The Popcorn Balls on Elm Street

Forty-one Octobers

My mother made popcorn balls every fall on our farm outside Leon.

She wrapped them in wax paper and tied them with whatever string was in the drawer, and she handed them out to the neighbor kids who came by in sheets and their fathers’ old hats.

When my husband Dennis and I bought the house on Elm Street in 1985, I was twenty-two and had about eleven dollars to my name.

Store candy cost money. Popcorn, sugar and syrup did not cost much, so I made my mother’s recipe.

That first year I made forty. The second year I made sixty, and I bought a spool of orange curling ribbon at the Ben Franklin because Dennis said wax paper with plain string looked like something you would mail to a prison.

A few years later I switched to clear cellophane bags from the Ben Franklin, so the kids could see what they were getting, and I have used them ever since.

By the time Josh came along in 1989 it was a hundred and fifty.

By the nineties it was two hundred, and kids walked over from the other side of the tracks because word got around that the corner house had the good ones.

I was the secretary at Harlow Elementary for thirty-one years. I sat at the front desk and signed in tardy kids and called mothers when someone threw up, and I kept the allergy binder in the top drawer where I could reach it without looking.

So I know what is in a popcorn ball. I know what a peanut allergy looks like in a second grader, and I know what the nurse does about it.

In forty-one years I never once put a nut anywhere near those popcorn balls.

Dennis died nine years ago in March. That first October I did not think I could do it.

I stood in the kitchen with his reading glasses still on the windowsill and I thought, who am I making these for now?

Then the Henderson boy from down the block knocked on my back door on the twenty-eighth and asked if I needed help with the ribbon.

He was fourteen. His mother had sent him, I found out later. I made two hundred that year, with a fourteen-year-old curling ribbon at my table.

That is what the popcorn balls are. They are not a recipe. They are forty-one years of a town knocking on my door.

The phone call

Kayla called that afternoon, a little after three. I was out raking and I nearly did not hear it ring in my cardigan pocket.

Her voice was bright and quick, the way it gets when she has rehearsed something.

“Hi, Joanne. So I wanted to let you know, we are going to take the kids to the trick-or-treat at the mall in Ottumwa this year,” she said. “They do it inside, all the stores hand out candy, it’s just easier with Lily being so little.”

I leaned the rake against the maple. Owen is seven and Lily is four, and every Halloween since Owen could walk they had started at my table, then gone up and down Elm Street, then come back to my kitchen for cocoa.

“That sounds fun,” I said, and I meant to leave it there. Then I heard myself say, “Is that because of the post this morning, honey?”

There was a little pause on the line. Then she said, “It wasn’t about you specifically. It was a general safety thing. People are posting about this stuff all over. There was a whole news story about edibles in Halloween candy in Des Moines.”

“There’s one house on Elm Street that does homemade, Kayla,” I said, as gently as I knew how. “Everybody in town knows which one it is. You know it too.”

“I just think the kids don’t need to fill up on sugar from people’s kitchens,” she said, and her voice went flat and careful. “You make it into this whole big production every year. It’s a lot. I would rather keep things simple.”

“I’m not people’s kitchens,” I said. “I’m their grandma.”

“Okay,” she said. “Well. We’ll be in Ottumwa. I have to go get Owen from school.” And she hung up before I could say goodbye, which I did anyway, to nobody, standing in my front yard with leaves in my shoes.