My son went trick-or-treating alone last Halloween.
He was six years old, old enough to walk a few houses ahead of me but still young enough that I kept watching him from the other side of the street. He had his costume on, a plastic bucket in one hand, and the kind of excitement only a child can have on Halloween night.
About halfway down the street, he stopped.
He walked up to an older woman standing outside her house and started talking to her.
I couldn't hear what they were saying from where I stood, but they seemed to be having a perfectly normal conversation. After a few minutes, my son waved goodbye and continued down the sidewalk.
When we got home later that night, I was helping him empty his candy onto the kitchen table when I remembered the woman.
"Who were you talking to?"
He looked at me as if the answer should have been obvious.
"Grandma."
I stopped what I was doing.
"Grandma who?"
"My grandma."
I stared at him.
Both of his grandmothers had been gone for years. My mother had died six years before he was born, and his other grandmother had passed away when he was still a baby.
"That's not possible," I said.
He smiled.
"She said you wouldn't believe me."
Then he reached into his pocket and handed me a small button.
It was old and worn smooth on one side.
"She told me to give you this."
I turned the button over in my hand, confused.
Then I looked at the framed photograph sitting on our mantel.
It showed my mother on Halloween several years before she died. She was standing outside our old house, smiling at the camera and wearing the green wool coat she loved.
My son had never met her.
He had seen that photograph many times, though. Whenever he asked about her, I told him stories. One of the things I always mentioned was how much she loved Halloween.
"Grandma always dressed up as Grandma," I used to joke. "She wore that green coat every year."
I looked at the button again.
"Where did you get this?"
"From Grandma."
I asked him to tell me exactly what had happened.
His explanation was simple, as six-year-old explanations usually are.
He had seen a woman wearing a green coat and walked over to her because she looked like the grandmother in the picture.
He had told her, "You're dressed like my grandma."
The woman had laughed.
"Well," she had apparently replied, "I suppose I'm your grandma tonight."
She had continued talking with him for several minutes before he went on to collect more candy.
The button, she told him, had come from her coat.
That night, I couldn't stop thinking about it.
The next morning, my son and I walked back along the same route.
It didn't take long to find the house.
The woman was outside, and she recognized my son immediately.
"There's my little friend from last night," she said.
I introduced myself and explained why I had come.
When I showed her the button, her expression changed.
"Oh," she said. "That."
She looked down at her coat.
"I noticed the button was loose yesterday. I was planning to fix it this week, but when your son told me he liked the coat because it reminded him of his grandma, I thought I'd give him the button as a little keepsake."
I thanked her, then asked where she had gotten the coat.
"Secondhand shop," she said. "Years ago."
She had no idea where it had come from before that.
I showed her the photograph of my mother.
She looked at it for a few seconds.
"That's remarkable," she said.
The coat she was wearing wasn't exactly the same. The style was slightly different, and the fabric had clearly seen better days. But the color, the collar, and several other details were surprisingly similar.
Then I noticed something else.
The button she had given my son looked almost exactly like one of the buttons on my mother's coat in the photograph.
I didn't tell her what I was thinking.
There was no explanation that made the story feel less strange.
My son, however, had already settled on his own explanation.
As far as he was concerned, the woman in the green coat and the grandmother in the photograph were the same person.
He hadn't seen anything supernatural.
He had simply recognized his grandmother.
Maybe the whole thing was nothing more than a series of coincidences: an old photograph, a similar coat, a loose button, and a little boy who connected them all in the simplest way he could.
That's probably the reasonable explanation.
But every year when Halloween comes around, I take the photograph of my mother down from the mantel and look at that green coat.
And I still have the button.
My son doesn't remember exactly what the woman said that night anymore. He barely remembers the conversation at all.
But he remembers one thing very clearly.
He remembers that, for a few minutes on Halloween, he met his grandma.
And honestly, I'm not sure I want to tell him otherwise.