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The evening of the after-dark neighborhood fair for the kids was, in a word, lovely. It was pleasantly warm and there were kids and families milling about everywhere, some costumed and some not, and we all joined together on this evening with a shared purpose: to delight our children. And so we were delighted in turn.

Madeleine played games in her pink skirt with silver sparkles, tossing bean bags into tubs marked with snakes and navigating a pumpkin through a hay maze with a push broom. Once she played all the games, she selected a prize that came in a plain brown bag: a few erasers, a pencil and a toy centipede.

I walked with Violet to the face painting table, and she sat perfectly still while the high school volunteer painted a black nose and whiskers on her face. The volunteer held a mirror to Violet's face and I watched V, rewarded when a huge smile lit her eyes. Sheer pleasure is all you can see when Violet is happy, unadulterated joy every single time.

The girls sat in a fire truck and talked to the firemen who gave them plastic "stop, drop and roll" bracelets. We collected pumpkins from the pumpkin patch and the girls decorated theirs with markers and foam stickers.

We walked back home in the dark, the girls with their princess glow wands and Wayland with his phone set on the flashlight app to light the way. Madeleine was thrilled, chattering away the whole time as she ran down the sidewalk. Violet wanted to be held, so I held her, hefting all 30 pounds of her the mile + walk home.

Of course we were on the lookout for snakes, and we found one to the side of the trail, unmoving for a brief moment while Wayland shined a light on it. A copperhead, orange and almost pinkish in the light, stared back at him for a moment before it slithered back into the bushes.

Thanks to Madeleine's obsession with snakes, we have become very knowledgeable about the types of snakes in the area and have a healthy respect for the poisonous ones, knowing that if we keep our distance, we will be safe. Madeleine pondered ways we might have been able to catch it, determining that a net would be our best bet for capturing a copperhead.

"We wouldn't want to keep a copperhead for a pet," I tell her for the millionth time, and she pauses before replying. "I know, but I would be careful," she tells me. "It couldn't bite us with a net, and I know if I hold it I will just hold it by its head. And that way it can't bite me!"

My fearless daughter, staring at danger and summarily dismissing it -- simply because of her all-consuming passion for the subject at hand. And my other more timid daughter perched in my arms, patting my face and singing the "Nocturnal Animals" song. She makes up her own words: "Over by the twig, I hear a CAT," she sings. "Meow, meow meow." She lays her head down on my shoulder and I shift her weight. "You are HEAVY," I tell her. "No, I'm not," she replies. "I'm small."

And she is. They both are. My two daughters, one insisting she is bigger than a fear that most of us have, the other insisting she is small enough to remain comfortable in my arms forever. They are both right and wrong, this dichotomy that lives in us all: sometimes we are bigger than poisonous snake bites and sometimes we are smaller than our mothers' arms. And tonight, the night spins out all around us, a spiraling depth of darkness and stars and the loud hum of nighttime creatures, and we are all four such small, large things in the middle of it.