Southwick’s…at everything from the silly antics of the monkeys to the “Do Not Feed Fingers to the Animals” signs on the exhibits.

But what made me laugh the most was something that happened in the reptile house after I'd quietly walked in and stood looking at one of the snakes. I was the only person in the building, other than two female employees, who didn’t even notice me.

One of the employees disappeared into the back room and then called out, “Hey, Jane! (or whatever her name was) Quick! Come back here! You’ve GOT to see this!”

The other employee went out back, then immediately rushed back out, rolling her eyes and shouting, “Why on earth would I want to see two animals having sex?”

“Because it’s been so long since you’ve had it, I thought you might have forgotten how!” the other one said, cracking up laughing as she emerged from the back room.

At that point, I laughed, too. Both women’s heads snapped in my direction. Never have I seen such deer-in-the-headlights expressions.

“Oh, God,” the one who’d made the comment groaned in embarrassment. “I’m so sorry…I didn’t think anyone else was in here!”

I still was chuckling when I left the reptile house and headed over to the next bench where my husband had parked himself.

“All set?” I asked him. "Let's go check out the deer forest.”

Online, the deer forest had been described as acres of peaceful forestland where the deer roamed freely and guests could sit at picnic tables and enjoy the day just watching the animals or mingling with them.

“If it's more than 10 feet from here,” my husband said, “I'll never make it. You can go. I’ll just sit here and wait for you.”

“I’m not going to go sit all by myself at some table in the woods!” I said. "You've had time to rest now, so you'll do just fine. Come on, let's go."

To my dismay, the climb to the deer forest was longer and steeper than I’d anticipated. I could tell by my husband’s huffing, puffing and profuse sweating, there was a strong possibility he wasn’t enjoying the hike.

“Look, water buffalo!” I said brightly in an attempt to distract him from his complaining as we passed by the African Plains exhibit. “And zebras!”

He grabbed onto the fence and clasped his chest. “Where the heck are the deer?” he wheezed.

“Up there.” I pointed to a gate at the top of the hill.

He groaned. “Then just leave me here to die with the water buffalo.”

But I refused to budge another inch without him. When we finally made it to the deer forest, he plopped down at the first picnic table we came to, even though it wasn’t in the most scenic spot in the area. Then we waited to see all of the deer.

Fifteen minutes later, we still were waiting.

I walked over to one of the nearby deer-food machines and got a handful just in case a deer finally did decide to show up. The minute I turned the crank on that machine, deer magically appeared from everywhere, popping out from behind trees and leaping over bushes.

ME, IN MY GLORY!

By the time we left the deer forest, I was covered with deer hair and drool, but I was smiling. My husband was smiling, too – not only because the walk back was all downhill, but also because we finally were leaving and heading home.

I had a great time at the zoo. In fact, I already was planning a return visit.

“Can we go back to Southwick’s next October?” I asked my husband later that night. “I really enjoyed myself today.”

He grimaced. “I’ll let you know once my calves, knees, back and eyebrows stop hurting.”

We did return during future Octobers…two more times. But as a trade-off, I had to go with my husband to two model-train shows, which were his choice of fun.

Granted, the train shows were interesting, but I think they would have been a lot more exciting if they’d have added a few live animals to the exhibits.

Just sayin’…

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