Oregon Adventures, Part 1: Planes, Cars, and Boats

Posted on July 8, 2023 by Steph

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Saturday: Planes

Beth dropped North and me at the airport late Saturday morning. The car was packed with all of our bags because she was setting off on her own travels as well. She is attending her union’s convention in Saint Louis this week, and rather than spend the Fourth of July weekend alone, she decided to go to Wheeling for several days and visit her mom, then fly to Saint Louis from Pittsburgh.

We had two fairly uneventful flights. They were both a little late, but I wasn’t worried about making the connection because we had a four-hour layover in Chicago. It was around nine when we landed in Sacramento (midnight our time), which is quite late for the likes of me, so after we dropped North off at my sister Sara’s house, Mom and I went back to her house, and I went almost straight to bed.

Sunday-Monday: Cars

I was up before five, unsurprisingly. After trying unsuccessfully to get back to sleep, I finished my last blog post, which I’d mostly written in the airport in Chicago, and then went for a walk around Mom’s neighborhood. She was up when I got home around eight, so I made kale and cream cheese omelets, and she sliced strawberries, and we ate this repast on her deck. I’d picked a few blackberries on my walk, and we had those, too.

Sara dropped North off at Mom’s house, and Mom gave us a tour of her garden. She just moved to Davis this spring, so we’ve never seen it. It’s a small yard but it’s like a tiny orchard. She has an orange tree, an apricot tree, a plum tree, a fig tree, two apple trees, a grape arbor, and a blueberry bush, most of them bearing fruit right now. Plus, there’s a playhouse for my ten-year-old niece Lily-Mei, a chicken coop (currently untenanted), rosebushes, and a redwood!

Mom took us on a driving tour of Davis and then made us apricot smoothies with frozen apricots from her garden before we headed over to Sara’s house, where we got another tour. Sara and her family moved to Davis about a year ago, so it was also our first time seeing her house, which has a swimming pool, trampoline, and ping-pong table in the back yard.

At 1:15, six humans (Mom, Sara, her husband Dave, Lily-Mei, North and me) and two cats (Mom’s cat Tara and Lily-Mei’s cat Shadow), piled into two vehicles and began the first leg of our drive to Sara and Dave’s vacation house on the Oregon coast, where we were going to spend the bulk of our West Coast visit. Sara had decided to split the long drive over two days and got a rental house in Medford, about two-thirds of the way there.

I was in Mom’s car with Sara, Mom, and Tara. I managed to nap a little early in the drive and Sara, who had not slept well the night before, did too. I wondered if driving with her two sleeping fifty-something daughters in the car took Mom back to the days of having small kids.

The drive from Davis to Medford is beautiful. It starts in agricultural land, with fields of sunflowers and olive and almond groves. That reminded me of Spain, which I guess makes sense since California was colonized by Spain. Later there are mountains (most covered with evergreens but some arid) and clear blue-green rivers and lakes. Tara was very quiet in the car and meowed only once, right before throwing up.

We arrived at our house around seven and headed to a Chinese buffet for dinner. There wasn’t much vegetarian fare, but I made do with salad, edamame, and sushi with cucumber, cream cheese, and mango. North had noodles and fried rice. We all sampled the rather strange vanilla pudding, which most people thought tasted more like banana than vanilla and I alone thought tasted minty, until Sara decided it was like banana with an aftertaste of mint.

I was up even earlier the next day, as my body refused to adjust to West Coast time. Early in my pre-breakfast walk, I decided coffee was in order to get through the day, so I found a Dutch Brothers and got an iced latte. It was going to get up over 100 degrees and while it wasn’t nearly as oppressive as a day like that at home would be, because it was a dry heat, you could tell the day was going to be hot.

We hit the road a little before ten-thirty. This time I rode with Sara and Lily-Mei, and we played a game in which the players have to list as many animals as they can that start with each letter of the alphabet until they can’t think of any more. Whoever has more wins that letter. It takes a very long time to play this game, partly because it turns out we can think of a lot of animals and partly because Lily-Mei is loath to give up so there were often very long pauses and we only got up to the letter R. We met up for a picnic lunch at a rest stop and arrived at Sara and Dave’s house in Bandon later in the afternoon.

The house is a nineteenth-century, two-story frame house, painted mint green that Sara has decorated in a shabby chic style. It’s been undergoing structural repairs for the past year, and this was the first time Sara, Dave, and Lily-Mei had used it in all that time. The work isn’t done, so the windows were all covered with plastic, which they tore off in some places, so we could see outside.

Shortly after arrival, Sara showed us their dock on the river and then Sara, Lily-Mei, and I went to Face Rock beach. It’s a gorgeous, classic Oregon beach, with towering rocks in the ocean, caves to explore, and tidal pools. Sara and Lily-Mei showed me their favorite places and we saw a lot of sea anemones inside the caves and in tidal pools on the rocks. Sara was looking for sea stars, but she couldn’t find any. We climbed up a sand dune and found a warmer, sheltered area behind it, which was nice because it was cold and windy on the beach.

From the beach we went to a convenience store with a counter that sells Mexican food and got nachos, burritos, and quesadillas to eat on a picnic table outside. Mom and Dave met us there. North stayed home with a headache, but we brought them a quesadilla to eat later.

Tuesday-Thursday: Boats

I managed to sleep until six, which was still earlier than I’d like, but a definite improvement. I took a walk up the road before breakfast, as I was getting in the habit. It’s a pretty road, partly paved and partly gravel, with river views in the breaks between evergreens and ferns, horsetail, foxglove, daisies, and blackberries bushes in bloom growing alongside it.

We had a busy morning planned. The parade was our first stop. It was much smaller than the Fourth of July parade in Takoma, and less whimsical. There were no floats, but there were veterans marching and riding in cars, and people on motorcycles with flags, horses and goats adorned with red, white, and blue ribbons, and a lot of organizations throwing candy to the kids in the crowd as they passed. My favorite part was the person walking in an inflatable eagle suit, walking a corgi.

From there we went back to Face Rock beach. There’s a monthly event there called Circles in the Sand. People rake complex patterns in the sand for several days during the lowest tides of the month, which this year happened to include July 4. This time it was a huge labyrinth decorated with shells, rocks, sand dollars, crab claws, and kelp. Everyone but Mom (who stayed up at the top of the cliff) walked it—Lily-Mei three times, and Sara twice.

Then we wandered around the beach, showing North some of what we’d seen the day before, but there were places they couldn’t climb. I saw some little crabs in a pool up on some rocks I was trying to photograph so I could show North when Sara called to me saying she had found some sea stars. I would need to wade through some cold water to get there and I was rolling up my pants when we realized there wasn’t time because we needed to get back to town for the cardboard boat race, in which Dave was competing.

The race takes place on the Coquille River. People were gathered all along the shore and in a little glass building. Mom and North watched from there because it was warmer and protected from the wind. Sara and I watched most of the kids’ races from the sidewalk and then we joined Lily-Mei down on the ramp next to where the boats launched for a closer view of the adult races.

The initial races were two- and three-boat heats and then there was a final race for all the winners in both age groups. Almost half the kids’ boats sank, but the rest made it out to the designated buoy and returned to shore. The adults fared better, with only a few boats sinking. In one case, a boater who was clearly going to come in last in his race dived off the side dramatically to crowd applause.

Dave was in the last adult group, so we had plenty of time to compare his boat—which he’d made the night before and painted only that morning—to the others, which seemed to have much more sophisticated designs. Most of them were lacquered or heavily reinforced with duct tape. Some looked like real kayaks. You wouldn’t know they were made of cardboard unless you peeked inside. We were all a little apprehensive for him and his fragile-looking boat. Sara and Lily-Mei expressed certainty that he would sink.

Well, we needn’t have worried. Not only did his boat not sink, but he won his race! He had only a short rest before the final race and when it got back into the water, both sides were starting to rip. It held together long enough for him to make it around the buoy and back, and he came in third. This earned him a bronze medal for the whole event, which he wore most of the rest of the day.

The boat was done for, so we collapsed it for transport to Sara and Dave’s recycling bin with the help of a small boy who wanted to help us stomp on it. People kept coming up to Dave and asking how he made the boat. Later someone recognized him in a store and wanted to talk about the race, so I guess he’s kind of a big deal in Bandon, at least for now.

We came back to the house to eat lunch and the afternoon was quieter. Almost everyone took a nap and North and Lily-Mei had baths. Sara made a grid of meals and activities for the rest of the week and Sara and Mom went grocery shopping. When they got back, Mom, Sara, and Dave went on an art gallery walk while North and I made dinner—a tomato-cucumber-mozzarella salad with pesto, and a tomato-green bean-tofu stew.

We were planning to watch the fireworks from the riverside by Sara and Dave’s dock. They’d never done it before so Dave laid in a supply of fireworks for our own personal show just in case we couldn’t see the town show from there. As it turned out, we could only see the top quarter or so of the official fireworks and only when standing out on the very end of the dock, but it hardly mattered because there were neighborhood fireworks going off that we could see, and we had our own. Lily-Mei was more enthusiastic about setting off our own fireworks than the others anyway. She was jumping up and down with excitement as Dave set them off and exclaiming over each explosion and making predictions about them. Plus, Dave had made a fire in the firepit, and we all had chairs and it was very cozy and pleasant.

By the next day I’d adjusted to West Coast time and finally slept past seven. Mom, Sara, and I took a walk in the morning and in the afternoon, we dropped Tara off at the vet. She had continued vomiting not just in the car and she wasn’t eating and Mom was very worried about her. This is a recurrent problem and Mom’s vet hasn’t been able to determine the cause. So rather than order more tests, Mom just asked for IV fluids and an anti-emetic to make her more comfortable. Having an elderly pet isn’t easy.

While we were waiting to pick up the cat, Mom, Sara, and I had lunch. I’d requested that on this trip we do something with just the three of us, since we’re not often alone and they are my original family.

Later in the afternoon, Sara, North and I went to see the Coquille River Lighthouse and the beach there. We’d planned to stay about an hour, but North got a headache fifteen minutes in, so they took the medication that typically takes the edge off for about a half hour and then stops working—they were saving the good meds for nights with late afternoon or evening activities planned—and we stayed another fifteen minutes. We went inside the lighthouse, walked the length of the rocky jetty, saw pelicans, and walked on the log-strewn beach.

Sara and Dave made two kinds of pasta (spaghetti and chickpea macaroni) with three toppings (tomato sauce, pesto, and meatballs) for dinner. And then we watched True Spirit, a movie about the youngest person to try to circumnavigate the globe. Later I was telling North that while they were sleeping we saw a film Beth wouldn’t like and they asked if it was inspirational or if there were children in peril, which are two things Beth doesn’t care for in movies, and the answer was both.

[SPOILER] Even though I knew the teenage sailor didn’t die it seemed like she was going to over and over and in one scene her parents and siblings thought she had, so it was kind of wrenching.

On Thursday morning, Dave, North, Lily-Mei went back to Face Rock to see a slightly different labyrinth that had been raked into the sand. This time the tide was lower, and you could walk to the rock where the sea stars were without wading through water. We saw tons of them, orange ones and vibrant purple ones, plus a lot of cormorants perched on the rocks. It was easier for North to explore one of the sea caves because they were wearing more suitable shoes (on our previous visit they didn’t want to get their orthotics wet, so they didn’t wear them on this trip).

After lunch at home, Mom, Sara, North, Lily-Mei and I went into downtown Bandon while Dave stayed at the house with the contractors. We got ice cream (Lily-Mei got Play Doh which stained her tongue blue), visited a very cool display of art made from ocean plastics (“awesome” in North’s words), hit a toy store, a candy store, a bookstore, a clothes store, and a chocolate boutique where North warmed up with an orange drinking chocolate. (It’s quite chilly on the Oregon coast, even in July.) My mom got Lily-Mei a stuffed narwal and North a book.

Back at home, everyone rested a bit before dinner where we were going to join four more relatives because our party was about to get bigger…

Investigations and Celebrations

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Steph

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During the first two weeks of May we kept ourselves busy following up with a university we recently visited, touring another one, and having two celebrations.

Investigation #1: JWU Meeting

The first week of May was exhausting. I had more work than usual and North had a bunch of appointments, mostly medical. On Tuesday we were out of the house for six hours straight. It didn’t help that all three of us were sick with a cold that passed from Beth to me to North.

On the first Friday in May, we had a Zoom meeting with two professors and an administrator at Johnson and Wales to discuss the physical requirements of the baking and pastry arts program and what kind of accommodations North might receive if accepted into it. The meeting wasn’t definitive—the professors didn’t say North’s chronic pain and mobility issues wouldn’t be an issue, but they also didn’t say they couldn’t succeed in the program. It was more of an exploratory discussion on both sides.

The JWU folks seemed open to rest breaks at scheduled intervals but concerned that a cane or crutch might be in the way in a busy kitchen. We mentioned we are pursuing the possibility getting orthotics for North’s shoes, knee braces, and/or a compression suit for their torso that might allow them to stand and walk for longer periods without mobility aids. Finally, we said we were thinking of enrolling North in JWU’s two-day summer program for high school students at the Charlotte campus so they could get a real-world taste of what it’s like to work in a culinary lab. Everyone seemed to think this was an excellent idea, so we signed them up. They’ll be headed to North Carolina the last week in June.

Investigation #2: Towson University Open House

Towson University, which is located just north of Baltimore, about an hour from our house, had an Open House the next day. We left the house at 7:45 a.m., which is early for us to be out and about on a Saturday, or it is for me and North. Beth was up in time to eat breakfast and go for an abbreviated version of her usual morning walk, but North and I are not early birds. To ensure I’d eat breakfast, I made myself overnight oats, two boiled eggs, two vegetarian sausage links, and a thermos of red zinger tea to consume in the passenger seat of the car. I don’t think North had breakfast at all.

Towson is a large state school. We were visiting because I asked North to add another state school to the mix. The event started with an overview presentation in a ballroom. Then we went on a campus tour. North had requested a slower tour when they registered, but unlike at Saint Mary’s, nothing came of that request. Fortunately, North was able to keep up with the tour guide, but they complained a bit about the hilliness of campus. (I counted it as a point in St. Mary’s favor that they were more responsive to answers given on their own online form.)

Towson has a pretty campus, leafy, with plentiful green space and a lot of red brick buildings in different architectural styles. Their mascot is the tiger, and they are serious about it. Tiger statues abound. We didn’t go inside many buildings—no dorm room, dining hall or classroom, though we did go into a science building where we saw an anatomy lab full of plastic body parts, and a lot of spiders in glass cages and fish in aquariums. (We were not taken to the cadaver lab, but we learned there is one.) Beth and I both feel that campus tours don’t show you the inside of the facilities as extensively they did five years ago. She speculated it was a covid-era change that was never reversed.

After the tour we attended presentations on the College of Liberal Arts and the Honors College. We also visited tables to pick up literature about Accessibility and Disability Services and the school’s impressive selection of study-abroad programs. By twelve-thirty, we were finished. North said it seemed like “a nice school,” but they’re not sure they want to go somewhere so big (21,000 students). I made a plug for the Honors College, because if they got in, they’d be part of a smaller community (about 700 students), who take some of their classes together and live in the same dorm their first year.

Celebration #1: Birthday

I turned fifty-six the following Thursday. Until evening it was a normal weekday. Deciding I had time for one chore in the morning and deliberating whether to sweep and mop the kitchen floor, mow the lawn, or replant my sunflower seedlings into bigger pots, I went with the easiest and most pleasant option. When I went out to the patio table where the seedlings are currently living, I was surprised to see two of the six of the cucumbers, which I’d planted two and a half weeks earlier and which I’d about given up on, were poking up through the dirt. That felt like my first present. (Two more sprouts have since joined them.)

In the afternoon I worked on a blog post about astragalus for heart health in Traditional Chinese Medicine, but I knocked off early to meet North at their bus stop because we’d arranged to walk from there to Starbucks so I could claim my birthday reward. North got some kind of tea-juice concoction. They like to invent new drinks there, by customizing existing drinks on the app, often trying to maximize their stars. I got an iced latte and the new bee cake pop. I didn’t want anything too extravagant because there would be cupcakes after dinner.

North made both my birthday dinner and the cupcakes. We had vegetarian chicken cutlets with gravy and roast asparagus. (North had peas instead because they don’t like asparagus, but they roasted it perfectly nonetheless.) The cupcakes were chocolate with my favorite frosting—fresh strawberry buttercream. I request it more often than not on my birthday.

I opened presents next. From the kids I got three books: Circe, Parable of the Talents, and Don’t Fear the Reaper. I later learned one of those last two was my Mother’s Day present from Noah and I shouldn’t have opened it then. Oh well. For further reading when I finish those, mom got me a gift certificate for a bookstore that opened recently in Silver Spring. My sister got me two jars of fancy nut butters (I’ve tried the chai spiced peanut-almond butter and it’s good). Beth’s mom had a tree planted for me in a national forest and Beth got a new cushion with an abstract leafy pattern for the wicker chair on the porch and a promise of a new hanging basket for the big philodendron that spends the summer and early fall on the porch. So now while I’m reading my new books and eating toast with nut butter out there, it will be even prettier.

I had to rush through the cupcakes and present opening a little because I had book club that night. In fact, I realized later that in my haste, when I blew out the candles, I forgot to make a wish. Because I knew time was tight, I’d asked ahead of time for someone else to do the dinner dishes, as an additional birthday present. I left it to Beth and North to decide who would do it and North stepped up. It was nice to eat dinner and leave to discuss So Long, See You Tomorrow, without having to squeeze in this chore or come home to sink full of dishes. (Thanks, kiddo.)

Interlude: Before Mother’s Day

Beth was out of town for most of Mother’s Day weekend. She went up to Ithaca to help Noah pack up some of his belongings and to bring them (but not him) home so when we travel back there next weekend for his graduation and then back home, there will be room in the car for the four of us. She left Friday morning and returned Sunday afternoon.

I was feeling kind of sad about not seeing Noah on Mother’s Day, but then late Friday morning Noah texted me during the last fifteen minutes of his final IT work shift, which was slow apparently, because we chatted for the next half hour, which felt like a nice, long time, and just what I needed. (I’m not sure if he stayed at work or texted while he walked home.) Right before work he’d turned in his last assignment, for Machine Learning, so the first and fourth texts read: “I’ve finished college” and “In 15 minutes I’ll be unemployed too.”

He didn’t get the internship he interviewed for on his birthday. What with the writers’ strike, it’s not a good time to be looking for a video editing internship in Los Angeles, but he’s going to keep looking. We talked about that, and I gave him some updates from home.

Over the weekend I got a lot of one-on-one time with North, who fortunately didn’t get a headache on Friday or Saturday. Friday night, we ordered pizza and watched the first movie in the Fear Street trilogy, which is not great art, but fun, and not the sort of film Beth would enjoy. On Saturday morning North had therapy in Silver Spring. They took the bus there and I swept and mopped the kitchen floor, then got on another bus and met them there. We went to the farmers’ market, where we bought some excellent strawberries, the very last two boxes for sale, as the market was closing soon. As I approached the stand, I saw a young woman grab the third-to-last last box and take off without paying for it. I’ve never seen anyone do that at a farmers’ market and it made me wonder how often it happens.

Next, we headed to the movie theater. We saw Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. North asked me afterward if it was faithful to the book, as they haven’t read it. I hesitated to answer because I haven’t read the book since the 1970s and my recall of it is not perfect. But I said it’s faithful to the way I remember it, both the plot and tone, plus the acting was good and the portrayals of Margaret’s relationships with her parents and grandmother are warm and endearing and wholesome. And as someone only eight years younger than Margaret, there’s some good 70s nostalgia there. North liked it, too—two thumbs up from us.

We got home and I made some applesauce because we had a couple apples with soft spots, and we each cobbled together a dinner out of leftovers and said applesauce. Not satisfied with two movies in one weekend, we watched the second installment of the Fear Street trilogy that evening.

Celebration #2: Mother’s Day

On Sunday morning I went to the Takoma Park farmers’ market in hopes of finding a few vegetables I couldn’t find in Silver Spring, but I couldn’t find them there either. To keep it from being a wasted outing, I bought myself a strawberry-yogurt smoothie and walked to the co-op where I bought a few items. Then I came home and mowed the lawn, finally finishing the chores I’d contemplated two days earlier. North had to go to school for a Cappies’ meeting to vote on year-end awards for the plays they’ve been reviewing all year. I took them there in a Lyft and waited in a nearby Starbucks where I wrote a lot of this.

Beth got home while we were out, bearing brownies Noah made for her Mother’s Day present. When North and I got back I helped her unload Noah’s things from the car, including a very large television he bought for himself several months ago. Then we ordered Mexican/Salvadoran takeout so no one would have to cook on Mother’s Day. Beth and I split an order of spinach enchiladas and North got bean pupusas.

Before we ate, we opened our presents from North. They got Beth some gourmet salt and a bunch of dark chocolate bars and they got me a jar of macadamia-coconut butter and this original painting from a photo of Rehoboth Beach, which I love. After dinner, we watched an episode of Gilmore Girls (we’re near the beginning of season 5) and then North and I talked to my mom on the phone and Mother’s Day was a wrap.

On Sunday afternoon when Noah finished at the Cappies meeting and let me know they were ready to go, I accidentally sent Noah a text meant for them that said “Okay. I’ll head over,” then told him to disregard it because I was not in fact heading over to Ithaca and he responded, “In less than a week you are,” which is a cheering thought. All the early-to-mid-May family celebrations—his birthday, mine, Mother’s Day—feel a little off without him. It will be good to see him for several days and celebrate his graduation before he flies off to investigate what Los Angeles holds for him.

Here and There

Posted on February 15, 2023 by Steph

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We’re two and a half weeks into our current routine. On weekday mornings Beth works and North attends online classes or does homework, depending on the day of the week. Beth takes them to school in time for lunch where they hang out in the theater room with friends or attend improv club, again depending on the day of the week. Then Beth returns home to work some more and picks North up after they’ve finished their afternoon classes and takes them to Columbia, where they attend their afterschool therapy program. While North is there, Beth works in the Howard County public library, as she doesn’t have an office in the coworking space anymore. Then she brings North back home. They usually roll in around 7:15, which means we’re eating dinner late these days.

Wednesdays through Fridays, I stay home, but most Mondays and Tuesdays, I go with Beth and North to Columbia so we can attend individual family or multi-family therapy. We leave the house at 2:15 and get back five hours later. A lot of that time is spent in the car, but during the two hours while North’s in IOP before family therapy starts, I either work in the library alongside Beth or wander around Columbia. I am learning a lot about its environs. If you want to know how to find a coffeeshop, grocery store, drug store, post office, or pretty trail within walking distance of the Howard County Library main branch, I’m your girl.

Here a few things that have happened in the past couple weeks while we weren’t driving back and forth between Takoma and Columbia, some here and some there:

Snowfall (Here)

We have had almost no snow this winter. Just some flurries a couple days before Christmas and a dusting on the first morning of February. It was pretty and so novel I took a lot of pictures on my walk, but by afternoon it was all melted, except in the shady spots. I particularly liked how the snow looked on the red leaves of this plant.

Swim Pass (Here)

You may recall I finally got the Piney Branch pool to agree to honor my pre-pandemic punch card, but I wasn’t sure it would actually work until I successfully used it on the first Saturday in February. I am pleased about this, as I had $25 worth of swims left on the pass. It should last me the rest of the month and a week into March if I go every weekend. I’ve been swimming three Saturdays in a row now and it’s nice to be doing it again after an almost three-year-long break.

Care Package (Here and There)

I made brownies that same weekend, for two reasons. I wanted brownies and I wanted something homemade to put in a Valentine’s Day care package for Noah. I wrapped the individual brownies up in foil and decorated the foil with snowflake stickers because I couldn’t find any heart stickers in the sticker drawer. (Later I got some in direct mail from the American Heart Association and I put them on the envelopes of my valentines for Beth and North.)

In the care package, I also included Girl Scout cookies, Valentine’s Day candy, and a set of long underwear Noah accidentally left at home. (I texted him one morning when the temperatures in Ithaca were in the single digits asking if he wanted them and he said yes.) The following Monday, I mailed the package from a post office in Columbia, because, as previously mentioned, I know where things are in that town.

Lake Kittamaqundi Trail (There)

Last week I stumbled across this trail, which is part of the longer Downtown Columbia Trail, which goes right by the library. For a while it just seems to go along the highway, with some weedy fields in between. But eventually it comes to a creek and that creek leads to a reservoir and there’s a trail with some public art that goes along each side of the water. I didn’t have time to make the whole loop the first day I went, so I resolved to return and, where the trail bifurcated, go the other way so I could see the other side of the little lake.

Home Repairs (Here)

As of a week ago, the repair work on our roof, eaves, and kitchen is finished. We still don’t have the final bill, which we need to know what we can afford this year in terms of summer vacation, but it’s good to have the house intact, with new paint inside and out, and to have it ourselves.

Early Valentine’s Day Dates (Here)

North went over to Ranvita’s Saturday afternoon, for pizza and a movie and an exchange of Valentine’s Day gifts. North got Ranvita a box of chocolates; Ranvita got North a rose-scented candle. As a result, Beth and I had several hours alone, so we had a date, too. She picked me up at the pool and we got takeout from Mark’s Kitchen, a Takoma fixture that’s about to either close or be under new management after thirty-two years.

Because it might be my last chance to have my favorite dish there, I got the bibimbap with a fried egg, a bit of a diabetic splurge, because of the rice (and I did eat a good bit of the rice). I might not have done it, but my sensor expired that morning and because they are less accurate the first twelve hours after application, I wasn’t planning on taking any readings from the new one until that evening anyway. Sometimes during these gaps I eat just as I normally would, and some days I go a little crazy and have half a banana and a strawberry in my morning oatmeal, a splash of orange juice in my tea, and a rice bowl for lunch. This was the latter kind of day, and it was very satisfying. I have no regrets.

We ate at the picnic tables in downtown Takoma. It was in the high forties, and I had wet hair from the pool, but it was sunny, and we’ve gotten pretty hardy about eating outside in the past few years, so it didn’t seem too cold.

After lunch, we went back to the house and watched the Valentine’s Day episode of Abbott Elementary, then hung out until it was time for Beth to go get North from Ranvita’s and take them to McLean, Virginia where North was attending a play they were going to review.

What Middle-Aged Lesbians Do on a Saturday Night (Neither Here nor There)

We spent the evening apart, as North was attending the play, a musical based on a Mario Brothers video game, which they said was “surprisingly good.” Once Beth had driven them there it was too far away for her to come home, but the play was sold out, so she couldn’t attend and had to occupy herself for several hours. I told her to google, “What do middle-aged lesbians do on a Saturday night in McLean?”

She ended up spending it in a nearby mall, where she got Turkish food for dinner, and when the mall closed, in a coffeeshop where she got hot chocolate. The coffeeshop was having an open mic night and she kept me updated via text about the acts:

[R]ight now there is a white guy singing a slowed down acoustic version of “Little Red Corvette”off key.

Now there is a woman singing a rewritten version of “Blue Christmas” to a backing track. It seems to be about climate change. Also off key.

New guy singing now. Not being able to carry a tune seems to be a requirement of this open mic. Fortunately there is a two song limit.

Meanwhile I was home, doing the kind of thing I do when left to my own devices: cleaning out my mail drawer, menu planning for the next week, blogging, and reading Love in the Time of Cholera. I’d been in bed over an hour by the time Beth and North got home at 11:25 and then North stayed up into the wee hours to write their review.

Valentine’s Day (Here and There)

The day before Valentine’s Day North made chocolate hand pies. They consist of chocolate crust filled with a fudge-like substance and drizzled with more chocolate. They are as good as they sound. North filled a tin with them to take to school for Ranvita, but some were reserved for family (and Zoë, who had dinner at our house that night).

When North got up on Valentine’s Day, a few minutes before their first class, they sleepily nodded in the direction of the heart-shaped balloon Beth had left at their place at the dining room table, and said, “Happy Valentine’s Day.”

At nine-thirty their astronomy class ended, and they had a half hour before English, so they found me in the basement, where I was preparing to mop the downstairs bathroom floor and asked if I wanted to exchange Valentine’s presents now instead of in the evening. It seemed to be what they wanted, and I had no objection.

We gathered around the dining room table and opened cards and gifts. In addition to the balloon, we’d gotten North a box of the Lindt strawberry-white chocolate truffles they like and a Starbucks gift card. I told them it was a little extra cash to make their money at Starbucks go further now that the stars are less valuable. (North has been irritated about this.)

My card was a very cool piece of original art Beth commissioned from North. Two black cats I recognized as Matthew and Xander are standing with their tails forming a heart and it says, “Lucky to love you.” North explained it was because black cats are supposed to be bad luck, but of course, we don’t believe that. Valentine’s Day was the day North assigned the cats as a birthday (years after the fact) when they found out the shelter estimated their litter was born in “mid-February.” The cats would have been twenty yesterday and we miss them both.

Beth got me a book and a box of tiny cupcake-shaped truffles in five flavors (chocolate, coffee, caramel, lemon-poppyseed, and raspberry). It’s a great gift for a diabetic with a sweet tooth because their diminutive size allows me to fine-tune how much sugar I eat at any given time. Beth got treats from me, too, chocolate-covered cashews and chocolate-covered clementine sections.

That afternoon we all drove out to Columbia together because it was a Tuesday. I went back to the lake and explored the other side a little bit. There are a lot of docks and benches and a playground and some retail, including a few restaurants on the water. It’s a nice space.

The theme of multi-family therapy was love languages. We all had to identify our preferred ways of giving and receiving love and talk about how to navigate differences in family members’ love languages. It was well attended, with seven parents in the room and another on Zoom, for the six kids.

North had been looking forward to the dinner I often make for Valentine’s Day, tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches cut into heart shapes, but they had a migraine and went to bed as soon as we got home. I was sorry about that, as food is definitely an example of one of the love languages, though I’m not sure which one—acts of service or gifts? Anyway, this morning while they were doing astronomy homework I made them a grilled cheese sandwich, cut into a heart shape, for breakfast. There had been plenty of love the day before and in the month so far, but there’s always room for more.

Winter One Acts

Posted on January 18, 2023 by Steph

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Two Saturdays ago, we went to the Winter One Acts at North’s school to see some of their friends, including Ranvita, act in them. In the spirit of concise storytelling, I’m going to present what we’ve been up to over the past few weeks in bite-sized pieces, three paragraphs max per topic. Can I be that brief? We’ll see.

Theater

It felt novel for the winter one acts to be put on in winter, as last year a covid surge and subsequent scheduling problems delayed them until May and the year before, of course, they didn’t happen at all, as school was closed for most of the year and there were no extracurriculars even when it opened briefly in the spring.

It was our first outing of the year as we didn’t do much for New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day. We got an invitation to go to a small New Year’s Eve party our neighbors were holding, but we didn’t feel up for it. We didn’t do our usual New Year’s Day hike or cheese board either. We did all watch Carol because North found it on a list of New Year’s-themed movies. Afterward we all agreed it was a good film (Beth and I had already seen it) but the connection to New Year’s was tenuous at best. Afterward the kids stayed up to usher in the new year with salty snacks, sparkling juice, and tv, as is their sibling-bonding tradition.

Back to the plays…there were three one acts, followed by an improv presentation. Ranvita had a small part in the first one act, which was also the best one. It involved John Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and Cornelius Vanderbilt playing Monopoly in the afterlife and it was very funny. Ranvita also had several parts in the improv pieces. These weren’t being improvised in the moment but were workshopped as improv and then turned into very short plays. The schtick was the actors were trying to get through thirty of them in less than an hour (and they succeeded). It was fun to watch and North seemed to enjoy seeing friends, especially Ranvita, and they gave her a bouquet. They haven’t been able to see much of each other the past few months, but they did have a brunch date recently.

Game Nights

The next night, Beth, Noah, and I played Settlers of Catan with the Seafarers’ extension kit Noah got for Christmas. As you might guess from the game, there are ships involved, and you can use them to settle smaller islands off the coast of Catan. It took us a little while to figure out how strategy differs in this version, but we were getting it by the end, I think. Noah won the game. On other nights during his break, we played Sleeping Queens, Jeopardy, and Scattergories, some of these more than once.

Therapy

We have family therapy every Monday and Tuesday these days. Mondays it’s a virtual session in the late afternoon after North has gotten home from their day program. Noah joined us for a couple of these sessions. On Tuesdays it’s hybrid and it’s not just us, but all the families of all the kids in North’s program all together, which I have to say is kind of an odd format. All the kids are there in person, as it’s the end of their day. Some parents come in person, and some attend virtually. Often, Beth and I are the only parents in the room.

Beth has been working in a room she’s renting in a co-working space in a big office building near North’s facility, so she doesn’t have to make the hour and a half round-trip drive twice every day. Since she’s right next door, she always goes to multi-family group in person. I usually do, too, since the one time I tried attending virtually I couldn’t hear well and the person I could hear least well was North. Getting to Columbia by myself wouldn’t be easy, so attending group in person means I spend the day in Beth’s office on Tuesdays. There are four desks, so I can set up my laptop on one of them and I have new environs for my daily walk, so it’s not bad.

Anniversary

Beth and I had an anniversary a week ago today. It’s now been thirty-one years since our commitment ceremony and ten since our legal wedding (they were on the same date). We had breakfast for dinner, and I made muffins using the recipe for the spice cake that was our wedding cake (both times). I’ve made it almost every anniversary since 1992, usually with a lemon glaze, though the original wedding cake had white frosting with purple frosting violets on it. North is quite attached to the lemon glaze and was kind of outraged the year I made an orange glaze instead. Last year was my first year with diabetes and I left the glaze off entirely, but I’ve gotten a little more relaxed and when I was wavering about the glaze, North advocated for it and I ended up making it.

We exchanged presents after dinner. One of the advantages of having an anniversary two and a half weeks after Christmas is that you can just check your wife’s Christmas list and see what she didn’t get. I got Beth a kit of salad dressing spice blends and she got me Hamnet, which were unbought items from our lists. But I also got her two fancy dark chocolate bars, and she got me a roll of postcard stamps because I can always use them for get-out-the-vote campaigns and postage is going up later this month.

Her card said “Always and Forever” on the front, which is exactly what I wrote on the inside of mine. I’m taking that as a sign that we’re going the distance. ‘Til death do us part.

More Baking

I’d been in the mood to make cookies for a while, and I thought I should do it before Noah left so I could send some of them with him. The day I ended up making them was the Sunday of MLK weekend, which was also the thirteenth anniversary of my father’s death. It seemed kind of appropriate because he loved sweets of all sorts and Snickers bars especially, so something with chocolate and peanuts seemed a fitting tribute. North’s been baking, too. Their last creation was a very tasty carrot cake with a chocolate ganache. We’re still eating it.

Media Binges

The end of Noah’s time at home is often a rush to finish television seasons and books and this one was no different. In four weeks, he and I started and finished the current seasons of What We Do in the Shadows and The Handmaid’s Tale. I didn’t think we were going to manage that last one, but he ended up staying home a few days longer than he thought he would, and the extra days included a long weekend, so we watched the last four episodes in two days. That season was something else, wasn’t it?

With Beth, we also made it to the end of season 5 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (bingeing the last three episodes in the middle of the day on MLK day while North was at their program). Noah is puzzled at how the series will continue for two more seasons, as the title character dies in the season finale, but we’re not telling. With everyone, we got to the midpoint of season 7 of Blackish. We’ve reached the covid era episodes and while the first couple about it were excellent and very evocative, I was disappointed that it basically fell out of the plot after that, as if it barely happened and didn’t deeply alter our lives for years.

As for books, over the course of his break, Noah and I also read What Strange Paradise, The Nova Incident, and Wyrd Sisters. We often save a Terry Pratchett novel for last because they are short and easy to fit into a little scrap of time if we happen to have one left. We finished it on Monday, the last full day before he left. (Meanwhile two days earlier, North and I finished The Inferno, which we’d been reading since early December.)

Goodbye

Once we’d finished Wyrd Sisters, around 3:45 on Monday, I had a bit of an empty feeling, because there was nothing else to finish, after spending much of the last three days in a sprint to read and watch all the things. But there was plenty to do: we had a family therapy session (Noah skipped this one to pack) and I made dinner, a vegetable-bean-noodle soup, not unlike what I made for his first night home, and North made the carrot cake, and I packed Noah some snacks for the bus (pecans, dried cranberries, and a half-dozen of the cookies), and that night we all played an online Jeopardy game. Noah made a valiant effort to fill up on homemade treats while he could, eating two slices of cake and a cookie.

Yesterday morning, we all got into the car at 7:55 a.m. and drove to a mall parking lot just outside Baltimore, where at 9:15, we put him on a bus that said “Let’s Go” on the side. And heeding its suggestion, we all did, to college, to treatment, and to a little office in a co-working suite.

All the Good Things

Posted on December 30, 2022 by Steph

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Christmas Eve

We drove to Blackwater a day later than planned on a frigid morning. It was eighteen degrees when we left Takoma, and the temperature rose and fell between ten and fourteen for most of the trip. Beth thought the traffic would be bad because, like us, others would have delayed their travel and there would be two days’ worth of travelers on the road, but for whatever reason, we didn’t run into traffic at all. Maybe everyone who could drove early rather than late.

About an hour and a half into the trip we started seeing patches of snow on the ground and by the end when we climbed up into the hills, there was a several-inch layer, and high winds blowing it all around and the temperature fell to minus two. Negative numbers on a thermometer are a novel sight for us Marylanders, so that was exciting. There was also a bit of tricky driving for Beth.

We arrived at the lodge a little after three and I was glad to get out of the car because the leg cramps that were bothering me around Thanksgiving had returned on this trip and it helps to walk when I get them. We learned the power was out at the lodge and some of the cabins, but not the ones in our section of the park so we got the keys, drove there, and unpacked the car. I tried to shovel the porch steps before Beth’s mom arrived, but the snow was too hard packed to get off the risers.

Setting up the tree that had been tied up in our garage for weeks and then on top of the car for hours was a high priority. We wanted to give the limbs a few hours to fall so we could decorate it. Once I’d unpacked the food, North took over the kitchen, making chocolate-peppermint cookies, and Beth decorated the mantle with evergreen boughs she’d cut from the bottom of the tree, adding a string of lights and our figurines of characters from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and then the house was nearly Christmas-ready.

Beth’s mom, brother John, and sister-in-law Abby arrived an hour or so after we did, after a more challenging drive than ours, because they came from the opposite direction. We sat and talked until dinnertime. Beth heated up chili from cans (blending three different brands) and made almond flour cornbread and salad.

After dinner, Beth strung the lights around the tree, and the kids and I put up the ornaments. John and Abby had their own place in a nearby resort, and they left to go get settled in before we’d finished the tree. We watched Frosty the Snowman and Frosty Returns before bed. I skipped part of the latter one because I don’t consider it essential, and it was late, and I wanted to get a shower and go to bed.

In our rush that night, we inadvertently skipped our yearly reading of “A Visit with St. Nicholas,” which we all regretted when we remembered the next day. We also failed to put out cookies for Santa (which North often wants to do, even though it’s been a long time since any of us have believed in Santa) or to open one early present each. I have no strong attachment or objection to this last practice—it’s one we adopted only several years ago. Noah doesn’t like change, so he doesn’t like it and it often leads to sibling strife anyway, so that might have been just as well that we forgot.

Christmas Day

I was the first one up on Christmas morning, which wasn’t really a surprise. I’m sleeping better than I was a month ago, but it’s rare for me to sleep past 6:30 and that’s about when I woke. (Note: every other morning in Blackwater I slept past seven.) I went out to the living room to enjoy the tree lights and look at all your Christmas Eve Facebook posts. One by one, people got up and opened their stocking gifts.

North was responsible for Christmas brunch, so they set to work making scrambled eggs, various vegetarian breakfast meats, sliced fruit, and chocolate-peppermint muffins. Noah and I read while North cooked. John and Abby came over around ten and we ate. Everything was delicious.

Next it was time for presents. This year more presents than usual couldn’t be wrapped either because they were subscriptions—I renewed Beth’s to the New Yorker and we upgraded North’s to the Donor Sibling Registry to lifetime membership—or they had already been received—when my Fitbit broke in November, Beth got me a new one as an early Christmas present. But there was still plenty under the tree. Books, soap, socks and other clothing, tea, chocolate and other treats were popular. Plus, Noah got an extension kit for Settlers of Catan and YaYa got new earbuds.

After presents, John, Abby, and YaYa went for a drive to look at the snow. By early afternoon the temperature had risen into the double digits, if just barely, and Beth and I were both eager to get outside, so we went for a walk. The kids gave this activity a hard pass. At first, we thought we’d just go as far as the canyon overlook, but when we got there, we decided to keep going to the frozen lake, ringed with towering evergreen trees. As we walked over the dam, Beth turned to me and grinned.

I said, “This makes you happy.”

“It does,” she replied. “Look at this! It’s snowy, it’s cold—all the good things.”

We were out almost an hour and when we returned, the kids and I made gingerbread cookies from the dough I’d made at home and decorated them with colored sugar, raisins, dried cranberries, almonds, cashews, hazelnuts, and pecans. They came out just right and I reflected that it’s easier not to burn some when the kids are old enough to heed my directions to roll them all out to the same thickness. After gingerbread, North and I read a few cantos of the Inferno.

Just before dinner, North felt a headache coming on. They’d saved a dose of their rescue medicine for Christmas, just in case, so they were able to join us for Christmas dinner. YaYa made her famous spinach lasagna and afterward we sampled a chocolate Pandoro. None of us were familiar with this traditional Italian Christmas cake, and we found it a little dry, but it’s always good to try new things. John and Abby went back to their place and after a struggle to download it—the Wi-Fi was awful in the cabin—we watched Christmas is Here Again.

Speaking of the Wi-Fi, earlier in the day I’d had a difficult time getting my day’s photos onto Facebook, but I finally succeeded. I found myself surprised at how much this mattered to me. I had an even worse time the next day, but it seemed to matter more that I have a nice post for Christmas, partly because I enjoy the communal nature of holidays on Facebook, when many people are experiencing and sharing similar things, but also because I knew I’d like to see the photos pop up in my memories on future Christmas days. Ah, modern life…

Second Day of Christmas

John and Abby came over in the morning for breakfast and to say goodbye, as they were headed back to Wheeling. We were considering hiking down to the bottom of Blackwater’s eponymous falls, but John thought it was too cold—it was only ten degrees. He seemed torn and I think Beth could have used her older sister powers to sway him, but she didn’t.

I read with both kids in the morning and in the early afternoon, Beth and I set out to hike the Balanced Rock trail. It took about an hour and a half. We crossed a footbridge over a half-frozen creek lined with impressive icicles, traversed fields of little snow-covered evergreen trees and rhododendron bushes with their leaves curled against the cold, and finally climbed up to the two boulders that give the trail its name. About halfway there, Beth said, “Look at the wintry woods. Isn’t it the best?”

Answering automatically at first, I said, “Yes…well, no.” Beth made an indignant sound before I could explain. “The ocean is best,” I said, “but this is very, very nice.” And it was. In the whole walk, the only people we saw were two snowplow drivers when the trail crossed a park road. They were witness to the only time I slipped and fell.

We visited the lodge before going back home to see if its power was restored, because I was interested in swimming later if the pool was open and Beth thought people might want to go to the gift shop, but there was a sign on the door saying there was still no power.

Back at home, Beth heated up the Spanish drinking chocolate North got her for her birthday, and we enjoyed it with cookies. It was very rich and luxurious. I alternated between trying to get Facebook to agree to post my photos of the hike, with only partial success, and folding the last of three loads of laundry I’d done that day. (This is less than it sounds like—the washer and dryer were tiny.) Noah and I watched two episodes of What We Do in the Shadows and then I made dinner—cauliflower with cheese sauce and vegetarian Italian sausage.

North had a migraine and had hit the limit for their medication, so they went to bed in the late afternoon, and we didn’t see them until after nine. We’d planned to watch Glass Onion, but since North wanted to see it, we decided to wait. We tried to download The Fabelmans but it took so long we didn’t have time to watch it. This gave me a chance to read a few stray sections of the Post I’d brought and wanted to read before starting any of my Christmas books and to get this account of our adventures caught up. Just before bed, Beth wrangled the Wi-Fi into letting her post the rest of my hike photos.

Third Day of Christmas

Beth had to work in the morning, preparing for a press release for a video game workers’ unionization drive. I went back to bed after breakfast and started to read The Daughter of Dr. Moreau, which was one of three books I got for Christmas.

After a while I roused myself to do some dishes and from the kitchen window, I saw a young buck foraging for grass under the snow in the circular driveway in front of the cabin. It caused me to reflect that over the past couple days, I’d probably seen more deer than people. We were always seeing them in front of and behind the house. The snow behind the house was pocked with their hoofprints. One day when Noah was photographing a half-grown fawn, it came toward him up onto the back deck. This made me think people feed them, and eventually North and YaYa were feeding them Pandoro and apple.

When Beth finished her tasks, Noah wasn’t up yet, so the rest of us went to the upper overlook to see the falls around eleven-thirty. It’s a short, level trail, good for YaYa and North. It was lovely, as always. The falls were mostly frozen with two cataracts running down the icy surface. The nearby trees were all frosted with frozen spray and there were huge icicles, stained gold with tannin, on the rockface nearby.

We came home for lunch and Noah got up, so we did the other trail to the falls, the one that goes lower and closer. You descend a wooden staircase with viewing platforms at two different levels. The staircase was covered with packed snow, but that’s better than slush or ice, and we made it down to the bottom without much trouble. From that better vantage point, I could see big spheres of ice swirling around in the water at the base of the waterfall. The larger ones were big enough that if they were rocks, you’d call them boulders.

We visited the falls gift shop and dropped Noah back at the house before Beth and I set off on our longest hike of the day, along the ridge behind Pendleton Lake to the Pase Point overview. The trail has occasional views of the canyon and crosses little creeks, but mostly goes through woods and groves of rhododendron. It took about an hour to get from the cabin to Pase Point, where we emerged from the woods to stand on a ledge between boulders and take in a full view of the snow-covered canyon below.

We were wiped out from almost three hours of hiking, so Beth and I took a little nap before I got up to help Noah make soba noodle soup for dinner. Afterward we watched Glass Onion, which is fun film, especially if like me you went through an Agatha Christie phase in middle and high school.

Fourth Day of Christmas

Beth and I went on separate walks in the morning. Every day we were there it was a little warmer and that day it was just over freezing when I left the cabin, less bundled up than previously. I returned to the falls, finding them with slightly less ice and slightly more water tumbling over the ice, and quite a few more people on the staircase. I guess the warmer temperatures brought folks outside.

I climbed back up the staircase and continued up the park road to the bridge that crosses the Blackwater River, and stood on the span, looking down at the smooth ice with a current of open water wending through the middle. On the way back, I admired a decorated evergreen in a median I hadn’t spotted the first time I passed it.

When I got back to the cabin, I noticed Beth had managed to clear the porch stairs of snow as it had finally softened. She’d also taken some evergreen branches we had piled on a chair and woven them into the railing. It was a festive touch I hoped the park staff would leave up for the next people. I told her she’d spruced up the porch and she laughed at the unintended pun.

In a happy turn of events, the power came back on at the lodge and the pool was open. The sled run was open, too, but tickets were sold out, as were tickets for tubing. In the early afternoon, Beth took YaYa and me to the lodge, so I could swim and YaYa could use the exercise room. Beth floated and stretched in the pool while I swam sixty laps in the tiny pool. It’s in a pleasant, airy room with floor-to-ceiling windows that look out on evergreen trees. It’s nice to swim in a warm room and be able to see tiny icicles hanging from the gutters of the building and a dusting of snow on tree branches during the backstroke laps. After my swim, we soaked in the hot tub.

When we got back, North was excited to report they had hand-fed a deer an apple and even petted its head. I was surprised. The deer at Blackwater are very tame, but none of us had ever touched one

After a late lunch for me and an even later breakfast for him, Noah and I read and then watched a couple episodes of What We Do in the Shadows. Next in various combinations, we took ornaments and lights off the tree and dragged it into the woods behind the house, worked on the puzzle of movie posters (finishing it despite YaYa’s prediction that it wasn’t possible in the time left), and folded the last of the trip laundry.

We ate leftovers for dinner and afterward, Noah hooked his laptop up to the computer screen so he could show us a slideshow of the over six hundred pictures he took at Blackwater and people could select the ones they wanted. Then we spun off into different groups to read and watch television—North and I read a couple cantos of the Inferno. We got to the eighth circle of hell (of nine), but that’s not as far as it sounds because more than a third of the poem takes place in that circle. Beth and Noah watched Andor, and YaYa watched as much of Great Expectations as she could before the Wi-Fi gave out.

Fifth Day of Christmas

Beth and I both took early morning walks. For me, this meant leaving the house at 7:55—Beth was out earlier than me and came back later. I decided on the canyon overlook as my destination as I’d already been to the falls and the lake twice each and other than those, the overlook is best short walk from the cabin. When I got there the sun was just rising over the top of the ridge and touching the top of the canyon with light.

I was back at the house a half hour later, ate breakfast, and started packing up the cabin. We checked out at ten and after about a half hour of driving, we passed the crest lined with windmills and crossed the Eastern Continental Divide, where we left the snow and our holiday behind.

Before the Holiday

Posted on December 23, 2022 by Steph

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Monday afternoon at 2:40, Beth and I left the house together. She was headed to pick North up from their partial hospitalization facility, and I was headed to pick Noah up from the airport. Beth dropped me off at the Metro stop, where I shared an elevator with someone who didn’t see fit to extinguish his joint during the ride, so the elevator filled with pot smoke. I was annoyed, but it didn’t diminish my excitement to see Noah for the first time in three and a half months.

Despite what I said before about not taking pictures of the Great Barrier Reef, Noah did end up sending me some cool ones, taken from the air when he was returning to Robina, where he lived this fall (well, spring). He had a two-week stretch between the end of classes and his homecoming. Aside from the trip to the reef, he visited the beach, did some Christmas shopping, and then travelled to Sydney a couple days before his flight home. He sampled noodle dishes in Chinatown and went to see the harbor and the Sydney Opera House.

Noah’s phone battery died on the plane home, so he didn’t know I was waiting for him at the baggage claim, but we managed to find each other. He was travel-weary and didn’t want to contend with all his luggage on the Metro, so I called a Lyft. We had some trouble finding the driver and when we did connect, the driver was irritated with me and rude and accused me of wasting his time. Then in the car when I cracked the window because he was unmasked, he rolled it back up. Also, he was vaping the whole time. It was the first time in my many times in a Lyft I didn’t tip the driver, but I didn’t report him either because I didn’t want to be a Karen.

In the car I alternated between peppering Noah with questions and letting him be. He looked very tired after a journey across the Pacific and the United States. I thought he might want to go straight to bed, but he consented to stay up long enough to eat the lentil-noodle-chard soup I’d made, to keep me company and chop cilantro as I put the finishing touches on the soup, and even to watch How the Grinch Stole Christmas after we ate.

Once he did crash, though, it was an epic sleep. He went to bed at 10 p.m. and didn’t get up until 8:40 the following evening. When Beth and I left in the early afternoon to go to participate in multi-family group therapy at North’s facility and then bring them home for the day, I thought for sure he’d be up when we got back but he wasn’t. And because North had a migraine that night, it was just Beth and me eating the broccoli-cheddar-quinoa fritters I’d made because everyone likes them. By the end of the day, I was checking on him every couple of hours to make sure he was still breathing.

Having slept that long, Noah couldn’t sleep Tuesday night, and he ended up with this sleep dysregulated for several days, but I told him he needed to be up by late afternoon on Wednesday because we had a family activity planned.

It was the solstice and when we travel for Christmas (which we almost always do) we have a tradition of opening a few presents on the solstice to lighten our load a little. We’re spending the holiday with Beth’s mom, brother, and sister-in-law, so once North got home for the day we opened presents from my side of the family. We gathered in the living room, cheerfully lit with lights on the mantle and in the Christmas village I just inherited from my mom (who’s downsizing), and ate butter cookies decorated with red and green sugar and butter-pecan snowballs I bought at the bakery for the occasion while we unwrapped gifts. Beth got a set of pumpkin-carving tools she’d been wanting and fancy chocolate bars. I got two books and three jars of unusual nut butters. Noah got a book and a camera strap, and North got a check.

Beth, North, and I had a virtual family therapy session and after that, we had tofu-veggie bowls for dinner and then we went to Brookside Gardens to see the light display. We’ve done this a few times, but it’s just as magical every time to walk along the wooded paths, admiring the colored lights outlining tree branches or in the shapes of animals and plants. There were a few new features, a machine blowing bubbles made of liquid nitrogen, and steam issuing from the sea dragon’s mouth, but mostly it was the same as I remembered. That’s nice sometimes.

It was also nice that the outing wasn’t derailed by a migraine. It could have been because North’s still having them quite frequently, more days than not. From that we can gather that at the current dose, the new preventative medicine isn’t helping, but they’re not at the full dose yet. They’re building up to it. The good news is that the rescue medicine is very effective. Most of the time it heads the headache off in an hour or less. But…North is only allowed to take it twice a week, so they need to ration it. Every time a headache starts, they are forced to consider if it’s medication-worthy, based on what they have going on that day. Anyway, this time when a headache started right before dinner, they decided yes, it was a medication day.

As it turned out, it was Noah who was ready to leave the gardens before anyone else. He’s not only having trouble adjusting to a time difference of more than half a day, but he’s also having trouble with winter weather, having just come from summer, and he’d lost one of his gloves. It wasn’t super cold, around freezing, but that was too cold for him.

We were planning to leave for Blackwater Falls State Park on Friday morning. If you live in the U.S. or Canada, you’re aware of the massive weather system that derailed that plan. Most of our route would have been fine, but there was a stretch of road that was treacherous, with snow and very high winds, so after monitoring it all morning, an hour before we were set to leave we decided to stay home an extra day. Blackwater is one of Beth’s very favorite places in the whole world, and we’ve spent every Christmas since 2016 in a cabin there, so we were all disappointed to have our stay there cut a day short.

But there were some compensations. North and I took a walk to Starbucks. It was raining for most of the morning and temperatures fell rapidly as the day progressed, so it turned over to snow briefly before the skies cleared. It was over quickly, and it didn’t stick, but it was our first snow of the year, so I thought the occasion merited warm beverages. The walk there was fine, but the wind picked up as we were at a table outside, enjoying our hot chocolate and chai, and we decided to get moving again. North’s feet were wet because they’d stepped in a puddle on the way there and I wasn’t wearing gloves and wished I was, but it was still a fun outing.

At home, I read with both kids—The Inferno with North, while they inked a cityscape that they’re working on for art class and What Strange Paradise with Noah, his Christmas present from my sister, one of the gifts we opened early.

Beth and Noah watched Andor and we all watched a lot of Rankin-Bass Christmas specials—Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and The Year Without a Santa Claus, the last one while we ate cheap delivery pizza, which as I ate it, I realized was just what I wanted. And even if we weren’t where we wanted to be, and with all the people we wanted to be with, it was still good to have an idle day before the holiday, with just the four of us.

A Wild Ride: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 77

Posted on November 27, 2022 by Steph

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Tuesday: Hello, Covid

It was the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, parent-teacher conference day at North’s school. I was in between my second conference (French) and the third (Foundation of Tech) when I got a text from Beth informing me that while I was gone, North, who’d woken that morning with a cough, headache, stuffiness, slight fever, and dizziness, had tested positive for covid. It sounds kind of obvious in retrospect, but I was surprised. After two years and eight months of dodging this virus, I guess I was feeling we were invincible, even though my mom got it in the spring, and my sister’s whole family got it earlier this month.

Two days earlier we had let North leave the house without adult supervision for the first time since they got back from the hospital. They’d had brunch at a crowded diner with several friends. It was an exception to our no-eating-inside-restaurants policy, though we don’t know for sure that’s where they got it. Given that the incubation period is two to fourteen days, the second most likely option seems like the school play, which we attended about a week and a half before they started to feel ill. And I suppose there was the cat café, and we did go see a movie (Ticket to Paradise), but neither the café nor the theater had very many people in it. Ironically, they’d been around people less than usual during the two weeks before they got sick, first on a closed hospital unit and then at home.

I wondered whether I should bail on the rest of my conferences, being an official close contact of someone with covid. That might have been the ethical thing to do, but I was already there and masked, and given that North’s been out of school for several weeks, I really wanted to touch base with each of their teachers to explain what’s going on and discuss various possible paths forward for North academically. It seemed important, and the conferences were less than fifteen minutes each, so I went through with it.

When I got home, Beth said, “I feel like the degree of difficulty of our lives just keeps getting higher,” elaborating that we were like the proverbial frogs being slowly boiled in a pot. There were a few reasons this was bad timing for our family’s first bout with covid. (Is there such a thing as good timing for it?)

We were supposed to have an in-person intake interview at one of the partial hospitalization programs to which we’ve applied the following morning.
We were leaving our annual Thanksgiving-at-the-beach trip immediately after the interview.
The next day was also Beth’s birthday.

Beth called the hospital and to our surprise, they said we could do the interview virtually, so that was a relief. After a brief discussion, we decided we would go ahead with the beach trip. It usually involves Christmas shopping on Black Friday at the shops in downtown Rehoboth and we’d have to skip that, but I said it would be worth it to me to go if all we did was hang out at the house, have Thanksgiving dinner, order takeout the other nights, and take walks on the beach. That was what our first pandemic Thanksgiving trip to the beach was like anyway. (On our very first pandemic beach trip North was paralyzed, and we didn’t cancel then either. We are hardy travelers.)

There were risks, of course. Driving there would mean several hours of close contact with North and if Beth got sick in Rehoboth, then the drive home would be difficult or we could even get stuck there, but if you know how we feel as a family about the beach (me most of all), you’re probably not surprised that we went.

So many of you have shared your covid experiences on your blogs or on Facebook that we’ve had a range of models for whether or how to isolate infected family members from non-infected ones. We didn’t even discuss isolating from North. Given their current situation, it didn’t seem like a good course of action. We began masking when we were in the same room with them, but we weren’t avoiding them, and most of the time we even ate together inside, so that made the decision to spend a few hours in a car together slightly more rational.

After that was decided and after we’d filled out some pre-interview forms to scan and send to the hospital, I made Beth’s birthday cake, a chocolate cake with coffee frosting I’ve made many, many times. You’d think I’d remember the recipe well enough that I wouldn’t almost forget to add the egg, actually forget the vanilla, and accidentally turn the frosting into a glaze by halving all the ingredients except the coffee, but you’d be wrong. What can I say? I haven’t been sleeping well and I’ve had a lot on my mind. It was comforting to make it anyway, because it smelled good baking and there were batter and frosting bowls to lick, and it made the stressful day seem more festive.

Wednesday: Happy Birthday, Dear Beth

The next morning while we were packing for the trip prior to the interview, Beth got a call from the hospital informing us it was cancelled because that health care visits can’t happen over Zoom across state lines. The hospital is in Virginia and we’re in Maryland. Later I remembered we’ve run up against this rule before while travelling. I guess there’s some sort of exception for D.C. because we’ve had a lot of virtual meetings with providers in the District. This was quite frustrating. We couldn’t get a new appointment until the second week of December, and we won’t even be on the wait list until we have the interview. But there was nothing we could do about it.

We hit the road around eleven and arrived in Rehoboth around three-thirty, with a stop for a lunch of drive-through Taco Bell and Dairy Queen eaten at the tables outside the DQ near the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. We masked in the car and kept the windows partially down. It was a warm day—it got up to sixty degrees—so that wasn’t a hardship.

Near the end of the drive, Beth got a call from another partial hospitalization program where we’d been waiting for an intake interview since North got out of the psychiatric unit almost two weeks earlier. It’s in Annapolis, but they are opening a new location in Prince George’s County, which is closer to us than Annapolis, and they wanted to know if we’d like to interview for that location. Beth said yes. They’re supposed to call back by Monday to arrange it. So, on that front, it was one step back, one step forward. Because the facility is new, we’re hoping there will be less of a wait there.

We got to the house, a two-story yellow frame cottage with pale blue shutters, a living room and kitchen on the first floor and three small bedrooms on the upper floor, a narrow staircase between them, and a screened porch in front. We settled in, unpacking food and clothes, making up the beds, and deciding on our order of Japanese takeout for dinner. I was on the beach by five to see the sunset. When I got back Beth left to get the food and we ate her birthday dinner around the kitchen table.

After dinner, she opened presents. There was imported Spanish drinking chocolate powder from North, three fancy chocolate bars from Noah (one from Colombia, one from India, and one from Tanzania), and a bottle of French olive oil from me. It was all very international. Beth’s a fan of good chocolate and olive oil, so she was happy. Next, we ate cake and ice cream, and watched A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, and The Mayflower Voyagers.

Before bed, we took a walk down to the beach to see the stars. We could see Orion’s belt and one of the dippers– we weren’t sure which one. Beth stayed on the boardwalk while North and I went down to the sand. While we were separated, my sister’s family called Beth on her cell and sang “Happy Birthday” to her and let her know her present was on the way.

As we were going to bed, I asked Beth how her birthday had been, and she said it was “a wild ride,” but that it ended well. In my card I’d written (before North came down with covid), “I hope it’s better than getting deloused, or getting your gallbladder out, or getting a flat tire.” I suppose this one will go down as one of Beth’s many memorable birthdays.

Thursday: Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving started for me at 4:49. Remember how I said I’m not sleeping well? I stayed in bed until six, trying to get back to sleep, and then I relocated to the living room couch so the light from my cell and laptop where I was reading Facebook and blogs wouldn’t wake Beth. Around 6:45, I decided that as long as I was up, I might as well see the sunrise on the beach, which was only a five-minute walk away.

I used to watch the sun rise on the beach more often, when the kids were younger, and we all used wake at ungodly earlier hours. Well, I can’t exactly say I’m thankful for my recent insomnia, even on a day dedicated to gratitude, but… I was genuinely grateful that morning to see the orange ball of the sun rising over the ocean, touching the beach grass with faint light, putting touches of pink in the sky, painting the wet sand silver with streaks of gold, and making a big, ruffly, clear jellyfish I found at the waterline seem to glow from within.

I walked on the beach until the dawn colors had all drained away from the sky and the sand, went back to the house, ate breakfast, and made a batch of low-sugar cranberry sauce before anyone else was up. Everyone cooked a little throughout the day. Beth made the mushroom gravy and finished the broccoli-cheese casserole that North started. (North felt well enough to cook at first and then got dizzy and had to go lie down.) I made the basting sauce for the tofu roast and Beth made mashed potatoes. We’ve pared down our traditional feast a little over the past couple years since I got diagnosed with diabetes. I stopped making the brandied sweet potatoes because I was the only one who liked them, and we longer make breadcrumb stuffing because the roast comes stuffed with wild rice and Noah was the one who liked the original stuffing best.

Late in the morning, we all made our traditional turkey table decorations from apples, toothpicks, raisins, dried cranberries, and olives. “Will you make these with your kids?” I asked North.

“Yes,” they said. “Will you make them with them?”

“Yes,” I said. It was a cheering vision of the future.

Beth and I had lunch out on the screened porch—leftover Japanese, crackers, cheese, nuts, and fruit. Then we all had overlapping naps. I didn’t manage to fall asleep, but I came close, and it was nice to rest. North slept most of the afternoon. We’d hoped to take our Christmas card photos on the beach that afternoon, but they weren’t up for it. After my nap, I put the roast in the oven and went for another walk on the beach and boardwalk. When I came back to baste it again, Beth went for a walk of her own.

We ate a little after six and everything was delicious. Before we ate, we offered thanks for North being out of the hospital, for being together, for the fact that though we wished Noah was with us that the reason he wasn’t was that he was studying in Australia, something he’d wanted to do for years, and for the vaccines and boosters that kept North’s case of covid mild and that had protected me and Beth so far.

Speaking of Noah, at seven we had a Zoom call with him. It’s only the third time we’ve done it since he’s been abroad. The first time, with me and Beth, was to let him know North had been hospitalized and the second, with all four of us, was the last night North was in the hospital. He’d been trying to call them at the hospital and between the fifteen-hour time difference, difficulties with his changing between domestic and international SIM cards, and the fact that all the kids on the unit shared one phone and it was usually in use, he had not managed it until we linked him into one of our pre-scheduled Zoom calls.

We asked him if he’d done anything for Thanksgiving and he said no. It reminded me of studying in Spain the fall of my junior year of college and how it’s strange to be abroad on this very American holiday. My celebration that year consisted of a sweet potato boiled on a hot plate in a dorm room. We also found out his last school assignment is due the first week of December and he has two whole weeks of free time before he comes home. Beth and I both urged him to travel. He’s already planning a trip to the Great Barrier Reef, but he hasn’t explored much outside the town where he’s living, so it seems like a good opportunity to see more of the country where he’s been living since September. He mentioned in a puzzled way that a lot of the international students have been taking trips to New Zealand and Bali and missing class to do it.

It was good to talk to him. It was the first time I’ve been to Rehoboth without him since before he was born—in fact I think the last time we went without him might have been the trip when we brought printouts of sperm donor profiles to pick out his. It was also the first time we haven’t been together on Thanksgiving, so I was missing him a lot.

After the call, we watched an episode of Gilmore Girls, and then North and I walked to the beach again to look at the stars. There were seabirds resting on the waves, visible only as white spots bobbing up and down in the distance or occasionally taking flight and streaking across the dark sky.

(Not So) Black Friday

I managed to sleep until 5:30 the next morning, a slight improvement. Because my daybreak walk at the beach had been so rewarding the previous morning, I decided to do it again. It was cloudy and drizzling so there really was no sunrise to watch, but I never regret a walk on the beach.

I came home, made myself breakfast, and then left again to go pick up a few books I’d pre-ordered from Browse-About before North got sick. I double-masked and was in and out in a few minutes, resisting the temptation to stay and shop a little. On the way home, I detoured to the beach. It was high tide and an extensive network of little pools and channels of water had formed all over the sand. It was very cool, but I had to wend my way carefully to avoid getting stranded somewhere that would soon be covered by an incoming wave.

There was a family on the beach with preschool-aged twins running around, one in a ladybug rain slicker and one in a bee slicker. The hoods of their jackets had antennae. They were adorable and made me miss my little ones, who are not so little now.

When I got back home, Beth drove out to Route 1 in Black Friday traffic to get Grandpa Mac takeout for North. They’d slept all morning, so it was their first meal of the day. (Then Beth drove back when the order was wrong to get a replacement. This is a testament to Beth’s love for North.) I blogged and read and did laundry so we could bring home mostly clean clothes. It felt odd, not to be busy on the day I usually either start or get serious about my Christmas shopping.

In the late afternoon we had our Christmas card photo shoot on the beach. North and left ahead of Beth and went to the boardwalk where we purchased a frozen custard for North. We all met up and took pictures on the sand and jetties. While Beth and I had our backs to the ocean a rogue wave caught us by surprise and we both got our feet soaked. North took a series of photos of us running out of the ocean. I am considering using one of them on the card. After all, we haven’t had a picture-perfect year.

Beth and North went back to the house while I went to Grotto’s and ordered a pizza and mozzarella sticks for pickup. While they cooked, I went back to the beach to watch the sunset turn a bank of clouds in the northern part of the sky vivid pink and color the water and sand with swirls of pink, gold, and blue. I brought the pizza back home and after an hour or so, I heated it up and we had an early dinner before heading back to the boardwalk for the holiday sing-along and Christmas tree lighting.

When we reached downtown, Beth went to get soft pretzel bites for North while North and I found a place to sit away from the crowds near the bandstand. We found a bench on the boardwalk where we could hear the singing and see the tree but without standing shoulder-to-shoulder with hundreds of celebrants. We noticed someone was flying a drone near the tree, presumably to get an overhead view when the lights came on.

Although the other people sitting on boardwalk benches and passing by weren’t singing, we did. The first song was “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” and for a half an hour, there was a series of mainly secular Christmas songs like “Jingle Bells,” “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” and “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” At seven sharp, the lights on the tree flashed on, just as they always do. The sameness of this event is deeply satisfying.

On the way home, Beth confirmed that the orange light North and I had been seeing in the sky over the ocean the past two nights was in fact a planet—Mars. We marveled that you could see its color from so very far away.

That night before bed, because I’d had a sore throat all day and I was getting stuffy, I took a covid test. To my surprise, it was negative.

Saturday: Goodbye, Beach

Another morning, another early waking, this time around 5:40, another lovely sunrise on the beach, which I enjoyed along with parents with kids, people with dogs, walkers, runners, and people camped out on the sand wrapped in blankets watching the fiery sun hover at the horizon over the ocean. It’s quite the perq if you have to be up before dawn.

I came home and had breakfast and we packed up the house. Even though he’s busy with end-of-semester projects, Noah texted me the pictures of himself wearing a green t-shirt and standing on an Australian beach that I’d requested. We’ll juxtapose one with our beach photos on the Christmas card.

We stayed in Rehoboth for about an hour after we vacated the house. Beth took her daily walk and North and I had a slower ramble along the beach and boardwalk, with a long rest on a boardwalk bench. It was a wild ride getting to the beach, but once we got there it was actually a sedate couple of days, with more naps and less bustling about in shops than we usually have on Thanksgiving weekend, but I’m glad we went, and I hope it will prove restorative.

Note: Beth and I both tested positive for covid on Sunday morning.

Where They Are, Part 2

Posted on November 17, 2022 by Steph

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To cut to the chase, home is where North is now. After thirteen days on the adolescent psychiatric ward at Children’s, North came home a week ago today. We are trying to get them into a partial hospitalization program. This means a day program with psychiatric treatment that would last anywhere from two to six weeks. They’d be home evenings and weekends. We’re in various stages of the application process at three different facilities. They all have waitlists, but we’ve gotten as far as a phone screening completed at one and a phone screening completed, plus an in-person interview scheduled at another.

In the meanwhile, North’s not going to school. Beth and I are both working reduced hours to spend time with them. We’ve been playing Sleeping Queens and Clue and watching television and North and I continue to make our way through The Iliad. We’re up to Book 17. When we get through it, we’re going to start The Inferno. North is helping with housework and the still-in-progress project of taking Halloween decorations down. Plus, they’re working on a complicated paint-by-number mandala. Beth and/or I go on outings with them most days, either errands like grocery shopping or more recreational excursions.

Leaving the Hospital: Thursday

We found out North was being discharged Thursday afternoon and picked them up around six, after we’d finished one of the aforementioned phone screenings. I quit working and made dinner, a mushroom-white bean soup, early so it would be ready when we got home. North was appreciative of home cooking after two weeks of hospital food. That evening we watched Frankenweenie because in the hospital they’d been shown the first half hour of it as a group activity, and they wanted to know how it ended. It was deeply comforting to eat dinner around the same table and then eat white chocolate fangs leftover from Halloween and watch a movie.

Settling in at Home: Friday

Friday afternoon Beth and North dropped me off at Walgreens to get my flu vaccine and covid booster while they browsed at a nearby Asian market, where North got the kind of noodles they like. Back at home, after we finished a book of the Iliad, I read the last act of The Doll’s House to North. They’d read The Glass Menagerie and most of The Doll’s House in the hospital. North seemed to enjoy the play and cheered Nora in her decisions not to kill herself and to leave her awful husband. Fridays are usually movie nights, so after a dinner of homemade olive and mushroom pizza, we watched Rocky Horror Picture Show. It was North’s first time seeing it and I have to say they seemed a little skeptical of it. “So, the horror is gay people?” was their comment when it was over.

Faux Halloween: Saturday

North will be seeing their therapist, Andrew, twice a week until they get into a day program and Saturday morning was the first appointment since getting out of the hospital. That one was in person. Then we all had a virtual meeting with their psychiatrist, Dr. W, on Tuesday and North had a second (virtual) meeting with Andrew today. We’ll have an in-person family meeting with him on Saturday.

Saturday was also the day North designated as Faux Halloween. We watched The Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting in the afternoon, and It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown in the early evening, while eating Chipotle and more Halloween candy.

Then Zoë came over and we all left for North’s school, to see the closing night performance of Clue. It was a fun production, and as North was the co-costumes manager, we all admired the color-coded costumes and a reversable cummerbund that a character flipped over to indicate he’d been shot—the reverse side was bloodstained. Speaking of costumes, toward the end the play the same actor experienced a costume malfunction. His pants ripped and he had to use one hand to hold them up for the remainder of the play. He was such a pro, though, I really wasn’t sure if it was part of the play or not. He made it look like it was, but North says it wasn’t. After the play was over, Ranvita (who was on crew) found North and they had time for a hug, but North didn’t want to linger and talk to people. The actress who played Mrs. Peacock did stop them to say, “I missed you!” as we were on our way out. (North later said Mrs. Peacock’s costume was their favorite.)

Zoë came home with us and slept over. She and North watched Ma after Beth and I had gone to bed.

Starbucks Outing: Monday

“I know you’ve already been to Starbucks twice since you got home…” I started on Monday morning.

“But I want to go again,” North finished for me.

So, we walked to the Starbucks closest to our house. It’s about a fifteen-minute walk. North seemed happy to be outside and pointed out a lot of animals including a cat in the street who did not wish to socialize with us and a lot of birds. They noticed a blue jay in a tree, the iridescent colors of the starlings’ feathers in the shopping center parking lot, and the flock of pigeons taking off from telephone wires, swooping through the sky and returning to the same wire. I reminded them that they were four and we were outside the very same Starbucks watching birds swoop across the sky in formation and they told me: “Birds know what they’re doing, and people don’t.”

“I stand by that,” they said.

Cat-Related Outings: Wednesday and Thursday

On Wednesday Beth and North went to the county animal shelter to donate Xander’s food and treats and they got to visit with some cats. Beth said it was a little sad, but mostly nice. North said it was sad to leave without one young and vocal black cat in particular because they’d taken a fancy to him. The next day Beth and North had an even longer visit with the residents of a cat café in Annapolis. I didn’t go on either outing, partly so I could get some work done, but mostly because I’m just not ready. I don’t want to pet or play with cats who aren’t Xander yet.

That’s basically where we are. North has a chart on their door they use to keep us appraised of their mood. It’s nice to see it in green sometimes, but it’s okay that isn’t always. We’re in a kind of a limbo, doing the best we can, taking one day at a time.

Where They Are

Posted on November 5, 2022 by Steph

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Wednesday evening Beth and I were on a Zoom call with North and North had just asked if I’d been writing about them on Facebook or my blog this week. I said no. They said not to post anything on Facebook, but as for the blog, “You can say where I am but not why.” So that’s what I will tell you.

Admission: 21 Hours

North is in an adolescent psychiatric ward and has been for eight days. On Thursday of last week during a routine quarterly visit with their psychiatrist, they said some things that caused Dr. W to recommend we go to the emergency room. She called ahead, approving North to be admitted, thinking this way we wouldn’t be waiting all night in the ER. We did get out of the ER in a relatively swift hour and a half, but instead of spending the night there, we spent it, and most of the next day, in the psychiatric screening area where patients wait to be admitted to the children’s or adolescent psych unit of the hospital or discharged home. We’ve actually been to this screening area before, about three years ago—I never blogged about it. That time, we decided to take North home in the middle of the night.

This time around, once we arrived in the ER, North stopped speaking, though they would communicate through gestures and writing. If you’ve been reading this blog a while you might remember when North stopped talking for six weeks in third grade. That time, they felt physically unable to speak above a whisper, though there was no organic cause and when it got better, there was no clear reason. This time is a little different as North can speak under some circumstances, but I’ll get back to that later.

It wasn’t clear why the admissions process took so long, as North had been pre-approved and there were beds available, but if you’ve spent much time in hospitals—and I hope you haven’t— you know how mysterious and excruciatingly slow everything can be.

The screening area, which we started to call the bardo, consisted of a hallway with a desk and chairs for staff and more chairs for patients and parents who were waiting, and five exam rooms and one restroom branching off the sides. Each exam room had one bed, some chairs, and a tv. There was a cutout in the door so staff in the hall could see inside. If you turned off the lights, the room was dim but not dark. North got an exam room right away and didn’t have to wait in the hall. After they changed into a hospital gown and we were briefly interviewed and a nurse had taken blood and they’d provided a urine sample and taken a covid test, North was able to sleep, but Beth and I sat in plastic chairs all night. You aren’t allowed to bring anything into the area, so we didn’t have our phones, or books, or anything to occupy ourselves and once North was asleep, we couldn’t even talk to each other because we didn’t want to wake them. It was a long night.

At one point after a shift change one of the staff who didn’t know that North is using catheters—yes, that’s still going on—saw them go to the bathroom holding one and asked me if we’d gotten it from a nurse, and I said yes. I wasn’t intentionally lying—I was exhausted and misremembered, but we’d brought them from home, and soon no fewer than four hospital staff were swarming around North and their illicit medical device. So, now we know how to get people’s attention in the hospital.

Kids were arriving and leaving all night and the next day, sometimes sent up to the inpatient unit, sometimes sent home. I left the screening area a few times, either to go the locker with our belongings so I could use my phone to scan the glucose monitor on my arm or in search of food, because while they feed the kids, they don’t feed the parents. When you leave and re-enter you must be screened, and it can take a while for security to arrive to do it, so I tried to keep my excursions to a minimum. By Friday afternoon I was starting to wonder if Beth or I should go home and get some sleep and then come back and relieve the other in case it was going to be another night, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to leave, and Beth wouldn’t either. As far as I could tell, North was the only kid there with two parents in attendance and at least half of them had no parents accompanying them.

For much of Friday we watched a lot of truly dreadful daytime television—one of those shows in which people are suing each other (not Judge Judy, but similar) a crime drama with bad writing and acting, and The Young and the Restless. I paced the length of the little room for over an hour and a half, which made Beth so nervous she went out into the hallway, but I kept at it for a while after she left because it was having the opposite effect on me. Finally, we found a channel that was playing nothing but consecutive episodes of Friends, Beth came back to the room, I promised not to pace anymore and climbed into North’s bed with them, and we all watched several episodes. I haven’t seen Friends since it was on the air, and I’m sure there must be some episodes that haven’t aged well (that’s certainly true of Buffy) but from the ones we saw it seems to have held up. It was just what we needed, distracting and funny and North seemed to like it. It even made them laugh a few times.

Finally, at four o’clock Friday afternoon, almost twenty-one hours after we’d arrived at the hospital, North was taken up to the inpatient unit. Beth and I went with them but weren’t allowed past the lobby. We stayed there for another hour and a half, mostly waiting for someone to come talk to us and filling out paperwork. And then we left our baby there, went home, ate, showered, and fell into bed at seven. I slept for eleven and a half hours.

The Home Front: Weekend Plus Halloween

The next day was Saturday, the day of the Halloween parade. North hadn’t been planning to attend anyway because it was the first day of tech week for the school play and if they’d been home, they would have been at rehearsal. Last year Beth and I went to the parade without North (who had the same conflict) just to watch because we love it. We hadn’t decided if we were going this year and I’d completely forgotten what day it was until Beth asked me, tentatively that morning if I wanted to go. I didn’t. It seemed impossibly sad. I went out on some errands that afternoon and I ended up near downtown Takoma shortly after the parade must have ended because there were a lot of kids in costume, including an unusual number of skeletons, wandering around. In the Co-op, a small Buzz Lightyear was in line in front of me and told me he got his balloon sword at the parade.

Halloween proper was sad, too. We did our civic duty—put out the rest of our massive stock of decorations, lit our jack-o-lanterns (which we’d finished the night before we took North to the hospital, all cats this year in Xander’s honor), and gave out candy. I found seeing the costumed kids at the door alternately cheering and unbearable. To distract myself, I started awarding them prizes, (unbeknownst to them) on Facebook. Here’s what it looked like:

6:08 p.m.

Steph thinks the best trick-or-treater in the 5:00 to 6:00 hour was the “unicorn witch,” even though she wouldn’t have known that’s what the tot was without the voluntarily offered clarification. But it made sense—she wore a unicorn headband and a long black dress.

7:22 p.m.

Best costume in the 6:00 to 7:00 hour: Flower in flowerpot. Second place, hot dog.

8:10 p.m.

7:00 to 8:00 hour. Elaborate homemade piñata costume. Second place, witch with cauldron for candy and stuffed cat familiar, for attention to detail and impressive use of the word “familiar.”

9:00 p.m.

8:00 to 9:00 hour: Marshmallow. And that’s a wrap. Blowing out the pumpkins and turning out all the lights.

When it was all over, I told Beth this year was sadder than the year North missed trick-or-treating because of the sixth-grade Outdoor Ed field trip. “Way sadder,” she agreed.

Hospitalization: Eight Days and Counting

Earlier in the day on Halloween I delivered some homework to North, copies of The Glass Menagerie and The Doll’s House and questions to answer about the plays. (They will have to do this in crayon, as no other writing implements are allowed.) We’ve been going to the hospital frequently to deliver clean clothes and other items, though frustratingly, sometimes it takes days for the items to make their way to North. It was a week before they had a hairbrush, even though they were allowed one. We even brought a second one, thinking maybe the first one got lost. The same day they got to brush their hair, they got Muffin, their stuffed monkey. This required special permission, so it made a little more sense.

When one or both of us go to the hospital, usually Beth drives, but when I brought the plays on Monday, I took public transportation and the hospital shuttle so she could get some work done and so I could see North through the glass of the lobby. Whenever you come into the unit, they bring your kid out to wave at you.

On Wednesday afternoon I got to visit with them for an hour in the classroom. I delivered some art homework and a note from Zoë and a crocheted bee she made for North, a Zobëë, she called it. At North’s request I brought the cards and tokens for Love Letter so we could play (they beat me 7-0) and the Iliad. I read the beginning of book 12 out loud. This isn’t even homework. North got interested in it after they read the Odyssey last year and they’ve been reading it on and off since last summer. Somewhere around book 7, I started reading it to them because they thought it might go faster that way. (After room inspection that night both the card game and the bee were confiscated.)

We’ve also had at least one phone or Zoom call every day they’ve been there. At first it was kind of ad hoc and it was hard to get through but once we got on the schedule for every weekday evening at seven, it’s been easier. It’s good to see them once a day. We can see their room, which has a view of the Capitol, the Howard university bell tower, and the reservoir, and a dark blue wall with white silhouettes of whales and sharks. They’ve been doing a lot of adult coloring book pages with the ever-present crayons, and they are taped to the wall, along with Zoë’s note. We can have these calls because North will speak to us when no one else is around.

We get a call from Dr. D, the main psychiatrist who is working with North, every weekday except Wednesdays, and one day we had a family meeting, which was a Zoom call with North, Dr. D, and a coordinator. In this call North communicated by writing and holding the paper up to the camera. This is what they’ve been doing in group and individual therapy as well, though they have been working on saying a couple words per session.

We’ll have another family meeting on Monday, which if Dr. D is right, might be near the end of North’s stay. No promises, but she says she’s cautiously hoping it will be “early next week.”

At Home: Five More Days

Meanwhile, Beth and I have been working in the day and watching A League of Their Own or Abbott Elementary at night, plus Licorice Pizza on Friday night. I was writing postcards to voters in Kentucky and Georgia until the mailing deadline passed and on Friday, independently of each other, Beth and I took our ballots to the drop-off box near the community center. Beth also took North’s because in Takoma Park, you are allowed to vote for municipal offices at age sixteen. It seemed a little sad they couldn’t have the satisfaction of dropping their very first ballot into the box themselves, but it was good they’d already completed, signed, and sealed it.

On Tuesday I had lunch with my friend Megan. We’ve been good friends since North and Megan’s daughter were in preschool together, so she knows pretty much all of North’s long backstory. It was nice to talk to someone who didn’t need a lot of explanation. In other self-care, Beth went kayaking this morning and we went to Brookside Gardens for a walk this afternoon.

We very much hope North will be coming home soon. They’ve asked us to leave up the Halloween decorations, so we have. I’ve even left the Halloween cats dish towel hanging from the oven door and my black cat, bat, and vampire-festooned pencils and Mummy eraser out on my desk. We’re planning a little Halloween do-over for our reunion. We’ll watch It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and eat Halloween candy we saved. I am looking forward to that.

October Outings

Posted on October 20, 2022 by Steph

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Note: this blog post was already mostly written when Xander got sick, so the bulk of it of it takes place before the last one. Think of it as an artsy flashback…

We’re a family prone to traditions and sometimes that gives the years and months and weeks a pleasing, predictable rhythm. That’s why I was disappointed when a couple of the things we usually do in October either didn’t happen or we couldn’t attend, but despite this, we’ve had several nice outings recently.

Where We Didn’t/Won’t Go

Visitation Day

Most MCPS schools have a parent visitation day on Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples’ Day when you can come observe your kids’ classes. (It’s that day because the schools are in session and many parents have it off work as it’s a federal holiday.) We’ve gone at both elementary schools the kids attended, both middle schools, and Noah’s high school. Before this year, I would have said all MCPS schools host this event, but it turns out North’s school doesn’t. You’d think I’d know this as North is a junior, but their ninth-grade year was nearly all remote and last year there weren’t many events parents were invited to in the building, especially early in the year, so I wasn’t surprised when the date passed with no invitation.

But this year, since Back to School Night was in person again, I thought Visitation Day would be on as well, but there we no announcements, so we started to wonder. Trying to find out anything about it from the school was surprisingly difficult. When I called the main office the person who answered the phone didn’t know and transferred me to someone else’s voicemail, where I left a message that was never returned. When Beth emailed the principal, he never answered. When I asked North to ask their teachers, they forgot, although they seemed open to us coming, especially to their painting class. When I called the main office again, a different person who answered the phone didn’t seem to know what I was talking about but said there was nothing on the school calendar for that day. This seemed like a good indication the event wasn’t happening, but I’d posted something to the school’s Facebook page, just in case, and then in response, the mother of a senior told a story about how the last year before covid she’d gone to see just one class and her daughter’s teacher who was a veteran at the school had no idea why she was there. That made me think, okay, maybe this school has never done this, and it wasn’t a casualty of covid until another senior parent posted, no, visitation day did happen the last year before covid, so now I don’t know what to think about the past or the future, but it didn’t happen this year. I really liked getting a glimpse of my kids’ school lives, as you can probably guess from the fact that I pursued this so doggedly, but even so, I wasn’t going to show up uninvited.

Halloween Parade

The other thing that’s probably off the table for us, though we don’t know for sure yet, is the Halloween parade and costume contest. It’s happening, two days before Halloween, but North thinks it conflicts with tech week for the school play, so they won’t be able to compete, which is sad because over the years my kids have been enthusiastic participants in the parade and contest, which they have each won at least once. The same conflict stopped North from going last year, so I’m guessing it will also conflict next year which means North’s probably done with the costume contest, which is sad because we didn’t even know the last year was the last year. Beth and I have thought about volunteering to be judges, but I think I want to wait until North has graduated and there’s no chance that we’d be judging any of their peers, not that too many of them are still participating.

Where We Did Go

Gingerbread Sundae (Date #1)

This wasn’t an October outing per se, as we went the last day of September, but it was autumnal, so I’m including it. Around this time of year, I always get a craving for the gingerbread sundae at Mark’s, a restaurant in downtown Takoma. I like to have it just as it’s getting a little cool, but warm enough that ice cream still seems appealing. Last year I was newly diagnosed with diabetes and skipped it, but I have a better idea of what I can eat now, and ice cream is rich enough that the fat slows down the sugar and it usually doesn’t cause as big a spike as other desserts. I invited Beth to go on a mini date with me on a Friday afternoon and split a sundae and that’s what we did. The day was cooler than had been predicted when we’d arranged it, but she’d cleared her schedule, so we went anyway. We asked for a table outside, because we’re not eating inside restaurants, and we had the little alley next to Mark’s all to ourselves (as the day was not only cool but it looked like rain, though it held off long enough), so it was kind of romantic. They were out of the gingerbread syrup, but the combination of warm gingerbread and cold ice cream was still pleasing.

Family Movie Outing

Later that weekend, all three of us saw Don’t Worry, Darling. I enjoyed it, even though it’s the kind of movie that when you think about it later, it makes less sense than it seemed to while you were watching it. I can say Florence Pugh is quite good in it, the cinematography is striking, and it has an excellent soundtrack.

Mother and Child Pupusa Excursion

At the end of summer, I realized that North and I never went to the Langley Park farmers’ market for pupusas, which is something we usually do at least once in the summer, so I checked the school calendar for half days or days off on Wednesdays before the market closes for the season in late November. There was a half day in September, but North had to stay after school for the play. However, Yom Kippur fell on a Wednesday and there was no school that day, so we got pupusas for lunch and coffee and pumpkin pastries (a muffin for North and a slice of pumpkin loaf for me that I saved for later). North says the farmers’ market pupusas are better than restaurant ones and I speculated it’s because food often tastes better outside. North thinks it’s because they get the ratio of filling to dough just right.

White House Garden Tour (Date #2)

There’s a garden tour at the White House every spring and fall and Beth was offered tickets through her office. We’ve done this tour before, but not for eleven years, and I thought it would be fun, so Beth and I went. (North declined.) It’s a self-guided tour. There were framed photos of presidents and first ladies from the Carters to the Trumps planting trees in front of the trees themselves and you can see how they’ve grown. (President Carter’s Cedar of Lebanon is quite impressive now.)

There was a bottleneck at the kitchen garden so a staffer was hurrying people past it, which was too bad, because I would have liked to get a better look, but I saw herbs, peppers of different colors, sunflowers, and a bank of surprisingly tall marigolds. We’ve been to the White House to see the Christmas decorations (once in the Clinton administration), to tour the East Wing, take the Garden Tour, and attend the Easter Egg Roll (all in the Obama years), but this was the first time we’d been there during the Biden administration. It made me think I’d like to do the Christmas tour again sometime. On the way back to the Metro, we got coffee (me) and hot chocolate (Beth) and then we went to Value Village to get an orange shirt for North to wear at our annual pumpkin patch photo shoot later in the month.

Lunch (Date #3)

The other thing we usually do on Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples’ Day, besides visit the kids’ schools, is to go out to lunch. The upside was that we didn’t have to squeeze it between one school and the other as we often did in years past. We went to Busboys and Poets. Beth got a salad with vegan tuna, and I had cauliflower with aioli and vegan barbequed chicken. It was a pretty day, sunny and in the sixties so it was pleasant to eat outside, and we spent some time hanging out when we got home before I decided to get some housework and paying work done.

If you’re wondering if it’s normal for us to have three dates in a week and half, the answer is no, but we were on a roll. Sometimes that happens.

Play

This year North is participating in Cappies, an organization of student theater critics that sends students to review plays at area high schools and then grants awards at the end of the year. On Friday they attended their first show. A high school in McLean, Virginia was putting on The Man Who Came to Dinner. Beth was going, too, because it’s a long drive to McLean and it made more sense to stay than to go home and come back, and I thought if everyone else was going, I’d get in on the fun, too. We’d purchased the tickets before Xander got sick and once he did, I was leaning toward staying home with him, but then he deteriorated more quickly than we thought he would, and we had him euthanized the morning of the play. So, we were all heartsore, and I almost didn’t go, but I wanted to be together on such a sad night—although North would be seated with the other Cappies—so I went.

The host school feeds the Cappies dinner beforehand, but Beth and I needed dinner, so I heated up some leftover frozen pizza and wrapped it up in foil before we left in hopes that it would stay warm and it did, faintly. On the way we stopped at a Starbucks where North and I got Dragon Drinks while Beth went to a nearby grocery store to get marinated mushrooms, a salad, and Babybel cheese to supplement the pizza. We ate in the car in the school parking lot and Beth said we were tailgating. Meanwhile, North was dining inside the school. They’d expected something like pizza on paper plates, but they were served roasted chicken and Caesar salad on china, which would have been nice, except North doesn’t eat meat, so all they had for dinner was salad and mints.

The play is a madcap 1930s comedy about an imperious literary critic who breaks his hip while at dinner at a factory owner’s house and is bedridden there for weeks, and proceeds to take over the house, receive many colorful guests, and irritate his host, while befriending his children, older sister, and servants (and in some cases turning them against him). The main plot involves the critic’s scheming interference in his secretary’s love life. Beth missed part of the second act because she had to go watch a vote count for an Apple store in Oklahoma City that was voting to unionize—happily, the union won. When she came back all I was able to tell her about what she missed was, “There were shenanigans and machinations.” It’s that kind of play.

The production was well done. The set was gorgeous, and the actors did a great job. (As a costumes manager, North noted there were some impressively quick costume changes.)

It was over by ten, and because I didn’t realize there was a Cappies meeting after the show for the purpose of debriefing, I thought we’d be getting home at a reasonable time, but we had to wait in the school lobby until 11:15, when North was finally released. I was exhausted from the long, draining day and when we got home and Beth and I fell into bed, it was midnight. But North stayed up to write their review.

Pumpkin Patch Expedition

We took our annual pilgrimage to Northern Virginia to get pumpkins the next day. We had to do it when we’d scheduled it, because it’s a long outing and Beth’s going to be out of town this weekend, plus North had invited Ranvita. I wasn’t reluctant, though. I was still heavy-hearted—we all were—but in my experience, getting outside when I’m sad never hurts and sometimes helps.

We left mid-afternoon, picked up Ranvita, and drove to Potomac Vegetable Farms, where we’ve been getting our jack-o-lantern pumpkins since before the kids were born. The reason is the farm is owned by the family of a friend from college. As the suburbs encroach on it, though, it gets smaller and smaller. There used to be a cider press where you could watch cider made and farm animals to visit. They do still have live chickens for sale. Because they’re widening the highway in front of the farm, there’s less land between the road and the stand and the area where the pallets piled with pumpkins have been in previous years is gone. The pumpkins were right in front of the stand, but there were enough for us to peruse, make our selections, and pose for the traditional photos. Usually it’s just the kids, but this year we had North take one of us, too. We also bought decorative gourds, apples, cider, salsa, and a baking mix for North.

We texted some of the pictures we took (of piles of pumpkins and gourds) to Noah and asked him to guess where we were. It’s a game we play sometimes. This wasn’t a hard one, though, as he’d been to this farm almost every October from birth until he left for college (and once after that during his pandemic online school year). It was nice to include him a little, as I’ve found in the six days since Xander died that I miss Noah more, and Matthew, too. Even though it’s natural for kids to grow up and leave and cats to grow old and die—and with the kids it’s a good thing—part of me stubbornly wants it to be the six of us together again as it was for so long.

We got back in the car and resumed listening to and critiquing an Apple Music Halloween playlist. There were standards like “Thriller,” “I Put a Spell on You” (Nina Simone version), and “Season of the Witch,” but North objected to Justin Bieber’s “Ghost” because they say it’s about ghosting someone, not ghosts, and no one thought Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood” belonged on a Halloween playlist because it’s not really about blood.

There’s a vegetarian Chinese restaurant we like near the farm stand and because there’s a bit of a gap between the time the stand closes and when we want to eat dinner, we’ve gotten into the habit of taking a walk in Meadowlark Botanical Gardens. As always, since we’re there in mid-October, there were a lot of kids taking Homecoming pictures. While North and Ranvita (whose foot was in a boot from an accident at play rehearsal) were resting in a pagoda and Beth and I were walking down separate paths (as I had taken longer to decide on my food order and she left first), Beth saw a young lesbian couple hanging out and taking pictures with their straight friends and she said it warmed her heart that in many places at least these days, queer kids “get to be regular kids.” It’s one of the good things about our kids’ generation.

We picked up the food and took it to another park where we ate at a picnic table. We were there because of the community gardens there that North wanted to show Ranvita, so after we ate our sweet potato and avocado sushi, spring rolls, miso soup, seaweed salad, noodles, and seitan-snow pea stir-fry, we wandered through the different plots, admiring the fall vegetables and flowers.

North said they wished they were a plant person because it would fit their vibe, but they really weren’t. I asked what they’d do after the apocalypse if they couldn’t grow food, and they said they’d cook the food someone else grew. Then we all chose our post-apocalyptic jobs, and North decided in addition to cooking, they’d watch children. “I’m very domestic in the apocalypse,” they observed. For my part, I thought I could teach and if it was a vampire apocalypse, I’d have some useful knowledge because I used to teach horror fiction and I know more than the average person about vampires. I was imagining myself in a Van Helsing/Rupert Giles type role. It didn’t occur to me until later that given that I write a lot about herbs, I could be an herbalist and that might be useful in the absence of vampires.

Our next stop was frozen yogurt. We’ve developed this whole pumpkin-gathering trip agenda over the years and while it does change (as when we had to start dining outside and when our favorite dessert place went out of business), it keeps growing and growing. “The problem with our family,” Beth started at one point, explaining to Ranvita how once we do something more than once everyone wants to keep doing it, but North interrupted, saying firmly, “There is no problem with our family.”

Maybe there is and maybe there isn’t, but it was good to hear them say that. And the familiarity of the routine was comforting on a day when sadness ran just under the surface of our pleasures.

All For The Love Of You

A Chronicle of Suburban Lesbian Family Life

Category Archives: Holidays

Oregon Adventures, Part 1: Planes, Cars, and Boats

Investigations and Celebrations

Here and There

Winter One Acts

All the Good Things

Before the Holiday

A Wild Ride: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 77

Where They Are, Part 2

Where They Are

October Outings