Eating candy to deal with stressful week
Halloween came and went with a grand total of seven properly masked and socially distant trick-or-treaters.
They dropped by one at a time throughout the night and waited at the bottom of our front porch steps as I sent fistfulls of miniature candy bars down a 12-foot long chute.
I bought so much candy. Too much.
Weeks beforehand I had been dipping into the bags I’d stashed away from the kids as I waited for my morning coffee to brew. I’d carefully hidden the wrappers at the bottom of the trash can where no one would ever paw through and be the wiser.
Not that the children would care. They prefer the sugar coated rubber products that make your mouth turn inside itself from the sourness.
I’d bought the large hybrid bags with nuts and nougat and new formulations of old favorites and hidden them away to make doubly sure the candy wouldn’t magically disappear during the new hybrid school days.
And now ... as Election Day came and went, and with it the realization that an immediate tidal wave of repudiation would not wash this president out to sea. But as vote counts started to show a fuller picture as the week wore on, I understood the true horror of my situation.
No one was eating ALL THIS CANDY except for me.
Every time I walked past the bowl, I’d swipe a Snickers or a 100 Grand or four. Of course I’d wait until no one was watching, then I’d pop an entire unwrapped miniature bar into my mouth, dispensing entirely with the decorum of dispatching a confection with multiple and delicate bites.
As I watched the news breathlessly announce nothing with verifiable facts, I mindlessly crammed one sweet after another into my anxious mouth.
Had it not been the nuts cemented together by nougat I might not have bothered to chew. And there is very little hyperbole in the idea that by the announcement of a winner that I will have eaten the same approximate weight in candy as of the largest of our two cats.
It occurs to me, as the week wears on and I sift through what remains of Halloween’s spoils finding my favorites have grown scarce, that we’re all just waiting to see if the winner of the election will actually win the election.