My middle daughter was born on the twenty-ninth of October, which means that for her whole life, her birthday and Halloween have been the same season, tangled up together, cake and costumes in the same week. It suits her. She’s my dark-and-light one, the earthy one, and there’s something exactly right about the fact that she arrived on the doorstep of the spookiest day of the year. She was practically born in costume. So her birthdays were often Halloween-themed, and even the years she wanted something else, we’d dress up in costumes anyway for Halloween. That was just how we did October.

I have a whole gallery of them in my memory. My son’s very first costume was Batman, and the next year he was a lion. When my middle came along, the two of them went as Bamm-Bamm and Pebbles, which is still one of my favorites, the two little Flintstones toddling around together. There were princesses beyond counting and superheroes beyond counting. There was the year my youngest, just a baby, wore a little dog costume that my mother, for reasons she never explained and I will never understand, absolutely could not stand. She just hated that dog costume. It’s one of those small, pointless, precious things I remember about her now that she’s gone, that she had strong and completely inexplicable feelings about a baby dressed as a puppy. And I got in on it too, not every year, but here and there. A witch a couple of times. A bar maid once. Part of the picture, rather than just behind the camera.

My mom is all through these Octobers, actually. Her birthday was in October too, so the season belonged to two of my women, my mother and my middle daughter, born into the same week of the calendar. My mom had her own costumes and back in the seventies made my sister’s and mine each year. My mom loved Halloween time, and what she loved most was taking the kids down to Half Moon Bay, to the pumpkins and the coast and the whole crisp feel of it. Her last Halloween, we were all there together, the whole family, because being together was the point. I didn’t know then that it was the last one. We’ve kept going back since, meeting up as a family in Half Moon Bay, or wandering a corn maze, getting lost on purpose. I don’t say out loud that we’re keeping her tradition alive, but I think it, standing in a pumpkin patch with my grown kids. She started this and we’re still going.

And then last year, my middle daughter, all grown up now, asked me to go out to the bars with her for Halloween. Just the two of us. So I had on a Snow White costume. And she dressed all in her black with her Halloween makeup. And there we were, the two of us heading out together, Snow White and the girl in black, the light and the dark of us standing side by side. Two grown women who genuinely like each other’s company.

Here’s the part that gets me. When I put that Snow White costume on, I realized I didn’t really have anywhere to wear it. That’s what happens when your dressing-up years were all spent on your kids. The costumes were for them, the occasions were theirs, and somewhere along the way I’d stopped having a reason of my own to put one on.

She saved it. She gave me the occasion. The daughter I dressed up for all those Octobers turned around and handed her mother a reason to get in costume again, and it was the best invitation I’d gotten in years. The kids still dress up. All of them, grown, still put on costumes every year, because that’s the thing we built, one October at a time. But the one I’ll keep is that night. I spent her whole childhood making sure she had a costume. Last year, she made sure I had somewhere to wear mine.