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Fall Break AF

Posted on October 29, 2024 by Steph

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Weekend 1

Friday

Beth and Noah and I were all in bed when North got home for fall break at eleven-thirty p.m. on Friday night. They were home earlier than we expected. They’d gotten a ride from someone they knew from their housing co-op and made surprisingly good time. I heard them come in and got up to greet them, when I discovered they had two of their fellow Obies with them. As I was only wearing a long-sleeved t-shirt and underwear I retreated to the bedroom while their friends used the bathroom, played with the kittens a bit, and left. North came into our room to give us hugs and shortly afterward they went to bed, too. They said the friends admired our copious Halloween decorations, which were only about half up at the time.

Saturday

Beth went kayaking Saturday morning, but the kids and I hung around the house all day, except for my daily walk. North and I watched an episode of Emily in Paris, and we talked a lot.

I learned North is now thinking of a double major in Theater and Psychology with the possible career goal of becoming an intimacy coordinator. They received an invitation to register for Acting 1 for the spring semester, based on the audition they sent for the fall, and they are going to audition to be in a Winter Term play. Their favorite classes are Sociology and Psychology and while they were struggling in their Spanish class earlier in the semester, they’ve brought their grade up to a B.

They are still going to Quaker meetings and volunteering at the kitten shelter where they have learned to give vaccinations to cats. They’re also active in a group that fundraises for humanitarian relief in Gaza. And of course, being in a housing and dining co-op takes up a fair amount of time.

North made a batch of pumpkin-cream cheese muffins, which was the first of several baking projects over the course of break. When the kitchen was free, Noah and I made spinach manicotti for dinner. Although Keep was a mostly but not quite vegetarian co-op when I lived there, apparently now it’s a mostly but not quite vegan co-op and North was hungry for eggs and cheese, so we planned a lot of meals with those ingredients—omelets, grilled cheese sandwiches, tacos, ravioli with alfredo sauce, and broccoli-cheddar soup. (North even turned down my offer to make breaded tofu sticks with homemade applesauce, which is one of their favorite meals, in favor of cheesier options.)

That night we watched A Ghost Story. North was sorry to hear we’d watched I Saw the TV Glow and Summoning Sylvia earlier this month, saying it was “mean” for us to watch two queer horror/horror-comedy films without them, but we’d drawn the nominated movies out of a hat (well, a bike helmet). “Blame the helmet,” I told them.

I liked the movie, but afterward North said, “I think I like movies where people talk.” (It is not a silent movie, but it is remarkably sparse on dialogue. A minor character actually gets the longest speech in the whole thing.)

Sunday

North met up with several of their friends who are still in high school for lunch. They brought four of the muffins with them and then forgot to give them to their friends, so there were more for us. That afternoon we headed out to Northern Virginia for our annual pumpkin gathering expedition.

We set off at three-thirty, listening to a Halloween playlist Noah found, all of us singing along with “Ghostbusters” as we got underway, and offering our judgments about which songs belonged or didn’t on the playlist as we went along. (Harry Belafonte’s “Banana Boat”? The Eurhythmics “Sweet Dreams?” Why?)

While we were in the car, North asked about an unfamiliar WiFi network they’d noticed in the house—Last-Name AP (the kids’ real and rare hyphenated last name I’ve decided not to include here). Someone joked it could be Last-Name AF. And then we started to discuss what was Last-Name AF. This whole outing, we decided. Why?

We have been going to the same farm stand since before the kids were born because it’s owned by the family of a friend of ours from college. Over the years we’ve added required stops to the itinerary—we’ve been eating dinner at the same restaurant since 2016 and we added two different parks during covid when we were all looking for outdoor activities. One is for strolling before dinner and the other is for eating dinner at the picnic tables.

The stand is on the original location of the farm, which relocated to cheaper land further away from the city as development encroached on it. It’s now hidden behind a tall highway sound barrier wall. You really have to know it’s there to find it. It’s also unstaffed sometimes and operating on the honor system, as of last year. This year there was another surprise—there were no jack-o-lantern-sized pumpkins! We picked out some tiny ornamental pumpkins, a pie pumpkin to use for soup, and apple cider; paid for them; and then turned our minds to the problem of finding bigger pumpkins.

North searched on their phone and found a nearby garden center that was selling pumpkins. We picked out four, took pictures at the bower of hay bales and cornstalks that I think was designed for that purpose, and picked up apple cider doughnuts and pumpkin butter.

Our next stop was Meadowlark Botanical Gardens, where we traditionally take a pre-dinner walk. It was decorated for Halloween, which was a new, fun development. We walked among the changing leaves, along the path of ghosts and ghouls (and my favorite, a skeleton in a bathtub of dirt); watched ducks, geese, and koi in the pond; and wondered why there weren’t any kids dressed up in their Homecoming outfits getting photographed, because we’ve seen that every other year. No weddings, either, though there was mother, father, and toddler girl getting professionally photographed.

We ordered dinner from Sunflower while in the park and went to pick it up, then headed to Nottoway Park to eat at the picnic tables in a grove of trees. Our timing had been thrown off by needing to go out of our way to find a new pumpkin venue so it was almost completely dark by the time we got there, but we were near a lighted playing field, so we could see our dumplings, seaweed salad, miso soup, sushi, vegetarian shrimp and noodles well enough to eat them.

It turned out to be too dark for our customary walk in the community garden plots. We tried, but we couldn’t see what flowers and vegetables were still growing in mid-October, which I always find interesting. The last stop was Toby’s for ice cream. Beth and I, independently of each other, got the same thing—one scoop of pumpkin and one of cinnamon. I recommend that combination if you find yourself in Vienna, Virginia any time soon.

North said later it was a “very satisfying” outing.

Monday through Thursday

Beth, Noah, and I went back to work on Monday. Over the course of the week, North completed an online food safety training so they can sign up for a head cook slot next semester, and they had a video call with the other food buyer at Keep so they could confer on the food order for next week, but they had a lot of free time, too.

On Monday night I asked North to consider their “television goals” and they said, “that sentence is Last-Name AF.” But there were a lot of options because we are all watching different shows in different configurations and a lot of them include North, so we haven’t watched those since they left for school. While North was home, we watched the last five episodes of season 3 of Emily in Paris (North and me), one episode near the beginning of season 6 of Gilmore Girls (North, Beth, and me), the last few episodes of season 2 of Good Omens (North and Noah), and the first four episodes of season 3 of Grownish (everybody).

In other activities, near the beginning of the week, North filled out their Ohio ballot and put it in the mail (before they returned to school, they were notified it had been received). They had Maddie over for dinner and to watch Clue on Wednesday. They baked a lot. After the muffins, they made a batch of almond butter chocolate chip cookies and a loaf of pumpkin-chocolate chip bread from the same recipe I’d used when I sent them their second care package of the year. Sadly, between poor timing on my part (it was still in the mail over the three-day Columbus Day weekend) and the vagaries of the college mail system, it took six days to reach them, and it molded. They said it had smelled good, and they wanted to try it, so they recreated it at home.

North and I went on a couple little outings. On Tuesday morning we went to the co-op to get yet another pumpkin because I’d forgotten to get an extra one to cover with metal spiders. North helped me pick out an appropriately warty one and then applied the spiders to it later in the day. (Throughout the week they helped add Halloween decorations on the porch and yard.) On the way home from the co-op, we stopped at Spring Mill Bread Company and got coffee and a lemon bar. On Wednesday we went to the Langley Park farmers’ market and got pupusas and supplemented the meal with a pink drink and apple croissant (for North) and a pumpkin chai latte (for me) from Starbucks. In a less recreational but important errand, Beth, North, and I all got flu and covid shots on Thursday morning.

Weekend 2

Friday

Friday evening, Beth, North, and I went out for pizza at Roscoe’s, which is North’s favorite place to get pizza in Takoma. We ate outside and got the marinated olives appetizer, which is also their favorite. Noah was still at work, so we got an additional pizza to bring home for him. From Roscoe’s, we went to the newish Red Hound (where Beth and I have eaten a couple times, but North never has) for soft-serve. North was intrigued because we’d told them they have interesting flavors there, just one flavor at a time. That night it was maple ice cream with optional apple cider syrup. We all got our ice cream with the syrup, and it was very good. It was a pleasant evening, so at both establishments we ate outside.

When Noah came home, we watched the first hour of Beetlejuice, but not until a long discussion about whether to have the subtitles on (North’s preference) or off (Noah’s). It was starting to get heated when Beth pulled out some of the conflict resolution tools we learned when we were in family therapy, and we ended up setting a laptop on the floor under the tv playing the same movie with the subtitles turned on so there was one screen each way. Once the movie got started, we discovered why “Banana Boat” was on that Halloween playlist we’d been playing the weekend before. It features prominently in the movie, which the kids had never seen, and Beth and I hadn’t seen since it came out in 1988. Still, the song is not spooky in itself, so we still disallow it.

Saturday

On North’s last day at home, we tried to cram as much autumnal fun as we could into one day. It started with a trip to Doc Waters Cidery to pick apples. We’ve never done this before, but it’s not much different than picking berries and we do that every year at Butler’s, which is just down the road from the cidery. (Butler’s has their own apple trees, but you’ve got to pay the rather exorbitant pumpkin festival admission to get to them when the festival is happening, so we didn’t do that.)

The main difference is that you reach up rather than down to get apples and for the high ones there’s a tool you can use to shake them loose and catch them. It looks like a lacrosse stick. The rows of trees were labelled with the variety, and we picked a few different kinds and then of course they got all mixed together and we didn’t know which ones were which. Some of the varieties were almost finished and there were a lot of apples on the ground with bees buzzing around them. We filled our peck bag to overflowing and then visited the snack bar where we got a cup of warm cider we passed around and more apple cider doughnuts (bringing our total apple cider doughnut consumption for North’s break to a dozen). We stopped at a shopping center where we got Noodles and Company and Mexican for lunch.

We made a pit stop at home to unpack the apples and our lunch leftovers and then we headed to the Takoma Park Halloween parade and Monster Bash. None of us was participating in the parade (though North will dress up first as a package of Lorna Doone cookies to trick or treat at department offices at school on Halloween, and later as Fluttershy from My Pretty Pony in a group costume at a party).

Historically, we have often been critical of the costume contest judging, but I found after watching the parade go by that the only costume that I was really invested in was the kid in the five-to-eight-year-old group whose face was painted white and whose head was enclosed in a carboard picture frame painted with the background of The Scream. I thought he should win something, probably Most Original. Noah liked the costume but thought the painting was too famous to be original. I said I thought it was original for a Halloween costume, and we agreed to disagree. If I had been a judge, the preschooler in the Pennywise mask accompanied by a toddler brother in a yellow rain slicker with a red balloon would have presented me with a dilemma. It was inarguably the scariest costume on anyone in the four-and-under group, but it made me feel kind of icky, seeing a kid that young dressed as an evil, psychotic clown. Beth opined that maybe Scariest shouldn’t even be a prize for that age group (they do have different categories for different ages some years, but not this year).

Anyway, Pennywise did win Scariest in her age category and The Scream won Most Original in his. There was a nicely executed excavator made of painted yellow cardboard in the youngest age group. The kid in it wore a hard hat. One of the prizes for the nine-to-twelve-year-old group went to a monster with multiple tongues and long claws and among the teen and adult winners was an alien rock star. The group prize went to a family dressed as Super Mario characters. If there had been a category for dogs (and given how often dogs are in the parade maybe there should be), I think it should have gone to the one in the panda costume. There was no one I thought really should have won a prize who didn’t… so good job, parade judges.

Back at home, we started to carve our jack-o-lanterns. We’d held off until the weekend before Halloween so they wouldn’t rot. Beth made the cat, I did the Kamala pumpkin, Noah carved the bat, and North’s is the scarecrow. While we carved, we listened to the official family Halloween playlist, to which I added The Addams Family theme this year, at North’s request.

Noah and I made a broccoli and cheddar soup for dinner. After dinner, I did the dishes and started roasting pumpkin seeds (so North could take some to school) while Noah finished his pumpkin and then we finished Beetlejuice, and watched It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. Beth and I went to bed, but the kids got in two episodes of Good Omens before calling our busy day a wrap.

Sunday

At 8:45 a.m., I watched from the porch as our car pulled out of the driveway and down the street. Beth was driving North back to Oberlin. They took most of the apples we picked to donate to the co-op with some reserved for Beth’s mom. When they got to Oberlin, they visited the college arboretum and had Chinese for dinner. Then Beth drove to Wheeling, where she’s staying for several days to visit her mom and brother who’s in town, too. I would have gone with them, but I thought someone should be here for the trick-or-treaters since the yard is all decorated and that seemed like a visual cue that we would be handing out candy. I was second guessing myself a little about staying home, though, as I watched the car disappear. It was a good break, and Last-Name AF, but it was hard to see it end.

Eight for October

Posted on October 14, 2024 by Steph

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I long wondered what I would blog about once North left for college. After all, it’s “a chronicle of suburban lesbian family life,” according to my home page. Noah’s here, of course, but between work and his lengthy bus-to-train-to-bus commute, he’s gone for twelve hours at a stretch on weekdays, and occasionally he works on the weekends, too, as he did two weekends ago, when he needed to work on an ad to convince people not to vote for Jill Stein. (Please don’t any of you do that, especially if you live in a swing state.)

But at the end of September, I thought I was doing reasonably well coming up with topics. I blogged twice that month, which is within the range of normal for me. But then I got stuck. It’s not that we haven’t been doing things, but nothing by itself seemed worthy of a blog post, so here’s a potpourri of our recent doings. (Some of them happened in September, but we won’t be picky about the blog post title.)

On the day before the fall equinox, the three of us went to the Bon Air Memorial Rose Garden in Arlington, to walk among the roses and zinnias and other late summer flowers. It was very pretty, Noah took a lot of pictures, and afterward we got ice cream at one of the places on the Post’s list of best ice cream in the DC metro area (though that was kind of an accident—it just happened to be nearby, and we didn’t confirm it was on the list until we got home). Noah and I both got the coconut chocolate crunch. I thought it was good, but not chocolaty enough, which was exactly what the Post said, as I learned after the fact.
There was a street festival the first Sunday in October and we went to see Anna Grace, a preschool/drama camp/Highwood Theater compatriot of North’s perform covers of Hazel Dickens, Iris DeMent, Kris Kristofferson, and Jerry Garcia. She has a lovely voice, and I thought she did particularly good job with the Iris DeMent song, “Working on a World,” even though it’s from the perspective of an older person. Then we got lunch from the food trucks. I got vegetable dumplings and a Thai vegetable-tofu curry and I split a large cup of pumpkin cheesecake ice cream with Noah.
We always have pizza for dinner on Fridays, alternating between takeout and homemade. The past two homemade nights I made it with pesto in a desperate effort to use up the abundant basil from our garden before it gets too cold for it to survive. The past two takeout nights Beth and I opted to go out rather than order in, once at Koma and once at Red Hound. (Noah gets home after our normal dinner time, so we brought pizza home for him both times.) This has been nice, like a built-in date night. At Red Hound, we had the whole back patio and its fairy lights to ourselves while we waited for our food.
The kids’ schools used to have a parents’ visitation day on Columbus Day/Indigenous People’s Day/Día de la Raza. It was that day because many parents have the federal holiday off and the kids don’t. Beth and I used to take advantage of the kid-free middle of the day to go out to lunch between visiting one school and then the other. This year Beth and I had no school to visit, but she suggested we go out to lunch anyway. We ended up changing it to dinner at the Olive Lounge because I had a mammogram late that morning and because I decided I’d rather have a night off cooking dinner rather than lunch out anyway.
In less fun news, around three weeks ago, I was taking my morning walk on a rainy day during a long stretch of rainy days, and I slipped and fell partway down a wooden staircase that leads down to a footbridge that spans Long Branch creek. I hurt the lower right quadrant of my back badly. It’s almost but not quite completely healed now, but at the beginning I had trouble bending over far enough to put on and take off my own socks, and I had to skip swimming for a week and then do a shortened version of my routine the second week. (The third week I was back to my full routine.) I also had to postpone the aforementioned mammogram until Monday because I didn’t think I could twist into the required positions. (Then to make matters worse, I tripped on another walk a few days after I hurt my back because I was looking at my phone while walking and I bloodied my left knee and shin. This was a minor injury, though, just a couple scrapes.)
The kittens will be seven months old on Thursday. They are growing and looking more like small cats and less like the tiny fuzzballs we used to be able to hold in the palms of our hands. They are plenty mischievous, though. Willow is an expert climber, finding a path to a shelf in Noah’s closet that’s near the ceiling; Walter is focusing his explorations on the great outdoors. He is always dashing out the front door and occasionally he slips past our notice and gets to stay out on the porch until he cries to be let back in. They both enjoy the laser pointer Noah recently remembered he owned. Here’s a video Noah took of Willow pursuing the red dot. Doesn’t she have an impressive vertical leap?
I’ve been keeping busy with book club and writing postcards to voters. We read Wind in the Willows in September and started Fathers and Children in October—we will continue that one through November. My last few batches of postcards went out to Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.
We got off to late start decorating for Halloween because North is often the one who gets that ball rolling, but I had Noah bring everything he could find up from the basement on Saturday and then I brought up the rest and put a few things out. I’m expecting some help from North with this project, though, because they are coming home for fall break and will be home late Friday night (or in the wee hours of Saturday morning). We can’t wait to see them.

Let Them Eat Cupcakes

Posted on September 27, 2024 by Steph

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Every half-birthday and birthday Noah was away at school I had cupcakes from a local bakery delivered to his dorm or apartment. The bakery was one we liked to patronize when we visited him, and it always went smoothly. If you’re ever in Ithaca, I recommend you drop by for bagels or pastry. It’s a lovely place. I liked being able to picture the store when I made the order. So of course, when he graduated, and we needed a cake for the family picnic that’s where I got it.

There is a bakery in Oberlin that’s been there since the nineteenth century and whose orange juice doughnuts, whole-wheat doughnuts, and buckeyes were favorite treats of mine when I was in college. You’d think it would be a shoe-in for our business, but it’s become a controversial place to shop after this happened. It’s complicated, because while there was no question that the students were initially in the wrong, the bakery’s reaction was over the top and cost the school tens of millions of dollars. And the fact that many students of color have reported being racially profiled there puts a different light on it as well. I have made a couple small purchases there since this all happened, for sentimental reasons, but I didn’t feel right making it our go-to source for cupcakes for the next four years. There’s a new bakery in town and campus catering delivers treats to students as well, so I decided to try something new.

I called the new bakery first, thinking it would be nice to support a local business over a big food service corporation. In my first call (a couple weeks before North’s half-birthday) I learned they don’t deliver, so I decided to think it over and call them back. I resolved it wasn’t a big deal for North to pick the cupcakes up themselves because the place is very centrally located and close to buildings where they have class. So, I called back and tried to order three cupcakes (I wanted the numerals 1, 8, and ½ in the frosting) only to learn the minimum order for cupcakes was a dozen. That seemed excessive so I got off the phone again.

At this point, I decided to go with food service. They had what looked like a convenient online order form and their cupcake minimum was four cupcakes, which was closer to what I wanted. I selected a delivery date, a cake flavor (red velvet), a frosting flavor (cream cheese), and described the decoration I wanted: 1, 8, ½, and an exclamation point since I needed to come up with something for the extra cupcake. So far, so good.

However, there was a warning on the website that said it will seem when you order that the order has not gone through but go ahead because the orders are being received. But then there was an email to use if you didn’t hear back in two to three business days. This last bit made me think the orders weren’t all going through, but I decided to see what happened.

When I’d filled out all the boxes and submitted the order, there was no confirmation message from the website, which was not a surprise. What was surprising was there had been no boxes for payment information. I supposed if it worked, I’d hear back, and they’d ask for it then, but I didn’t hear back. Two business days later I tried the email provided. I waited a couple more days. No response. I found another form on the website for “communication” and as that was exactly what I wanted, and wasn’t getting, I wrote the order out again and noted that I had not paid because there was no way to give my payment information. And then without waiting to see if this would work, I also tried texting a number that was also provided in the same place on the website. I got an answer almost immediately (probably from a bot) saying I’d hear back in a few minutes. Reader, can you guess if I heard back? I did not.

By this point, North’s half-birthday was several days away, and I remembered the bakery required a week’s notice for special orders, so it was too late to go that route. So, I called them and purchased a gift certificate for North to pick up at the store. In our weekly family call, I told North the bakery would have something for them on Monday and added, “It wasn’t what I wanted,” and told them I’d explain later.

“Well, I thought it would be cupcakes,” they said, sounding intrigued. They’ve had half-birthday cupcakes every September since they were eighteen months old, and they knew I sent them to Noah at school, so it wasn’t exactly intended to be a surprise.

On Monday morning I got a text from North, who was at the bakery where the cashier was saying they didn’t have anything for them. I instructed them to specify it was a gift certificate and that cleared it up. They purchased two apple cider cupcakes with dried apple in the frosting and sent me photographic proof that I had fulfilled my maternal duty. I was relieved that it had all worked out.

But it wasn’t over… Tuesday, the day after North’s half-birthday, they got a text that said, “Someone has gotten you a sweet treat” and instructed them to go to a dining hall to pick it up. They went and lo and behold, there were four red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting with the numerals 1, 8, and ½ in the frosting. Instead of the exclamation point I asked for, there was a big purple circle on the fourth cupcake. But given that I never paid for them, I can’t really complain.

It’s been three days since the second set of cupcakes arrived, but the whole situation has been so bizarre I wouldn’t be at all surprised to get a bill at some point. I don’t know if I’d be inclined to pay it if I do, though, since I had no way of knowing the order had gone through and I made other arrangements. Plus, they came a day late. I did ask North which cupcakes they liked better, just to help me decide which difficult establishment to start with next September. They said they liked the red velvet ones better. I suppose food service had the advantage in this contest because I could select a flavor that’s a favorite of North’s, while at the bakery they had to select from what was in stock that day. Meanwhile, Beth told me that on the Oberlin parent’s Facebook page, people have been complaining about Sweet Treat orders not going through and apparently, the only thing that works is to call, rather than text, the number it says to text.

When I reported to Beth that North preferred the food service cupcakes, she said, “Free is good.” It is indeed. And I’m pretty sure this was a half-birthday North will remember.

Three Weekends

Posted on September 15, 2024 by Steph

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Three weeks have gone by since we took North to Oberlin and then came home without them. It feels odd to be a household of three, none of whom attends a Montgomery County public school, needs to go to a Back to School Night anywhere, or is starting any new extracurricular activities. But September has not been completely unrecognizable. Each of its first three weekends we did something familiar in the form of a picnic, a music festival, or a pie contest. And we tried something new, too.

First Weekend: Labor Day Picnic

I had gotten used to the rhythm of North coming home from camp on Friday evenings and staying until Sunday morning, so I guess it wasn’t surprising that when on the Friday before Labor Day weekend they didn’t come home, it felt strange and hard.

The weekend itself was low-key. Beth went kayaking Saturday morning, and I went swimming. Noah mowed the lawn, he and I made zucchini fritters for dinner, and we all watched a movie. The day before we’d all conducted a round of movie nominations and vetoes, which netted us six movies to watch in September and October. Saturday night we watched King of Hearts, a movie which North had vetoed in a previous round, and I threw back into the pool, suspecting it might survive the process this time. I loved this French 1960s anti-war movie as a teen and hadn’t seen it since then. It doesn’t completely hold up, but it has its charms.

Also over the weekend Noah and I finally finished reading Maskerade, which we’d been reading since mid-July and started a new book, which despite its title seems to be more fantasy than romance. Sunday night we went to Koma for soft serve. The flavor names there are kind of fanciful. Beth and I got Brigadeiro, which the menu described as “sort of like a Brazilian Fudge.” Without this helpful note, I would have thought it was chocolate. Noah got caramelized coconut (and a salad because he hadn’t eaten much at dinner).

Labor Day was barely a holiday, as two out of three of us worked. Noah went into the office for a shortened day and Beth was at her computer most of the day as well. AT&T was on strike and strikes and political campaigns don’t take holidays. Noah’s been working on ads for Democratic political candidates, but also issue ads, on topics such as abortion and redistricting. A lot of them are airing in Ohio.

While they were thus engaged, I made a plum torte (your recipe, Suzanne) and assembled a picnic dinner of vegetarian hot dogs, devilled eggs, tomato slices, corn on the cob, and cole slaw to eat in the back yard. The torte was slightly burned on top, but independently of each other, Beth and Noah both declared it “pretty” and it was tasty, too.

Noah wasn’t initially sure he’d be home by dinner time. He has a long commute—two buses and a train—and generally gets home at seven-thirty or eight and eats a plate of whatever Beth and I have already eaten. But he got off early enough to eat dinner with us. I was glad about that because our three summer picnics (Memorial Day, Fourth of July, and Labor Day) are long-standing traditions and Beth and North had both been out of town this Fourth of July, and of course, I was missing North. It wasn’t like being all together, but it was still nice. The weather was pleasant, warm but not hot or humid, and it’s always relaxing to eat outside.

While we were eating Noah spotted a huge wasps’ nest high the branches of the silver maple in the back yard. We decided to leave it there, as it’s obviously been there a long time, and they haven’t bothered us yet. When I say we decided, I mean mostly me, as Beth and Noah initially assumed we’d be getting it professionally removed. But I offered to take over mowing the back yard for the rest of the mowing season (probably a month or so) since Noah is hesitant to do it now. It seems to me if we’re going to plant sunflowers and zinnias in the garden at least partly to attract pollinators to the cucumbers and tomatoes we shouldn’t object if they set up housekeeping near the garden.

Second Weekend: Takoma Folk Festival

On Saturday I went swimming, but Beth couldn’t go kayaking because of a small craft advisory so she did the grocery shopping a day early in hopes the warning would be lifted by Sunday, but it wasn’t. The silver lining was that we had more time for the Takoma Park folk festival that day.

We’ve been going to this music festival since Noah was a toddler, and we’ve been almost every year it’s been held since then, rain or shine. In fact, it was rainy the past two years (and cancelled for covid the two years before that) so we all appreciated that the weather was perfect—sunny, in the mid-seventies, and not a trace of humidity. We spent the whole afternoon there, arriving a little after noon and staying until it ended at six-thirty.

I enjoyed every act we picked—a mix of country, singer-songwriter, and rock– but later I wished we’d seen some music from another country, as I often like to do that. Most of the international music was on one of the three indoor stages, though, and the day was too beautiful to go inside. Here’s who we saw and what the program had to say about them.

Karen Collins and the Backroads Band: Classic country with vintage sounds and rockabilly flair
Amoreena: Blending baroque pop and piano folk with introspective lyrics
Acacia Sears: Poetic indie rock with metaphor-rich lyrics and unique melodies
Ammonite: Songs of queer joy and heartache, wrapped in a fusion of country, punk, folk, rock, blues, and roots music
Blank Page: Vibrant Americana rising stars sharing joyful original songs
iylAIMY: The most welcome jolt in folk, featuring rapid-fire lyricism, lush harmonies, and even beatboxing
Samiah: Enchanting and powerful female-fronted original modern rock songwriting

The two country acts had the greatest diversity of age. If I had to guess I’d say Karen Collins is in her seventies and the two youngsters that make up Blank Page are still in high school, though I learned from their Instagram that they have a busy performance schedule, with about a half dozen gigs a month. Overall, it was a fun day listening to music from young and old.

When we got home, we watched our second movie of the half dozen we’d picked— Whisper of the Heart. This was one of Noah’s picks. He wants to watch the whole oeuvre of Hayao Miyazaki and by now we’ve watched so many of his films it feels familiar and comforting to enter these bizarre but recognizable worlds.

Third Weekend: Long Branch Festival and Takoma Park Farmers’ Market Pie Contest

On Saturday, Beth went kayaking and I went swimming, which as you are by now gathering, are our normal weekend routines. But we did do something a little out of the ordinary. We’ve never been to the Long Branch festival before, and we decided to try it out.

There was one stage and when we arrived around five-twenty, the Cuban band Beth had most wanted to see was just finishing up. We listened to their last song and then walked around the playground where the festival was held, looking at vendors and food booths. Dinner options were less extensive than we anticipated— quesadillas and pizza were the only vegetarian choices. After mulling over our options, we decided to eat at El Golfo, which is right across the street. I got my usual—spinach enchiladas and Noah and I spilt an order of flan and a slice of tres leches cake. (I thought the almost an hour round trip of walking to the festival and back would prevent a blood sugar spike and it did.) We ate outside and while we were eating the band came back from a break, so we got to hear them after all.

When we got home, we watched movie number three—Las Niñas, so between the Cuban music, Mexican food, and Spanish film it ended up being quite the Hispanic evening.

The pie contest was the next day. Long-time readers probably remember that North entered this contest every year it was held from the age of seven or eight and they won twice—with a cantaloupe pie when they were ten and a mushroom pie when they were thirteen.. They also entered several apple pies (it was originally an apple pie contest), a lavender-mint pie, a corn custard pie with an Earl Grey-infused crust, a plum pie, and most recently a Dutch pear pie, all delicious.

Unlike the Labor Day picnic and the folk festival, this wasn’t just something we did with North, it was something we did because of North. It was their thing. In fact, if they gone to school at Saint Mary’s, which is a two-hour drive away, they may have even come home for it. (We talked about that when they were still deciding.) So… I wavered a little about whether I wanted to go, but it’s a fun event and you get to eat pie, so in the end I did. I went alone because Noah had plans (he goes to a board game event at a Panera in Rockville most Sunday afternoons) and Beth had to work because the strike at AT&T finally ended that day, after a month, and she had to write a statement.

I got there about a half hour after pie slices had gone on sale, swinging by the farmers’ market first for tomatoes and a raspberry-yogurt smoothie. The line was long, so it took me twenty minutes to get to the tent. I perused the list of winners at the entrance. I decided if there were any slices left of the winner for Kid’s Pie (raspberry) or Other Sweet Pie—this means non-apple, non-peach– honey-fig was the winner, I would get one of those. The raspberry pie had sold out. There was one slice of fig pie left and I wasn’t sure it was the winning fig pie as there are often a couple fig pies and I’d forgotten the number associated with the winner, but I bought it anyway. It was quite good—the crust was crispy and tasted of molasses. I picked up one of the slices of apple pie for Noah. It was very pretty, with intricate leaves in the crust.

I sent North a picture of the pie slices and gave them the lowdown on the winners in various categories. I figured they’d be interested in Most Unusual because that’s a category they’ve won in the past. It was called ABC Medley, which we both assumed meant it had ingredients that start with those letters. I did see a pie with cucumber in it and I thought that would certainly be unusual (more unusual than cherries for instance) so that could have been the ABC pie, but I don’t know what else was in it or if it was even the winner for sure.

Meanwhile, in Oberlin

We’ve been texting a lot with North, and we’ve had three all-family calls. They’ve been busy. Classes have been in session for two and a half weeks. They say Spanish is their most challenging class. They were elected one of the food buyers for their dining co-op, they’ve been to interest meetings for a couple different theater groups, they auditioned for a part in a play (which they didn’t get), they’re volunteering at a cat rescue, and they attended a Quaker meeting in town to see what it was like. They’ve been to the movies in town (seeing Reagan) and went to a party at which people pretended to be rushing a non-existent sorority (Kappa Epsilon Epsilon Rho, which spells KEEP, the name of their co-op).

We sent them their first care package. I made almond butter chocolate chip cookies, Beth bought Jolly Ranchers for North’s candy bowl, and then I filled up the box with things I found in the pantry I thought they’d like to have (a box of Annie’s mac-n-cheese, Pop Tarts, Honey Vanilla chamomile tea). Beth said the theme was “random things North likes.” I had no idea where the Pop Tarts had come from, but it turned out Noah bought them for himself, so I replaced them.

Things seem to be going well. We miss North, but we’re all settling into our grooves, running on separate tracks until they cross briefly when they come home for fall break in a little over a month.

Welcome Home, Obie

Posted on August 28, 2024 by Steph

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Friday evening to Sunday morning: Wheeling

We arrived in Wheeling around seven, after a six-hour drive and let ourselves into Beth’s mom’s house. YaYa arrived shortly after we did, bearing takeout pizza. We ate and then Beth, North, and I went for a stroll in Wheeling Park. There was a festival going on, with live music, food stalls, multiple bouncy castles, and a clown. The band was playing covers of the Romantics and Dire Straits (and during their break a recording of Elton John). “We’re the demographic,” I told Beth, and she agreed. It was a pleasant night, not too humid and with a lovely sunset. We walked on paths through tall trees and around the swimming pool and the pond.

The next day we went out for lunch with YaYa at the garden bistro in Oglebay Park (where we just spent a week at the reunion). It’s on a terrace with a nice view of the hills of the park. We shared a cheese plate, and everyone got soup or a salad. (Mine was a tomato-burrata stew.) From there we went shopping for decorative items for North’s room at the artisans’ center. When we’d surveyed their room at home looking for knickknacks to take, they felt dissatisfied and said there was nothing they wanted to bring, except for a glass pumpkin they were afraid to break, and so left at home.

And then on the drive to Wheeling, a metal frog sculpture at a market spoke to them. They texted its picture to their roommate and between them they decided its name was Vert, but rather than pronouncing it like the French word, North is going to pronounce it to rhyme with Bert. At the artisan center, to complement Vert, North picked out a red glass candy dish. I said if they kept it filled, they’d become known as the kid with candy on offer in their room and this would make them popular.

When got back to YaYa’s house we had a little surprise going-away party for North. Beth’s aunt Carole, Carole’s son Sean, and her granddaughter Holly came over and we had red velvet cake and ice cream, and Sean told us stories about his college days including one about his journey to college, which involved Carole seeing a cow that seemed to be dead but wasn’t after she dropped Sean off at to catch his bus to school. We managed to surprise North, and they seemed pleased. Later that afternoon, we went swimming in the condo pool and Beth’s aunt Jenny dropped by the pool deck to chat and had a gift for North (and one to take home to Noah, too). We had Chinese that night and then North and YaYa watched Unfrosted.

Sunday morning to Monday afternoon: Oberlin

We left Wheeling early the next morning and drove to Oberlin, arriving around 10:30, and moved North into their room. North is living in Keep Cottage, a student-run housing and dining co-op where I lived for three semesters (my sophomore year and the second half of my senior year). It houses about fifty-five students and feeds about seventy-five.

North has a third-floor corner room with sloping ceilings, windows on two sides and deep closets. It’s right next door to the room where I lived my last semester of college. Keep was the place I lived longest at Oberlin and the building is just seeped in memory for me. After I helped carry their things up to their room, I peeled off to explore. I found my sophomore year room with the door propped open and no one inside, so of course I stepped in for a moment. I visited the second-floor bathroom I cleaned twice a week for a year and stood outside the door of my sophomore year boyfriend’s room. Then I walked by other friends’ rooms and wandered through the lounge and the kitchen. (The next day I tried to go down into the basement, but the door was locked.) Keep has changed very little. It was like stepping back into 1986. Even the smell was familiar.

North’s roommate Sarah and her parents arrived soon after we did, and the kids seemed to hit it off and began to sort out the room arrangement. I think I may have scandalized Sarah just a little when I told her that when I lived in Keep my roommate had an illicit cat whose litterbox was in one of those roomy closets.

Beth and I left North to unpack while we went to visit Noah Hall, where I lived my first year and Beth lived her first two years at Oberlin. Surely by now you all know we met there on my first day of college, when she was sophomore dorm staff and checked me into the building, and that we named Noah after this dorm. Every time we’ve visited Oberlin in recent years, Beth has wanted to get inside Noah, but the doors are always locked. We thought it would be open for move-in and it was, so we got to poke around there.

It was fun but not quite as satisfying as walking around Keep because there weren’t as many rooms and common spaces we could get into, but we did find our rooms and stood outside the doors. We both lived on the second floor the year we met and there used to be three lounges there. The carpet that depicted hunting scenes in the north and south lounges has been replaced with something more generic. The center lounge is gone, converted into two bedrooms, but a door to one of these was open, and we could see they left the pretty wooden paneling on the walls.

I mentioned that my high school boyfriend with whom I’d come to Oberlin broke up with me in that now departed center lounge. (It happened during orientation. Because I had the luck to start dating my wife at the tender age of twenty, it ended up being the worst break up of my life.) Beth knew about this of course, but not exactly where it happened. “Well, good riddance,” she said, even though it was a cozy lounge.

I learned later that Noah is a substance-free dorm now. In the eighties… well, let’s just say it wasn’t.

We met up with North and Sarah at Keep and walked to Tank Hall. It’s the only co-op open during orientation and all OSCA members are eating there until the rest of them open. I ate in Tank as a dining-only member the year I lived in Noah, so this was a familiar space as well. I popped into the kitchen, where I first learned to cook in an industrial kitchen. Lunch—rice, breaded baked tofu, sauteed cabbage and carrots, homemade pickles, and granola—was served buffet style. There was nutritional yeast in the breading, which I don’t mind but Beth and North don’t care for, and it caused me to reflect that my recipe for breaded tofu also has nutritional yeast (that I just don’t put in, subbing extra wheat germ) and I wondered if it could be the same recipe. (It’s from the Zen Monastery Cookbook.) Nutritional yeast aside, I wondered if the fact that I learned a lot of what I know about cooking in OSCA and that as a result its hippie-style of cuisine made it into a lot of the food North ate as a child will make the food at Keep seem homey.

Most of the students were eating on the lawn, but Beth and I ate on the porch, to give North some space and a chance to socialize without their parents hovering. The spacious, wraparound porch took me back, too. Many nights after dinner at Tank my first year I used to sit there and have long talks with the young man who would be my boyfriend the next year.

North and Sarah went off with other OSCA members after lunch. Among other things, North changed their voter registration from Maryland to Ohio. Beth and I went to the campus bookstore to look for Oberlin pencils only to discover they were sold out. I was disappointed because I already have a lot of Oberlin swag (a hoodie, two t-shirts, and a couple stickers on my laptop) but of all the Ithaca merch I bought when Noah started college, I found the pencils and the mug most comforting, because I used them in my daily routine. I did get a mug, even though we have a great quantity of mugs at home. Beth knew better than to say anything about that.

Next, we took a sentimental journey walking to and photographing every dorm, co-op, and apartment building where either of us ever lived (not all pictured here—I moved around a lot). The selfie is in front of the house where I was living the summer of 1987, when we started dating. Beth is standing in front of the apartment building where she lived her junior and senior year, plus the year after she graduated.

We hadn’t taken pictures at Noah (the big brick dorm) the first time we went so we returned. We noticed someone had painted “Noah Bench” on a bench outside it in fat purple letters, so I texted a picture of it to Noah and wrote, “They named a bench after you.”

The day was hot, and we’d walked a lot so we went to the student union to rest until it was time to meet North in Finney Chapel for the welcoming ceremony. They weren’t calling it a convocation, but that’s what it was. Various administrators spoke, the speeches interspersed with musical performances. The acoustics are good in there, so it would seem like a waste not to have music.

There was a picnic dinner afterward—we had barbequed tofu, corn on the cob, corn and bean salad, potato salad, cole slaw, and fruit salad. We had dessert plans, but there were cupcakes, so Beth and North each got one and gave me a sliver of each. We drove to the Dairy Twist, which is just outside town and got the second ceremonial end-of-summer-break ice cream. North got a root beer float, which has been their frozen treat of the summer. Beth got a cherry-dipped chocolate cone, and I got a mint-chocolate flurry. This establishment was another place we used to go. Because it was the eighties, and a lot of my friends were humanities majors we used to call it the Dairy-Da. (Get it? Derrida.)

From there we returned to Finney for a concert of performances by conservatory students and faculty. We could only stay for half of it—a mix of classical, jazz, and compositions by conservatory students. The highlight was probably watching a student play the enormous organ. It was impressive how he twisted around to use both hands and both feet at once.

North had a house meeting at eight-thirty, so we slipped out of the concert, said goodbye until the next day and drove to the house of Beth’s retired colleague Jeff and his wife Karen. They live outside Cleveland and graciously hosted us for the night. Jeff even made homemade almond croissants for us in the morning.

We returned to Oberlin the next day and met North back at Finney. They had two morning sessions, one on adapting to college life, which I attended with them while Beth took a walk, and a second one with their PAL group. These peer advising groups seems to have taken the place of impact groups, which were more loosely organized, dorm-based, group therapy-type sessions we had when I was in college. (Beth was my impact group leader.) While they were there, Beth and I attended a session about the transition to college for parents. We didn’t learn much as this isn’t our first rodeo, but we did learn that starting next year Thanksgiving break will be one day longer than the four-day weekend it is now, which was welcome news as the short break has already posed challenges for our travel plans this fall.

When we were all finished, we met up and wandered through the student activities fair, but we didn’t linger because North had a few places they wanted to go before lunch. We browsed in the campus bookstore where we bought them a sweatshirt, Ben Franklin where we got them a water bottle sticker and a candle, and Gibson’s Bakery where we bought some treats.

And then it was time to say goodbye. Parents were encouraged to be off campus by two. There was an event with cookies called Sweet Goodbyes to send parents off, but North had a crew shift at Tank right after lunch (learning how to clean a co-op kitchen) that conflicted with that, so we were leaving early. We dropped them off at Tank for lunch, stood on the lawn outside the car, and said our teary goodbyes.

Monday Afternoon to Wednesday: Oberlin, Takoma, and the Road in Between

We had a long drive ahead of us, so we just picked up some food at Sheetz for an a la carte lunch to eat in the car, but by dinnertime we had made pretty good time, so we stopped at a diner in western Maryland. It turned out that a grilled cheese sandwich (American on white bread) with fries was exactly the comfort food I needed after leaving my youngest child at college. We followed it up with ice cream, just to be safe.

North has been keeping busy. Monday after their crew shift, they had another PAL meeting, and they played cards and attended a tea party with some people in Keep. Tuesday, they met with their academic advisor, went to a meeting on campus safety, and there was a picnic dinner for new OSCA members. Today was a day of service and they participated in a beach cleanup at Lake Erie (where they met another kid named North!) and toured some museums in Cleveland. Classes start tomorrow. They have sociology, psychology, and a class about college life.

Back at home, we miss them, of course. I defrosted two quarts of soup they made earlier this month (lentil and black bean), and we had it for dinner Tuesday and Wednesday, which I found consoling. I washed their sheets on Tuesday and when I realized I couldn’t just toss the fitted sheet on the bed for them to put on the mattress themselves because they weren’t here to do it, it hit me hard. But despite these moments, we are glad for them. They came a long way to get where they are.

All day Sunday and Monday almost everyone who gave a speech said something along the lines of, “Welcome to Oberlin,” “Welcome Obies,” “Welcome home, Obies,” or assured any nervous first-year students in the audience “You belong here,” and each time both Beth and I felt a little jolt of emotion. It certainly feels like coming home to us and we trust that with time, it will be home and a place of belonging for North too.

This is what Beth wrote on Facebook:

Forty years ago I walked through the door of the Oberlin dorm on the left and into my future. Thirty-nine years ago Steph walked through the same door. I was living there a second year and checked her in.

Yesterday our youngest child walked through the door of the Oberlin dorm on the right. I know that their journey will be unique to them, but I hope they find what I found there: a bunch of brilliant, passionate oddballs who became beloved friends. And if they also find the love of their life, well, that would be OK too.

Welcome home, Obie. You’ve got this. You belong here.

Between Camp and College

Posted on August 24, 2024 by Steph

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North had eleven days at home between camp and college. It took them three days to do all their laundry from camp and I took advantage of having another person home to give them some more chores, like cleaning the bathroom, vacuuming, weeding and cooking dinner. And of course, there was list-making and packing, tending to pre-college administrative tasks, and chatting with their recently assigned roommate.

But there was plenty of time for other pursuits.

Caffeinated Outings

North and I went out for coffee or other beverages four out of the first five days they were home. We didn’t plan it that way, but on the first Monday they were home I needed to get yard waste bags from the hardware store, and I invited them to come with me and stop at Takoma Beverage Company and they did. We got coffee and split a chocolate-cherry scone. Then two days later I was going to the Langley Park farmers’ market in search of peaches, and I invited them to come with me and stop at Starbucks and they did.

The peaches we found at the market were hard and greenish. I was skeptical they’d ripen but we’d walked a mile or so to get them, so I bought them and hoped for the best. (Two days in a paper bag with a chunk of apple did the trick.) We got pupusas, too, and these were good as always. We ate them at a table in front of Starbucks, where we got refreshers and a cake pop. I arranged the peaches, pupusas, Paradise and Pink drinks, and the pop for a photo and posted it to Facebook with the caption that “Today’s outing was brought to you by the letter P.”

The next day, after North’s psychiatrist appointment, we stopped at Lost Sock for coffee and alfajor cookies (dulce de leche and coconut). While we were there I said since we’d been to three out of four of our habitual spots for mother-child coffee runs, we should be completists and go to Koma sometime before they left. They laughed and agreed. And then on Friday morning, when Valerie cancelled on them at the last minute, they texted me and asked if I could meet them there, so I did, and we got tea and a strawberry Danish.

Outings with Friends

Having been gone most of the summer, North had a lot of friends they wanted to see. The first Monday evening they were home they went to Ranvita’s birthday party, which was held at a Chinese restaurant. The next day a big group of friends went to the Montgomery County Fair and then swimming. They were gone most of the day. On Friday evening they went to a drive-in movie with El and saw a double feature (the newest Deadpool and Alien movies). They said neither movie was one they would have chosen to watch without the drive-in part of the experience, but they had fun. The following Monday, they spent most of the day at Miles and Maddie’s house. The twins brought North home as I was cooking dinner and came inside to see the kittens and exclaim about how big they’ve gotten. (The kittens have each tripled in size since we got them three months ago.)

Medical Appointments

North had several routine visits with healthcare providers, but the most notable one was with the neurologist who manages their migraine care. What was notable was that it was the first time in the almost two years they’ve been seeing him that he didn’t need to brainstorm about new medications or treatments because the new preventative they’ve been on since mid-May is working remarkably well. It’s a once-monthly injection they give themselves and the first couple weeks it didn’t seem to be helping much. Luckily, the doctor warned us it might take up to three months to show results. In June they had thirteen migraines (down from an average of twenty or more) and in July it was ten. When we had the meeting, almost halfway through August, North had only had four. (They’re up to eight now for the month.)

And because they have effective rescue medicine that can be used twice a week, plus another semi-effective one that can be used five times a month, this means they hardly ever need to go to bed with a headache or power through one anymore. The doctor also mentioned that for people for whom this medication works, it often keeps getting more effective with time. I can’t tell you how happy we all are about this turn of events. Beth commented how easy it’s been to get used to being able to make evening plans without considering how many meds North has already used this week. We can just assume now either they won’t get a headache or if they do, there will be enough meds. It is downright liberating.

Montgomery County Fair

We took advantage of this freedom to go to the Montgomery County Fair late Saturday afternoon instead of earlier in the day, which is a more migraine-friendly time for North. We all, but especially Beth, like to ride the Ferris wheel after dark, but between the kids’ bedtimes when they were younger and not wanting to risk a late afternoon migraine, many years we couldn’t stay that late. There was another potential problem, though. Rain was forecast on and off all day. It had not rained yet when we left, but the sky was threatening.

We arrived a little before five and walked around the rides to see how many tickets we’d need to ride our favorites. Then we loaded up a card with the requisite number plus a little extra and the kids and I got in line for the swings, which then closed with no explanation. As we walked to other rides and they closed one by one, we gathered it was because it was about to rain. And rain it did, a real gully washer.

I was afraid we’d just wasted a lot of money on non-refundable ride tickets on the last night of the fair, but determined to make the best of it, we headed for the animal barns. This was something that North’s friends hadn’t done when they went earlier in the week, and they do like to see the animals. Even with an umbrella, I got kind of wet on the way there and to top it off I slipped and fell into a puddle at the entrance to the rabbit barn and got the whole back of my pants soaking wet.

Everyone else at the fair had the same idea about what to do in the rain so the animal barns were crowded, but we there was enough room to walk around and see the goats and sheep and rabbits and poultry and oxen, plus a llama and an alpaca. North’s favorite is the rabbit barn, so we stayed there the longest. There were a bunch of white rabbits there with black rings around their eyes. They looked as if they were wearing eyeliner. According to the sign, this kind of rabbit has been bred since the nineteenth century, starting in France. North and I got to pet one. It was very soft.

The rain was letting up, so we got some food while we waited for the rides to dry out. North said “the interesting food” is at the end of the midway, which their friends had not visited. Between us we got pupusas, a spinach crepe, and cheese and grapes from the dairy shed. Dessert round one consisted root beer floats, ice cream, and a red velvet funnel cake, which we threw out after eating only half of it because no one liked it enough to make it their primary dessert.

While we were eating, I’d seen a woman walking on stilts and blowing bubbles and that reminded me of the Halloween parade because there is always someone on stilts there and we talked about how North might enter this year because they will be home for fall break and how I may someday volunteer to serve as a judge.

There was an announcement that the rides were open, so the kids and I rode the swings, and then North did the Genesis, a ride with a long row of seats that goes up and down and side to side. All the lines were long because it was a Saturday night and the last night of the fair and everyone had to take a break at the same time because of the rain. Beth got in line for the Ferris wheel while Noah and I were watching North ride the Genesis. I was also watching the changing colors of the lights on the Ferris wheel, which were lovely in the gathering darkness.

When we joined Beth in line, I told her that being at the carnival rides put the lines from John Prine’s “When I Get to Heaven” in my head: “I’m gonna kiss that pretty girl on the tilt-a-whirl” and she kissed me before I could finish the lyric. The fair sometimes reminds us of going to the Lorain County Fair in Ohio when we were in college and puts us in a nostalgic mood. When we got up in the air, we could see the whole fair lit up, which is always fun.

My last ride, with both kids, was the Mousetrap, a very strange little ride. It’s a tiny roller coaster inside a building that’s almost completely dark. The painting on the outside depicts mice pursued by cats, so I guess you are supposed to be a mouse darting this way and that in the dark.

By this point, we’d finished all our must-dos, but we had some tickets left, so North rode the Sizzler, one of those innocent-looking little carnival rides with clusters of cars that spin in one direction while the whole ride is going in another direction. I got quite sick on one of those as a teenager (like throwing up sick), so I contented myself with watching and singing along with Beth to the music playing—“Summer Nights” from Grease. Beth said I could call the blog post “Summer Loving,” but I explained it was about more than the fair. Noah went off in search of fried Oreos for dessert round two (North got a pretzel).

As we left the fair, we saw a big ad for Corktoberfest on the side of a trailer. We see it every year and every year North says they read it as Cocktoberfest, which would probably be another kind of event altogether. Then everyone said I should call this blog post Cocktoberfest, even though we did not attend the wine festival, which as you may have guessed does not even happen until October. We did see roosters, someone pointed out, quite innocently. What can I say? We were tired and happy and a little punchy from our night at the fair, which could have been a disaster, but wasn’t.

Creek Walk

The next morning the kids and I went wading in the creek. We do this almost every summer, generally near the end. The most common route is to start with a trip to Starbucks and then enter the creek near the Jackson Avenue bridge and that’s what we did. We walked through the creek to the Carroll Avenue bridge, opting not to continue all the way to the playground, because we all had afternoon plans and time was running short.

We found the spine of an animal in the water and couldn’t determine was it was—too big for a squirrel or rabbit, too small for a deer (unless it was partial), maybe a fox? It will remain a mystery.

It was pleasant to walk in the cool water with sunlight filtering through green leaves all around us, even if the morning was not that hot, and even if the walk was on the short side. No one fell and got hurt. No one was stung by bees. This activity is not without peril, but we keep doing it anyway.

Cobbler

That afternoon North and I made a peach-blackberry cobbler with the blackberries we picked and froze last month. They made the filling, I made the dough, and then they rolled it out to cover the fruit. There are four fruit-based desserts I make every summer. It starts with strawberry shortcake on Memorial Day, progressing through sour cherry sauce for ice cream on the Fourth of July, blueberry kuchen whenever we pick blueberries, and then this one, usually toward the end of the summer. Making it on the same day we took a creek walk really did make it seem like summer was truly almost over. And it was Beth’s last night cooking before North left, so she made one of her classic summer dinners—barbequed tofu, corn on the cob, and fried okra.

DNC

The following night we watched the first night of the DNC for two reasons. The president of Beth’s union was speaking briefly and there was going to be a 90-second video Noah helped edit at work. The CWA president spoke with a group of other union officials a little after eight and Beth texted him to say he did a good job. By this point, we’d been waiting for more than an hour and a half for the ad, with everyone running out the room every now and then for snacks and bathroom breaks. The video was originally supposed to be the first thing played in the program, but the order of events got switched around and Noah didn’t know when it was going to play, just that it wasn’t first anymore.

By nine, North was thinking of bailing and taking a shower so I ducked into the bathroom to start get ready for bed so I wouldn’t need to wait a half hour to get in there if the ad came on soon. Sure enough, I was washing my face when I heard shouting from the living room and I ran in, face sudsy, washcloth in hand, to watch this. Turns out it was the walk-in video for Kamala’s cameo.

Beth, North, and I were all in bed by ten, but Noah stayed up to watch more of the convention and the next morning he told us there was another ad about abortion he’d worked on that he didn’t realize was going to play. Here it is.

Television and Ice Cream (and More Coffee)

And then the eleven days came to an end. On Tuesday we finished the second season of Grownish as a family. The next day, North and Noah watched a couple episodes of Good Omens because he had the day off, and North and I got to the midpoint of the third season of Emily in Paris, which was our goal since finishing the season wasn’t in the cards.

On Wednesday, two nights before we left for Oberlin, I made breaded tofu sticks because they are a family favorite. North requested applesauce to go with them, so I made blackberry-applesauce with our stash of frozen berries from the berry farm and served it with carrot sticks and slices of garden cucumber.

Thursday morning North wanted to go to Starbucks yet again because it was the first day the fall menu items were available, and they wanted a pumpkin-cream cheese muffin and some kind of apple-flavored coffee. I prefer to wait until it’s autumn, or at least September, for these kinds of treats, so I got a plain latte and a croissant.

Speaking of treats, we have a long-standing tradition of ice cream (or frozen yogurt) on the last night of summer break. About a week before we left, North and discussed the question of whether it should be the night before we began the journey or the night before we parted ways in Oberlin. The first would include Noah; the second was closer to the first day of school. Finally, I said, “Why not both?” and that’s what we decided to do. (Before that even happened, though, we went to Sweet Frog the first Thursday North was home because they were having an as-much-yogurt-as-you-can-fit-in-a-cup sale for six dollars, but it turned out you needed to give the cashier a code, which we neglected to do. Live and learn.)

The following Thursday, North’s last night at home, we met up with Noah (who came straight from work) at Mount Dessert Island Ice Cream in Mount Pleasant. Remember how we were working our way through Post’s list of best places to get ice cream in the D.C. metro area earlier this summer? Well, we hadn’t been to one since the end of June, but North suggested we do one last one. We’d been to the top three, so we picked this one because it was number four.

We found a parking space right nearby, which was a stroke of luck in that neighborhood. (A side note: Beth and I lived in a group house in Mount Pleasant for three months during the summer of 1991 when we first arrived in D.C.) The store is very small, located on the first floor of a rowhouse, with benches out front. Beth got white Russian, North got a float with blueberry soda, Noah got something with chocolate chips and caramel, and I got fig. Have you ever had fig ice cream? It was excellent, tasting of the fruit and brown sugar all the way through. It wasn’t just vanilla with fig chunks. I highly recommend it if you’re local.

The next afternoon after a morning of work and packing and whatnot, Beth, North, and I hit the road for Oberlin, via Wheeling. More about that trip in the next installment…

Reunited

Posted on August 13, 2024 by Steph

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First Saturday

En route to her family reunion, Beth and I had a picnic lunch and then a short walk at the Sideling Hill Road Cut, or as we’ve called it since the kid were small, “the stripey rocks.” There was a mountain view from our picnic table, and when we sat down to eat, Beth sighed and said, “I like mountains.” She likes them like I like the beach.

We pulled into Beth’s mom’s condo driveway around five on Saturday and from there proceeded to the cabin in Oglebay park where the reunion was taking place. Cabin isn’t quite the right word, as it was more like a small hotel, with two stories, eight bedrooms, and ample common space, both upstairs and downstairs. The upstairs was quite airy with a soaring ceiling in the main area. We knew what to expect because we stayed in the same cabin at the last reunion. In addition to the people staying in the cabin, there were people staying at the park lodge, and people staying with in-town relatives. It was a big and ever-shifting crowd.

This was the fourth reunion Beth’s mom’s family has had since 2002, when we brought our toddler son to one in a smaller cabin. There was a second one in 2012 and then a third one in 2016. It’s interesting to see how the family has gone through cycles since the first one. Noah was the youngest person in attendance at the first one and there were a bunch of kids older than him. Then at the middle two, our kids were almost the only kids (except a seventeen-year-old boy at the second one, which barely seemed to count to us at the time as our kids were so much younger, and a couple babies at the third one). But at this reunion there were about a half dozen kids who have been born since 2016 and three pregnant women, so the family is clearly in a growth phase, most of which is occurring in Beth’s aunt Carole’s branch.

The attendees were mainly descendants of Beth’s maternal grandparents—Beth’s mom, her three aunts (Carole, Susan, and Jenny) and their kids, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. It was startling to realize that of the four generations present, Beth and I are in the second oldest generation, the one in which many people are grandparents.

When we arrived, a couple people were constructing an easel to display the family tree that Jenny made and there was also a calendar of events and a list of who would be attending dinner each of the first several nights. (The next day Carole’s granddaughter Holly set up a posterboard display of photos from previous reunions.) That night we had pizza and talked to many, many people, some of whose names I learned (or re-learned) and some I never learned. A lot of people asked after Noah and North and we reported on their jobs and North’s college plans.

Many of the people at the reunion were Irish. Carole and husband raised their kids partly in Ireland and most of her kids, grandkids, and great grandkids still live there. The Irish parents were speaking to their kids in English and Irish and Marjorie (who’s Chilean and married to Carole’s grandson Eanna) spoke to her son Santino in English and Spanish.

After dinner, Beth and I took a short walk through the park because I hadn’t walked much during the day and then we had dessert. I had a slice of the blackberry pie we’d bought at a farm market on the drive—the group made short work of it—and Beth had ice cream.

We retreated to our downstairs bedroom a little after nine-thirty. We are early-to-bed people, and we were tired from staying up past our bedtime all week to watch the Olympics and from the drive. I slept all the way through the night without waking, which is quite unusual for me, as I’m a light sleeper. The room was dark and quiet, even with so many people upstairs.

First Sunday

In the morning people went their separate ways. Carole’s grandson Michael went for a run as he did most mornings, Beth and I each took walks, and many people headed to the pool at various times. There were some grocery runs and an expedition to get corn and tomatoes from a farm. I worked on my last blog post and this one, too. After her walk, Beth showed me photos of the morning mist and some cool spider webs she’d seen. She was animated and very happy to be in Oglebay.

My glucose monitor expired on Sunday morning and I’d forgotten to bring a new one. (I realized this about an hour into the drive.) It ended up taking several days to get an early refill approved and what with all the treats in the house, my self-control was not always what it should have been, but you know, vacation. To complicate matters, my Fitbit broke a few weeks ago, while we were at the beach, so while I was still taking a walk every day and trying to remember to get up and move every hour, I did often forget.

In the afternoon, I worked a little. I hardly ever work on vacation, but I have a big set of medical abstracts about probiotics and prebiotics to rewrite into plain English. The project is due in a few weeks, and I wanted to chip away at it. (I ended up working four days, never more than an hour.) Meanwhile, Beth’s aunt Jenny set up a station with white baseball caps and fabric pens for people to use to decorate them. People were doing this throughout the day and evening.

We celebrated Carole’s eighty-seventh birthday that night. It was the biggest gathering of the reunion, with perhaps fifty people. There was Italian takeout and birthday cake and Carol’s grandsons Tristan and Eanna played “Happy Birthday” and then “We Are Family,” on the piano while people sang. This was an appropriate choice with the lyrics “I have all my sisters and me” because Carole’s three sisters were all there. Sean gave a sweet speech he often gives at his mother’s birthday celebrations about how though the family moved around a lot during his childhood (to places as diverse as New York, Montana, and Ireland) that she always made wherever they lived feel like home because “home is where the love is.”

Afterward Carole exclaimed “I couldn’t be luckier” to have so many people she loved gathered in one place.

Sean then gave a half-hour presentation on family genealogy. He started with photos of the four sisters in high school in the 1950s and 60s and then dove into the past—nineteenth-century German immigrants who opened a store in Wheeling, seventeenth-century New England Puritans, and soldiers who fought in wars from the Norman Invasion, through American Revolution and Civil War (on both sides of the latter). The family can trace its ancestry directly to Edward the III and is distantly related to Audrey Hepburn, Charles Darwin, James Taylor, Jane Austen, and Meghan Markle. Sean then distributed bound copies of his research to all four sisters and one of their cousins, who has a particular interest in genealogy.

Monday

I didn’t sleep all the way through the night again, but I did sleep until 7:45, which is quite late for me. Beth did me one better and slept until 8:15. We learned soon after waking that Jenny had tested positive for covid. That was sad because she’d have to stay at home for the rest of the reunion (she lives in town) and she really likes organizing activities. She’d had a tie-dye event planned for the kids. (She sent the materials later in the week and it went on without her.)

That morning Beth and I were both struggling with balky internet (she to work, me also to work and to edit and post my last blog post to Facebook). While we were doing this there was a group yoga session on the upper deck—I was on the lower deck and could hear mysterious thumps as people moved the furniture around—and a bunch of people left for the pool.

Beth and I finished what we needed to do and went for a hike in the woods. The trail was sometimes gravel and sometimes dirt and went along a creek. We had to ford the creek a couple times—no problem as it was low—and cross little bridges or step from tree stump to tree stump that had been set into a path in a marshy area. We saw a couple small waterfalls plus the innards and one leg of a dead deer, so picked apart by vultures (perched nearby) that it took me a few seconds to realize it was a deer. That’s part of nature, too, I guess.

After lunch Beth and I went to the pool, encountering three different groups of people from our party on their way back to the cabin on the path between the cabins and the pool. Beth loves the pool at Oglebay. It’s a large rectangular pool with pretty stone building behind it. It was built by the CCC in that architectural style so common in American municipal and state parks. We talked about what an act of optimism that was in the Depression, imagining people would have the space for leisure in their lives. It’s a real gift from the past.

Beth’s mom worked at the pool snack bar as a teenager, so there’s family history there, too. We soaked in the pool for a while and I tried to swim laps, which involved dodging people left and right because there’s no lap lane. I did about a dozen laps the short way across the pool. It was nice to stretch my muscles and feel the sun on my back, but I gave up it up as too hazardous. Then we lay on towels in the sun to dry off and I read a little.

When we came back, Ailble, Michael’s middle daughter, who’s five, gave Beth a long, complicated update about the Grinch, who had apparently been skulking about the cabin and trying to steal things. The upshot was that she and some of the other kids had put a spell on him, which resulted in him returning a hat he had stolen from her. As she was talking, she saw a doe, got excited and confessed to us that “I have a crush on the deer.” She claimed to have kissed one and then she approached the passing deer, edging closer and closer. Eventually the deer loped away. Deer are everywhere in the park and very tame. Probably too tame for their own good, as the park last fall organized a bow-and-arrow hunt to cull their numbers.

Before she’d finished everything she wanted to say, Ailble had to leave because she was in a group of people who were going paddle-boating. Beth and I helped her mom and Carole’s late husband’s sister Pat shuck corn for that night’s cookout on the upper deck.

There was a huge spread for the barbeque—burgers, salmon, hot dogs, veggie hot dogs, and haloumi—plus many sides. Michael manned the grill and people ate both inside and out on the deck. After dinner there was a sing-along and dance performance. Michael’s wife Orla and their two oldest daughters Aishling and Ailble all took turns demonstrating step dancing, while their youngest daughter Eadadoin and another toddler girl (Fia, Tristan’s daughter) joined in, both clearly understanding this activity involved a lot of kicking.

The singing kicked off with “Country Roads,” because so many people had traveled such a long distance back to their ancestral home of West Virginia. Fia had a look of comic surprise on her face when everyone around her burst into song, but she quickly got used to it.

Over the course of the evening Sean and his sons Eanna and Tristan played the piano, clarinet, guitar, and a small Chilean stringed instrument to accompany the singing, and Carole’s grandchildren Kawika and Holly both sang solos. The singing went on for hours. The songs were mostly in English, but there was an Edith Piaf song in French and another in Irish. One of my favorite moments happened right after we finished “Sweet Caroline” because Fia kept on singing the “Oh oh oh” part. When it was my turn to make a request, I suggested Joni Mitchell’s “Chelsea Morning,” but the musicians asked for another choice, so I chose “Big Yellow Taxi,” which is more sing-along-friendly. I decided to go to bed once we’d all sung “Hallelujah,” because it seemed like a good closer, at least for my part in the event.

Tuesday

The next morning, we found out another member of our party had covid. This time it was Gina, who’s the sister of Aine, Sean’s ex-wife. Gina had traveled from Ireland and couldn’t go home, so a couple people who were staying at the cabin decamped for Carole’s house so bedrooms could be re-arranged to allow Gina her own room where she would isolate. I did wonder at this point if a sing-along in a group of covid-exposed people had been the best idea, even in a spacious, high-ceilinged room, but what was done was done. From then on, I started spending a lot of time outside or in our room. I didn’t avoid other people completely—after all, seeing people is the point of a reunion—but I did try to avoid large groups inside and ate most of my meals outside.

In the morning, while people were leaving for the pool, Beth and I went to her mom’s house for the internet, and during the hour and a half we were there, her mom popped over to Carole’s house (two doors down) and Susan, Susan’s son Scott, and Carole’s daughter Meg all came by. It was like a mini reunion there.

In the afternoon, Beth went back to the pool, and I took a walk around the pond and the gardens behind the nature center and saw people paddle-boating, a lot of ducks, a pollinator garden, and metal sculptures of bugs and animals.

Dinner that night was an Indian feast, cooked by Sean. It’s his signature meal—several curries (most vegetarian), dal, naan, and apricot chutney, delicious as always. He’d been in the kitchen for several hours making it. A large group had gone mini golfing and didn’t get back until 7:40, so we ate on the late side. While we were eating, Ailble informed us she’d been nuzzled by a deer, and she thought she might be the first person ever in the whole world to have this experience and she also thought there should be a celebration to mark this event. Fortunately, there was birthday cake for her grandmother Aine after dinner and after everyone had sung “Happy Birthday” and she’d blown out the candles two cupcakes were presented to Ailble with their own candles to blow out, so I guess that was her celebration.

Beth and I went for an after-dinner walk. We left around nine and there were still streaks of pink in the sky. Wheeling is west of Takoma Park and the sun sets later there. A cold front had come through, though without the expected rain, and it was nice weather for walking.

Wednesday

There were no new covid cases.

This was the designated day for excursions to Pittsburgh and its environs. There was a group that went to a children’s museum in the city, a group that went to Kennywood amusement park, and a group that went to see an evening Pirates game. I think Holly was the only one to go on two of the excursions (the park and the game). Orla stayed behind and had her first child-free day in eight years (!). She spent it walking, swimming, and reading and she said it was lovely. Beth and I went to Kennywood.

This wasn’t the main amusement park of Beth’s youth (that would be Cedar Point) and we never took the kids there, opting for Idlewild when they were small and we were in Wheeling, so I’d never been. It’s a medium-sized park, but when we got there, we realized it lacks some of the attractions Beth likes best—like a Ferris wheel, a mine ride, or an internal waterpark. (There’s one outside the park, but it’s a separate ticket.) We had lunch and rode the carousel together, and then she started waiting for me outside rides. I rode two small wooden coasters (the Jack Rabbit and the Racer), both of which dated back to the 1920s. The Jack Rabbit was scarier than I thought it would be, given the size, but that might be because I was alone in a seat for two without a divider and I felt like I was sliding around in the seat. The Racer has dividers. I was pleased to see so many small wooden coasters—there was at least one more I didn’t ride—because wooden coasters are my favorite and as I get older, I’m not as keen to ride the big ones. I always have to psych myself up to ride the even smallest ones at Cedar Point and Hershey Park, which are about twice the size of these.

Speaking of Hershey Park I was wearing a t-shirt I got years ago at Hershey Park that says, “I Survived the Sooper Dooper Loooper” and for the first time ever a stranger commented on it, saying, “I survived the sooper dooper looper, too!” Later while we were having ice cream, I saw a small boy at the counter wearing a shirt with the same slogan. When I bought it, my kids insisted that in adult sizes it’s ironic, but it is not for me. It identifies me as someone who likes roller coasters, but only smallish, usually older, ones. That’s my sweet spot.

I rode the swings, taking my shoes off so I could feel the wind on my bare feet, and I was sizing up the flume ride, trying to decide if it was small enough for me when we finally met up with the group that had come in the other car—Meg, her daughter Holly, Sean’s daughter Rebecca, and Aisling. They recommended the raft ride as something that might be tame enough for Beth and we headed that way. It was a good ride for her. You get into a six-person boat, and it floats down a river with some gentle rapids. It wasn’t too scary, and we all got wet.

After the rafts, four of us (everyone but Rebecca and Beth) braved the haunted house. Rebecca bought us cheese fries to eat in line because the others hadn’t had lunch yet. We thought we’d have to throw them out at the entrance but to our surprise, none of the staff said anything, so we kept them for the first part of the house.

The haunted house is mostly the kind where you ride in a car, but you start by walking into a room where a ghost on a screen informs you he is the spirit of the original owner of the house and everyone else who has lived there has remained as a ghost and he wants them evicted and then asks you to shoot them with laser guns provided in the buggies. It was a competition within each car and the ghost said each winner will be invited to stay in the house with him forever. Aisling said she wasn’t even going to try because she didn’t want to be stuck in the house. She did end up shooting, though. Holly won the competition in our car, with Meg a close second, and me a distant third, with Aisling not far behind me. I think Aisling might have had the right idea at first, though, because it was hard to appreciate the decorations while looking for green lights to hit.

By the time we finished, it was past five and we had a long drive home, so Beth and I left and drove back to a buffet of leftovers someone had set out, and a leisurely dinner on the upper deck, chatting with Sean, Carole, and Beth’s mom, and listening to the cicadas.

After dinner I showered and put on a new sensor, which we’d just picked up at CVS on the way home, after several days of wrangling with medical bureaucracy to get one. I was mostly happy to have it, because I’d wondered about my blood sugar a lot during the past few days, but it can also be nice to have a break from knowing, especially on vacation. I’m pretty sure ice cream followed by cheese fries would have produced a number I didn’t want to see.

Thursday

This was a laid-back day, at least for me. (Beth cooked for a crowd and had some work drama.) Some of the kids went on an expedition to the climbing wall with Carole and their parents and got their faces painted at a Family Day picnic a local retirement home was having in the park. (Orla said they crashed the party, but Carole knows some people who live there who invited them to join the fun.)

I took a walk past the lake to the park mansion, trying to find gardens I remembered there from previous years, but there was construction, and I didn’t end up finding much planted. On the way back, I stopped at the lodge to work, thinking the internet might be better there, and it was. When I got back to the house, I had lunch and helped Beth pick cilantro leaves off the stem for the cilantro-garlic sauce she was making for dinner.

In the afternoon, while most people were at the pool, I started A Haunting on the Hill, which I’ve had in my to-read pile for a long time (since Christmas maybe?) and put a good dent in it. I haven’t read for such a long stretch in ages, so that was satisfying.

Beth served her signature dinner for big gatherings—gazpacho and salt-crusted new potatoes with cilantro-garlic sauce, served with a cheese plate, baguettes and olives—to an appreciative crowd. Later that evening, Beth’s high school friend Michelle dropped by the cabin while most people were out on an ill-fated stargazing outing (it was cloudy and the park cancelled the event, so they salvaged the expedition by taking a walk instead), and we had a visit with her. As I was falling asleep, I noticed my throat was sore, but I was too sleepy to get up and take a covid test.

Friday

I took a test on waking—negative. I went for a walk that took me by the tennis courts where Beth worked as a teenager, without even knowing I’d find them. Around ten-thirty we set off for Pittsburgh, where we were having a lunch-and-movie date. The movie theater was in Squirrel Hill and there was an abundance of interesting restaurants nearby. We chose a tea house where we got mezze—humus, tzatziki, baba ghanoush, raw vegetables, and pita with cookies (chocolate chip for Beth and ginger-fig for me). I also got a chilled ruby tea. After lunch we had some time to kill so we walked on mix of residential and commercial streets through the neighborhood, which seems vibrant and funky.

The move was Didi, which I recommend if you like coming-of-age stories and you can stand to watch a boy in his early teens make bad decision after bad decision that make you want to reach through the screen and hug him or try to talk some sense into him.

We got back to the cabin and headed to the pool for a quick, last swim. We ran into Michael and Orla and their girls there and learned that Marjorie was the latest of us to fall ill with covid. I was mentally crossing my fingers that we could escape infection in day and a half we had left in Wheeling.

Second Saturday

On checkout day, I took one last walk in the park on a path through the golf course and around the swimming pool, where I saw women doing yoga on floating surfboards. I walked around an old, abandoned frame house near the pool and found a big patch of mint growing behind it and picked a leaf to chew.

We vacated the cabin and regrouped at Carole’s house before people went their separate ways. One group was driving to D.C. in a rented van for a few days of tourism. Another group was staying with Carole in Wheeling for a few days. And we were headed for the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia just outside North’s camp, where we’d pick them up Sunday morning.

We made a pit stop at Blackwater Falls, where we walked down to the wooden stairway to the base of the falls. It felt strange to be there in the summer, as it’s almost always winter when we go, but the falls are beautiful any time of year and it is easier to descend the stairs when they are not covered in ice and snow. From there we got ice cream at the snack bar (usually closed when we’re there) and drove to the canyon overlook. There was a wedding taking place in the field by the overlook and Beth was so charmed by this idea she said she wanted to have a fiftieth anniversary party there in thirteen years. Mark your calendars.

It was almost eight when we got to our AirBnB, which was an apartment in a large Italianate house. There were balconies, a portico, a reproduction of the Venus de Milo, a pool, and deck on the roof of the portico outside our apartment with a view of the mountains. This was an excellent place to watch the sun set and later the stars, including the Big Dipper, shining brighter in the sky than at home.

In between the sunset and the stargazing, we sat with our feet in the pool, watching the crescent moon rise through tree branches and bats swoop over the pool, listening to the cicadas, and smelling the bank of lavender growing behind us. It was quite the romantic place to relax after a longish drive.

Second Sunday

At ten-thirty we arrived at North’s camp and collected them and a fellow counselor who lives in Takoma and packed both kids’ belongings into our car. Rose is the oldest child of Mike, the filmmaker who’s been a mentor to Noah, and Sarah, who used to be the Secretary-Treasurer of Beth’s union.

On excursions to town all summer North had been seeing signs for local attractions they wanted to visit so we hit up a couple of them on the way home. Our first stop was Natural Chimneys Regional Park. It’s just what it sounds like, giant limestone formations that look like chimneys, or (even more so in my opinion) the ruins of a castle. We admired them and then wandered down to the North River, which was full of water again after being dry for much of the summer.

North wanted to have lunch at a restaurant in Harrisonburg that specializes in grilled cheese, but it turned out it was closed on Sundays, so we headed straight to Luray Caverns and had (probably inferior) grilled cheese and soup at their snack bar before descending into the cave for a self-guided tour.

I don’t think we’ve taken North to a cave since they were ten and this was a nice one, with winding paths and majestic formations in a ten-story room and a pool that reflects the stalactites on the ceiling so they are doubled. North said they were tempted to touch the formations. Of course they didn’t, but we did see people disregarding that particular rule because people are idiots.

We listened to a couple of episodes of the Handsome podcast in the car and a couple hours after leaving the caverns we stopped for frozen custard. It was a fun ride home and it was nice to have Rose along for company.

We got home around five and were reunited with Noah and the kittens. I swear Walter grew perceptibly in the nine days we were gone. (The size gap between the two keeps increasing. North says at almost five months, she still looks like a kitten, but he looks like a half-grown cat.) In our absence they both learned how to get up onto Noah’s loft bed, which was a great triumph.

We now have twice the zinnias we had when we left and new blooms on the sunflowers, some of which are now taller than me. Plus, there were two cucumbers big enough to pick and about cup of cherry tomatoes and all the herbs are doing well. So, I think we can safely say Noah succeeded in his primary and secondary goals of keeping the cats and the garden alive.

It will be less than two weeks before we hit the road again, and that time we’ll be leaving our youngest at college, where with luck they will grow and thrive, too.

Update, 8/15: On Wednesday, four days after we got home, we learned that Carole and Santino both had covid, bringing the total to five attendees of the reunion.

Interlude

Posted on August 4, 2024 by Steph

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We had a two-week interlude between our trip to the beach and the next trip, to Wheeling for a family reunion, where we are now.

The last weekend in July, a week after we got back from the beach, North came home from camp on Friday evening and stayed until Sunday morning, as per usual. Saturday was a busy day. North and El had breakfast in the city and then El came over and they watched a movie. After lunch, Beth, North and I went berry picking. Noah opted to stay home and participate in an online gaming event.

We intended to get blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries, but though all these berries were listed as available on the website and again when we checked in at the farm entrance, once we’d picked blackberries, we learned the blueberry fields were closed. I don’t know if they ran out while we were picking blackberries or if the staff at the gate didn’t have up-to-date information. We knew we were cutting it close, as blueberry season, which used to last until August when the kids were small, seems to end in late July now, if it lasts that long. I’m guessing it’s climate change.

But it might have been just as well there were only two kinds of berries to pick because we were kind of rushed for time. On arrival, we visited the snack bar and got a blueberry hand pie with ice cream to share and then we picked two quarts of blackberries and two pints of raspberries. In the blackberries, North and I were sharing a container, so we stuck together, and they told me amusing stories from camp. The berries were kind of sparse and we sometimes wished we had Noah with us to reach the high ones. I told North I was getting my stretching in for the day. It was easier picking in the raspberry field, and we were in and out of there quickly. We dashed into the farm market afterward and got blueberry jam, cheese, pretzels, a slice of blueberry cake for me, and a mixed berry slushy for North.

The reason we were on a schedule was because Beth was going on an evening kayak tour of the monuments on the Potomac, and she had to get there by six, which meant getting home by four-thirty. She said it was a lot of fun and she got some beautiful pictures. While she was gone, Noah and I made a soba noodle salad with shiitake, tofu, and broccoli, which North praised with unusual enthusiasm. I think they were getting tired of the food at camp after six weeks of eating it. After dinner, we watched Teen Beach Movie. They showed it at camp and North had to miss it to stay with a kid who was afraid to watch it (if you’ve seen it, you will find this as puzzling as we did—it’s a rated G Disney movie aimed at tweens). North had FOMO about it, so we indulged them.

The next morning, we said goodbye to North again until the following Friday. I had a nice, low-key summer Sunday. I took my daily walk in weather that was hot but not miserably humid, read, and napped. Beth made gumbo for dinner and then we watched the Olympics.

Another work week rolled by. Beth and I continued to watch swimming and diving and gymnastics every night through Thursday, and the kittens often watched with us, sitting on the coffee table in front of the television. When the U.S. women’s gymnastics team won gold and were all high fiving each other, Willow jumped up and put her paw on the tv screen right over their hands, then she chased the flag they were carrying around.

It only took us five days to eat up all the raspberries and half the blackberries (the other half I’d frozen for future baking plans). Not satisfied with our higher-than-average berry consumption, I made a blueberry kuchen with grocery store blueberries on Wednesday, freezing a quarter of that for North, who came home again on Friday evening.

That night, we watched a little track and field and talked about camp. North always needs to vent a little when they get home. They always enjoyed sleep-away camp as a camper, both at Scout camp and elsewhere, so they’ve been surprised at how many kids are homesick or don’t want to be there for other reasons. Those kids are a small minority, but they take up a lot of the counselors’ time and North had one in their group who’d been a handful. They did say all the others were “angel children.” Then they took a shower—something they sometimes only manage once in a week at camp because they are so busy—and emerged from the bathroom, exclaiming, “I feel so clean!”

Saturday morning Beth and I left a little after ten a.m. for our next adventure, leaving North to do laundry, play with the kittens, write goodbye notes to be distributed to other camp staff members at the end of the last week of camp, attend a belated graduation party for El Saturday night, and then to take a Lyft to the camp bus stop Sunday morning. I’d drawn up a page-long to-do list for Noah, divided into categories such as “Kitten maintenance: #1 priority—Don’t let the cats die” and “Garden Maintenance: #2 priority—Don’t let the garden die.”

It seemed very strange to drive away, leaving the kids and the kittens behind. It wasn’t a couple’s trip—we’d be in a group of several dozen people– but we haven’t taken a trip longer than a weekend getaway without the kids since before Noah was born. We really are entering a new phase of life, one in which the times when the four of us are together are more interludes than the stuff of everyday life. I am having trouble getting my head around that.

18 to 81, or Interesting Times

Posted on July 23, 2024 by Steph

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Our beach party was small this year, just five of us, my family of four plus my mother. And for the first time since Noah was born, there were no minors present. We ranged in age from eighteen to eighty when we arrived and eighteen to eighty-one when we left.

Here’s what our all-adult group did at the beach and just after, while our country experienced nine days of twists and turns. (Ironically, while at the beach Noah and I were reading Terry Pratchett’s Interesting Times, named after the purported Chinese curse—“May you live in interesting times.”) President Biden was in Rehoboth at the same time we were, recovering from covid and contemplating his political future. It makes me a little sad to think about that. It was time for him to go, and he had a mixed record, but he did a lot of good, and it must have been hard.

Friday and Saturday: Getting There

North and I made it down to the beach by 5:15 p.m. on Saturday. It had been a long journey. Beth had left at 6 a.m. the previous morning to pick them up at camp, deliver them to a medical appointment and then home, where we were all reunited after almost two weeks, and had a dinner of homemade pizza. North always comes home from camp exhausted because they need to get up early and stay up late doing bed checks on campers, so they bowed out of meeting my mom at the airport. Shortly after dinner, though, Beth, Noah and I drove out to pick up my mom at National and dropped her off at her hotel in Silver Spring.

By mid-morning we were at her hotel again to fetch her and begin our drive to Rehoboth Beach. It took about six hours, with stops. There was almost no traffic at the bridge; in fact, most of the traffic seemed to be going the other way, which prompted my mom to tell the story of the time (when my sister and I were teens) when we were driving to the Outer Banks in heavy rain and all the traffic was going the other way and it turned out that it was because the storm was a hurricane and the islands were evacuating. There’s more to this story, involving my stepfather almost getting arrested for breaking into the closed realty’s office for the keys to our house. It’s a family favorite.

But while it was raining on and off during this drive, it was not a hurricane, and the only hardship we experienced was agonizingly slow traffic at the very end. We got to the house by 4:30. It has an interesting feature which is stone from an old lighthouse that collapsed in the 1920s is set in the brickwork of the chimney and around the front door.

Once the food was unpacked and linens distributed to all the bedrooms and bathrooms, North and I took a rainy walk to the beach. We only had one umbrella between us, and we tried to share but North ended up getting soaking wet. We were both happy to get our feet in the sand and surf, though, and to breathe sea air.

Meanwhile, Beth was doing a quick grocery shop for dinner and breakfast the next day. North and I made dinner—veggie burgers and dogs, baked beans, corn on the cob, sliced tomatoes, and watermelon. This was the day Trump was shot at the Republican convention. This was distressing news. I don’t want to live in a country where presidential elections are marked by violence against anyone, even him. (Before we left the beach, Noah reports, there were already t-shirts with the image of him with his fist up in the t-shirt shops. I missed that.)

But we were on vacation, so all five of us headed for the boardwalk, where we got frozen custard. The boardwalk was hopping, as befits a Saturday night in July, but I’d thought the rain—which had mostly stopped—might have deterred people. It was a pleasant night, though, not too hot, and we saw a rainbow on the way there. I spotted it first in a puddle and had a hard time finding it in the sky, but standing in the middle of the street, we found it, big but faint. It was easier to see in the reflection than in the sky. This seemed like it might be a good metaphor, but I’m not sure for what. Maya would probably know.

Sunday: Settling In

Sunday morning Beth and Mom did the big grocery shopping, North did a couple online modules they had to complete for school about alcohol and hazing—their Internet connection is not good at camp and they don’t have much time anyway—and I made and received calls from the realty about the fact that the house did not have hot water or any frying pans, which Noah needed to cook dinner. Once both of those problems were resolved with visits from the gas company and a realtor bearing pans, and once North had put together a potential class schedule for the fall semester and met with their advisor online, North and I went to the beach.

We got there about 2:30 and had a long swim, about an hour and half. The water was cold getting in, but pleasant once we got used to it and the waves were adequate. We saw pelicans and osprey catching fish and had a nice talk. In my opinion, the ocean is one of the best places to chat with someone. After our swim, North headed up to the house and I went to one of the boardwalk pavilions to read my book club book (The Great Mistake, a 1940s cozy mystery) in the shade for about an hour until my mom showed up and we went to sit on the sand together. She’d had something of an odyssey buying a beach chair and finding our meeting spot, but we had almost an hour to sit on the sand, watching the waves and talking. The beach is also an excellent place to talk.

Noah made dinner that night—veggie crab cakes made of chickpeas, artichokes, and hearts of palm. Beth loves these and had asked him to make them at the beach. They are quite tasty. After dinner, we watched Fancy Dance, which is very good, but heavy.

Monday: 37

Monday was Beth’s and my thirty-seventh anniversary. This is the summer anniversary, the one that commemorates our first kiss. We decided that rather than exchange gifts we’d just spend the whole day together, doing an activity of her choice in the morning and mine in the afternoon, and then we’d go to dinner.

Beth chose kayaking. We rented kayaks and explored Assawoman Bay. We saw all kinds of wildlife—egrets, geese, herons, dragonflies, a horseshoe crab, jellyfish, and mussels along the banks of an inlet. We were on the water for almost two hours. The day was sunny and warm but not oppressively hot, plus I was wet from the waist down from the water dripping off the paddles and that cooled me down. I haven’t been kayaking with Beth in a couple years—she goes frequently, so that was pleasant.

We returned to the house for lunch—Mom and the kids had gone out for Mexican, but they returned shortly after we finished eating. Our next stop was an ice cream place we’d never tried—it’s in one of the little alleys off Rehoboth Ave. I got black raspberry and Beth got cappuccino. I saw a gnome with popsicles on its hat there and photographed it for Nicole, who collects gnomes. It turned out to be the first in a series of vacation gnome pictures I sent her.

From there we went to the beach, where we rented chairs and an umbrella. This is something we don’t often do, so it felt luxurious. We read for about an hour and then stood in the surf for a while and then Beth went back to her chair while I had a brief swim before returning to our rented shade to watch the ocean.

I was people-watching, too. I spotted a young man in the surf with a glucose monitor on his arm. I thought—in his twenties and fit, probably type 1, but you never know. When he got out, he walked right by me and I wondered if he noticed my monitor and thought—in her fifties and plump, probably type 2, but you never know.

We went back to the house and showered for dinner. We went out for tapas and ordered a feast—a watermelon and berry salad on arugula, a cheese plate, ratatouille, tortilla Española, and two desserts to split—olive oil cake with berries, and a flourless chocolate torte. Everything was excellent. The waiter put a candle in the olive oil cake because it was our anniversary, which caused someone at the next table to wish me a happy birthday.

We went and sat on a bench on the boardwalk and almost immediately spotted dolphins. They weren’t going in a straight line north or south as they usually do, but circling and Beth surmised they were feeding on a school of fish. We watched them for at least twenty minutes and then took a walk on the beach in the sunset. I saw dolphins almost every day we were at the beach, but this was something else. It was a magical way to end the day, but the best part was just having a whole day devoted to spending time with each other.

And it so happened that the card I got Beth had dolphins on it. She got me one that said, “Let’s get old and weird together.” Apparently, North was with her when she bought it and opined quite firmly, “That’s the one.”

Tuesday and Wednesday: Being There

We went out to breakfast at Egg on Tuesday morning. Noah and I have worked out a system for summer breakfasts at this restaurant. I eat something high in protein at home before we leave, then we each order the lemon-blueberry crepes, and I eat half of mine and give the rest to him. I get a meal that doesn’t cause my blood sugar to spike or leave me feeling deprived, and he gets a plate and a half of crepes, which are one of his favorite foods.

Leaving the restaurant, we all strolled through the farmers’ market that’s right across the street and bought tomatoes and cucumbers for the gazpacho that Beth was making that night and peaches and blackberries. At a honey stand, I found a yellow and black striped gnome with a beehive in one hand a bee in the other and I took its picture for Nicole.

From there North and I continued down Rehoboth Ave where we went to BrowseAbout to get a birthday card for my mom. North browsed but did not buy anything. Next, we went to Candy Kitchen where I got taffy for the neighbors who were watering our garden in our absence, fudge for the house, sea salt caramels for myself, green apple army man gummies for North (eating them was an anti-militaristic statement, they assured me), and some dark chocolate-salted caramel-covered almonds for Beth, who had recently picked out a similar confection for herself at another store, put it down, and failed to bring it to the cash register.

Beth, North, and I went to the beach in the mid-afternoon, and the waves were better than average, the best of the trip so far. North and I swam and talked, but I also spent some time sitting with Beth and reading my mystery.

Beth left the beach first because it was her cooking night. Her beach meal is set—every year she makes gazpacho and salt-crusted new potatoes with cilantro-garlic sauce, served with Spanish cheeses, baguettes and olives. North made a pitcher of watermelon agua fresca to go with it. The meal was superlative, as always.

Mom was in the mood for ice cream afterward and it didn’t take much convincing to get everyone to the boardwalk. North and I stayed to ride the Haunted Mansion at Funland, which I love beyond reason, even though (or perhaps because) I have it practically memorized. The only surprise is whether it will take the route that goes across a balcony that gives you a brief glimpse of the beach and boardwalk and makes your car visible to passersby. We always hope for that and this time it happened.

One thing I do not love beyond reason is the idea of going to a water park at the beach. I am fine with water parks in their proper place, which is within amusement parks on a hot summer day, but if I am hot at the beach, I want to be in the ocean. So, I did not go to Jungle Jim’s with Beth, Noah, and North Wednesday morning.

While they were gone, Mom and I went out to lunch at our usual lunch place, O’Bies by the Sea. The food is fine, and it has an ocean view. It’s where I often indulge in my once yearly departure from vegetarianism, with a plate of steamed clams. I paired it with devilled eggs with Old Bay, and a berry cup. Mom got a crab cake sandwich.

I was alone at the beach that afternoon and I swam, walked the almost the length of the boardwalk twice, and read.

Mom cooked dinner that night. She made portobello mushrooms stuffed with kale and cheese, which were quite good. North asked what we wanted to do after dinner and I said something “undemanding” because I was worn out, so we ended up watching Mama Mia, which fit the bill.

Thursday: 81

In the morning Beth and North went kayaking in Rehoboth Bay. North said they explored a marshy area and got a little lost in its waterways and they saw herons, egrets, mussels, and many fiddler crabs. North found their asymmetric claws amusing.

While they were gone, Mom and Noah and I took a walk down to the boardwalk and sat in one of the pavilions. It was quite pleasant there, with a nice breeze and view of the dunes. We walked down to the beach briefly to look for dolphins because Mom hadn’t seen any yet, but none were in evidence.

We all got back to the house around the same time and ate lunch. Then Beth and I went to the bakery to pick up my mom’s birthday cake. It had pink and purple roses in the frosting, and she said it was almost to pretty to cut, but we did. I’d picked up some candles to go with it because I thought she would like their pastel colors and did not notice until Beth told me that they were the re-lighting kind. I warned Mom ahead of time and she said I should have surprised her with them. They not only re-lit themselves after she blew them out, but they threw off sparks, so there was a surprise after all.

In the afternoon, North and Noah went to Funland and Beth and I went to the beach. Rain had been threatening so I swam right away. The water was calm, probably because it was low tide, as I heard a man mansplaining to his companion. (Did you know there is one high and low tide each day and night and that they are not at exactly the same time every day?) I got out and read a few chapters of my book while North, who had just joined us, swam, and then I got in with them and swam again. The waves were a little bigger. Perhaps the tide had changed. I don’t know. Clearly, only a select few understand tides.

We went out for Japanese to celebrate Mom’s birthday. It’s a very pretty restaurant full of greenery, strung with fairy lights, and crisscrossed with koi ponds inside and out. (I would have liked to eat on the roof, but there were no tables available there.) We got some of our favorites—the kids got noodle dishes, we had edamame with Old Bay, seaweed salad, vegetable dumplings, and vegetable tempura. Beth got sushi and Mom got seafood pasta. Afterward we got ice cream on the boardwalk, having lucked into an excellent parking space.

North had been trying to get a root beer float since the water park, where they had been disappointed that it had been taken off the menu. They’d tried again that same day at another place that was supposed to carry them but had been out of root beer that day. We were returning to that establishment but, sadly, they were still out of root beer. North had to settle for coke float, their second one in two days. Beth drove Mom and Noah home and North and I walked home along the boardwalk in a fine, refreshing drizzle.

Friday and Saturday: The Last Hurray

With so much beach-going and other fun, I had been having a hard time keeping my blog up to date, so Friday morning I went to Café A-Go-Go to have a half-sweet Mexican mocha and a third of a piece of crumb cake and to pound the blog out before we returned home the next day and got buried in all those urgent things you have to do when you get home from a trip. Beth and North came with me and got their own drinks/treats, plus the other two-thirds of the crumb cake, and they sat outside so as not to disturb me. (When I asked my mom and Noah if they wanted to come and not talk to me, Noah said, “No thank you” and my mom seemed puzzled by why I was going in the first place instead of writing at the house or what she would do there.)

That afternoon everyone but Noah went to the beach. North and I swam in some very respectable waves, taking a brief break in the middle to reapply sunblock, rest, and eat cherries and pistachios. When the lifeguards blew the five o’clock whistle, we got out and headed back to the house for pre-dinner showers.

Dinner was mozzarella sticks, pizza, spinach stromboli, and gelato at Grotto. (Mom went around the corner to get a frozen custard.) The evening was mild and pleasant, after some warm and humid weather earlier in the week. Mom said festive umbrellas and strings of lights make every outdoor space more inviting and it does seem to be true. And when I went inside to use the restroom, I spied a pair of gnomes by the front door.

When dinner was finished all went around the table and said what our favorite part of the week had been, at Mom’s request. Noah wondered if he was allowed to say the water park (yes), Beth and I chose our anniversary, Mom liked her birthday dinner at the Japanese restaurant (“my favorite restaurant in Rehoboth”) and North chose swimming in the big waves that day. North had skipped dessert at Grotto because they wanted to try one more time to find a root beer float and this time, by trying a new store, they had success.

We got home and began packing. I assessed the contents of the fridge, tossing a few things and making decisions about what I’d throw out in the morning if no one ate it for breakfast and there wasn’t enough room in the cooler. (This is the most stressful part about leaving a rental house for me so it helps to think about it ahead of time.) Noah pitched in by eating a slice of birthday cake and some fudge on top of gelato. “I am doing my duty,” he said solemnly.

The next morning the kids had birthday cake for breakfast (“I do what I must,” Noah commented.) While we were packing and carrying things out to the breezeway in front of the driveway, an orange cat appeared and made the rounds, getting people to pet him.

After we vacated the house, we split into three groups. North and I went to the beach, Mom and Noah went to read in a boardwalk pavilion, and Beth returned the keys and went to read in a coffeehouse. Much to our surprise, the orange cat followed us when we left the house, even crossing a busy street. A man witnessed this, asked if it was our cat and when we said no, he scooped it up. North surmised he was going to take it to a vet to see if it was microchipped, because it was acting lost.

North and I had a nice final swim. When we got out of the water we saw a big pod of dolphins, including some that were jumping high enough out of the water that I saw their tails, but not their noses. It was the first time that week North and Mom (whom we fetched from the pavilion) saw any dolphins, so they were excited. Noah stayed in the pavilion to watch our stuff and by the time he got down there with his camera, they were gone.

We all met up for lunch. North got a sandwich at Green Man, Noah got fries at Thrashers, I got orangeades, and we brought them to supplement our meal at the crepe stand where we always have our last lunch on summer beach trips.

We had a few errands to do in town—a last run to Candy Kitchen, a last ice cream, a photo op at O’Bies by the Sea. Beth and I once took a picture there with my sister, who also went to Oberlin and Beth had the idea to take a new picture with our newest Obie.

Next we dropped by the realty to get the keys back because my mom had left a charger in the house, but the cleaners had taken it away, and when we checked back at the realty later (after a visit to the Crocs outlet on the highway) it wasn’t back yet, so we gave up on it and drove out of town, but right after a stop for gas, the realtor called and said it had finally been returned. We were not far away at this point, but I failed to consider that on a summer Saturday afternoon beach traffic is mostly going into town, not out, so it took much longer to get back than it had to get to the gas station in the first place. We weren’t driving away from the beach for good until 4:30.

After that we made decent time, but we got home later than we expected. Mom and the kids and I had dinner at Cava in Silver Spring, while Beth took the car home to unload it and then she came back and took Mom to her hotel. When we got back to the house, we were reunited with the kittens, and I was happy to see our first sunflower had bloomed in our absence. North and I tackled the first of what would be four loads of laundry so they could have all their clothes clean to take to camp and we fell into bed.

Sunday: Goodbyes

The next morning, we dropped North off at the camp bus stop where they would check campers onto the bus before boarding it themselves. Beth and I went to the farmers’ market from there and came home with tomatoes and a bounty of summer fruit (apricots, blueberries, peaches, and plums). Then she took me to Silver Spring, where Mom and I met up, wandered through a small street festival, listened to some music, and got Lebanese for lunch, while Beth finished the grocery shopping.

Back at home, Mom met the kittens, and took in the changes we’ve made to the house since she was last here. While Beth was out taking a walk, and Mom, Noah and I were chatting in the living room he got a notice on his watch that President Biden had dropped out of the race, so we turned on the television to learn more. It was a small relief, as I think Vice President Harris is in better shape to govern, though I don’t know whether she’s better positioned to win—and this question is causing me a lot of anxiety. At the very least, she’s not less likely to win. Beth came home while we were watching tv (also alerted to the news) because she had to work on a press release. It wasn’t the first time she had to work during this unprecedented week in American history. She is the communications director of her union so when something big needs to be communicated, it falls to her.

Mom and I took a little walk around the neighborhood, ending up at a playground where we reminisced about taking the kids when they were little. Later that afternoon, we took her to the airport and our visit was over. I’m hoping next summer my sister, brother-in-law, and niece will come to the beach and then we’ll be 12 to 82. Also, less interesting current events during a week of a Harris presidency would be fine by me.

Comings and Goings

Posted on July 9, 2024 by Steph

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North Comes Home

After that first weekend, North managed to come home the next two as well, by volunteering to be a bus counselor. Saturday of their second weekend home it was very hot, the first hundred-degree day of the summer. We spent it thusly: Beth was up shortly after dawn to go kayaking, I went swimming at Piney Branch pool, the kids watched the last two episodes of Dr. Who, Beth and North had lunch at Cava, everyone went to see Inside Out 2, Noah and I roasted zucchini, tomatoes, and feta for dinner and everyone went out for ice cream at Everyday Sundae in the District. It was on that list of twelve best places to get ice cream in the D.C. metro area that has been guiding our ice cream choices this summer. I got blueberry cheesecake. It was good, but not exceptional.

The next Friday, North came home with a sprained ankle and without their phone because they dropped it into a latrine at camp. Because they weren’t up for much walking, we decided not to go to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, which we’d been considering, and Beth and North spent a lot of time while they were home setting up their new phone. For the record, this was the second phone they lost in a month, so they volunteered to pay for half of it and we took them up on it.

That Saturday North also hung out with Maddie, Noah and I roasted radishes and fried tofu for dinner, and we went to Dairy Godmother in Alexandria, Virginia. This was the longest trek we’d made for ice cream so far. This place is famous for its custard (though it also sells sorbet and vegan ice cream), so we thought that’s what we should order. There are only three custard flavors every day—vanilla, chocolate, and whatever the flavor of the day is. My blood sugar was on the low side when we arrived, so I splurged on a sundae—chocolate custard with marshmallow sauce and sour cherries. It was an excellent combination of flavors. I was quite pleased with it. We have now visited all the top-rated ice cream venues—it was a three-way tie—one each in Maryland, the District, and Virginia. This has been a fun project.

The next morning, Beth drove North to the camp bus on her way out of town, because she was off on her own trip…

Beth Goes to Wheeling

Beth spent another week with her mom. She worked, visited with relatives, road-tripped with her friend Michelle to Morgantown, and spent a lot of time in her mom’s condo’s pool. I sent her off with a pint of homemade sour cherry sauce and I got a lot of compliments about it from Beth’s mom and Michelle.

Noah and I were on our own for six days. We worked and watched a few episodes of Angel and Scrapper. I started writing postcards again after a long hiatus. I did a batch reminding Florida voters to renew their enrollment in the vote-by-mail program and another for a school board candidate (also in Florida) who is running against a Moms for Liberty candidate. It soothes my election-related anxiety a little to be doing something, even if it’s for a down ballot race. Because if the unspeakable does happen, who’s in office at the state and municipal level is going to matter. (Well, it always does, but you know what I mean.)

Noah and I Go to a Parade

Noah and I went to Takoma’s Fourth of July parade. We used to go almost every year, but between covid cancellations (2020 and 2021) and travels (2022 and 2023) we haven’t been since 2019. I enjoyed it. I always do—the painted rooster statue on wheels (the rooster is the symbol of Takoma), the papier mâché shark representing a swim team, the UFO and aliens just because, drummers from various cultures (Scottish, Japanese, and Caribbean), and seeing Jamie Raskin, our congressional representative. If you’re not a Marylander and you’ve heard of him, it’s probably because he was the impeachment manager during Trump’s second impeachment. He was one of many local politicians walking the route or riding in classic cars, and all the rest of them got polite applause, but people went wild for Raskin, shouting out “Thank you!” and similar things. He’s a local hero.

One notable event in the parade was that toward the end, a horse who had been in the parade, got loose and ran through the parade, against the flow of the procession. One person was knocked down, but thankfully, no one was seriously hurt.

When it was over I considered the fact that we don’t see as many people we know as we used to at this event. The crowd skews toward families with kids of elementary school age or younger and we don’t know many people like that anymore. In fact, the only people I saw whom I knew were my city council member and her family, who were in the parade. Her son went to preschool with North. The lack of familiar faces among the spectators made me feel a little sad and unconnected, even though a few people I know were there and posted pictures on Facebook. I just didn’t see them at the time.

My melancholy might have stemmed from the fact that I was already missing Beth and North. It just felt odd to be apart on this holiday we’ve spent together so many times, even though we were split up last Fourth of July, too. I guess being in a new place with extended family made it easier last time. But it’s the kind of thing that will happen more and more often, I expect, as the kids move out into the world.

Noah and I had a picnic dinner (on the porch because the evening was rainy). I scaled it back a little, skipping the potato salad and baked beans, because Noah doesn’t like them and they’re not great for me in a meal with plenty of other carbs. We had vegetarian hot dogs, devilled eggs, corn on the cob, watermelon, and ice cream with blueberries and another batch of sour cherry sauce. He helped by shucking the corn and slicing the watermelon while I was out running errands.

Beth Comes Home and North Does Not

Two days later, Beth came home. North did not because there were fewer campers due to the Fourth of July holiday and not enough to fill a bus. (The campers and counselors who were there went on a field trip to see fireworks in a nearby town—so North was the only one in our family who saw any this year.)

I made a blueberry crumble to welcome Beth home. Noah and I made soba noodles with a peanut sauce, cucumbers, green peppers, and radishes and we all ate the noodles and crumble and watched The Death of Stalin, which Noah’s been wanting to watch for a long time. We weren’t all together, but it was still very good to have Beth home.

Willow and Walter Go to the Vet

On Monday, Willow and Walter got the last vaccine they’ll need for a while, for rabies. Beth reports they were not at all freaked out by the car ride or the dogs in the vet’s waiting room. I wasn’t surprised. They were pretty chill at their three-month visit a few weeks ago. They continue to grow. Walter’s just over five and a quarter pounds and Willow is just over four pounds.

They also continue to be very energetic and mischievous. They spend a high percentage of their waking hours wrestling, chasing each other, or finding things to knock off other things. Willow likes to get up on high things and pounce on her brother from above. Every day I find them in funny places—in the dishwasher, the recycling bin, batting each other through the holes in a laundry basket, drinking from the toilet. Walter is particularly fond of sitting on the printer. Sometimes they sit on the coffee table in front of the television and watch along with us, Walter occasionally batting at the screen if there’s something enticing like race cars. They love ice cubes and come running whenever they hear the dispenser on the freezer door. Then we must give them one and let them bat it across the kitchen floor.

So that covers our comings and goings from the past few weeks. I hope yours have been festive, relaxing, or whatever you want out of these mid-summer days.

All For The Love Of You

A Chronicle of Suburban Lesbian Family Life

Author Archives: Steph

About Steph

Fall Break AF

Eight for October

Let Them Eat Cupcakes

Three Weekends

Welcome Home, Obie

Between Camp and College

Reunited

Interlude

18 to 81, or Interesting Times

Comings and Goings