About Steph

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The Home Front

Posted on July 6, 2026 by Steph

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Before She Left: Early June

Beth is in Wheeling again, taking care of her mom. She’s been gone three and a half weeks. She had four days at home after we got back from the beach and before she left for Wheeling and she was a busy bee during that time. She stocked the house with food, a week’s usual groceries plus extra non-perishable staples. She installed a new toilet valve, tightened a loose doorknob, and fixed the dishwasher when a screw fell out of the frame, causing the dishwasher to list out of the counter. But the biggest project was building a mesh enclosure for flowers and vegetables to protect them from garden pests.

Since mid-April, Beth’s been shuttling back and forth between Wheeling and home—plus side trips to Oberlin (to see North’s play), Chicago (to see a friend), Wyandotte (to get North settled for the summer), and Rehoboth (for vacation)—so she hasn’t been home much. This was part of the reason for all the home repairs and garden construction. She hadn’t had much of a chance before. Also, acts of service are her love language. And this departure felt different than the others because it was open-ended. We didn’t know when she was coming home.

Before she left, Beth, Noah, and I found time to watch up to the middle of the current season of Hacks, and she and Noah finished For All Mankind. On her last day at home, we went out for ice cream at Koma. The morning that she left, we hugged for a long time in the driveway. Neither one of us wanted to let go.

But we did and she left. Here’s what happened on the home front.

The First Few Days: Mid-June

On the first Friday she was gone, Noah and I watched the first half of The Northman, a more violent film than we’d select if she was home. Noah had texted that North we were going to watch it, and North had passed that intel onto Beth, telling her we were going to watch “a stabby Viking movie.” When Beth texted me to ask how it was, I responded:

Very bloody, kind of artsy. Björk has a small part in it. Plus Nicole Kidman and Anna Taylor Joy. And some men

Who are often shirtless and covered in blood

Not your thing

Nope, she answered.

On Saturday Noah and I finally gave the porch its annual swabbing. We usually do this in May when the pollen has stopped falling. If you don’t live in place that experiences what some people call “the pollening,” you should know pollen is sticky and a dirt magnet, so the porch gets filthy in late spring. Sometimes we don’t get around to the big clean until June, though. It’s a time-consuming job, involving taking everything off the porch and wiping it down and then cleaning the floor and ledges with soapy water, waiting for it to dry and bringing everything back. (This year we added to the task list taking down the Christmas lights that had been wound, unlit, around porch columns for months and boxing them up and putting them in basement along with some stakes used for Halloween decorations that never got put away last fall.)

This chore made me miss North. Usually, both kids and I do the porch clean together and it involves a certain amount of water play. Noah and I were all business, though, which I didn’t think about at the time, but made me sad when I thought about it later. Beth asked me later, on our family video call, if I wished I’d sprayed him with the hose.

Sunday morning Beth texted me to say that she’d found a cheap ticket to Pittsburgh on the day in mid-July we’d set as a possible date for me to come join her in Wheeling and asked if she should buy it. I said yes. That made me feel better, knowing the exact day I’d see her next, but it was still more than a month away at that point.

We had the video call, a three-state, five-person (Beth’s mom joined) affair, later that morning. It was good to be together, if virtually. Beth was amused, and I think touched, that I was wearing one of her t-shirts. I’d worn it to sleep to comfort myself and left it on the next day. We exchanged news. Beth had been to Wheeling Pride. North had staffed a Plinko booth at a carnival for work. They had thus far resisted the urge to get a cat.

First Full Week: Mid-June

It was Noah’s first official week at work (for the hours covered in his contract), but he only worked two days and as he’d been in the office three days the week before, it wasn’t a big change. The job should eventually ramp up to full-time as elections get closer. Speaking of elections, he was working on an ad about a referendum concerning how justices on the Kansas state Supreme Court are selected (elected v. appointed).

I worked, too, though more intermittently than I expected. I went to the dentist on Monday because of sudden and severe tooth pain that developed over the weekend; by Wednesday I’d had a root canal and on Thursday a crown put on top of the affected tooth. Two of those appointments were lengthy ones and I had to get in and out of the city on public transportation, so I didn’t get much work done. Even Friday, when I had no dental appointments, I felt scattered and unproductive. That night Noah and I got cheap pizza and watched Late Night with the Devil, which was fun.

While we were watching, I texted Beth:

We are watching a horror movie that takes places in the 70s. Excellent nostalgia value. You would like the first third.

After that, not as much

Beth and I talked twice over the weekend. On Saturday morning we had a call just between the two of us. She told me about going to a West Virginia Day celebration with her mom—there was birthday cake for the state, plus a photo station where one could dress up as Abraham Lincoln, so of course, she did. We discussed cheering plans for my visit in July, some nearby country fairs we might attend, a possible overnight trip to Pittsburgh.

Second Full Week: Late June

Sunday morning, we had a family call. North had worked a table at Wyandotte Pride. They said it was in a very scenic locale, right on the river, and though it didn’t draw a big crowd, they talked to enough people about the housing cooperative to make it worth the table fee. They’d auditioned for a filmed reading of a screenplay (which will presumably be used to shop around the project) and they’d gotten a call back. Beth mentioned that she and her mom were leaving soon after the call to attend the symphony and go out for tapas in Pittsburgh with Beth’s aunt Carole and cousin Sean.

Because Noah goes to his games on Sundays and is usually gone most of the afternoon and evening, I decided I should start using this weekly block of alone time to tackle The 1619 Project, which has been on my bedside table for several years. But by the time I’d finished the grocery shopping (farmers’ market, co-op, and grocery store), it was late afternoon and I was tired, so only read the preface before moving on to lighter fare. Still, it was a start.

Noah only went into the office one day that week, but he had some work for Mike editing video for the Amalgamated Transit Union. (Mike’s wife Sara was a colleague of Beth’s at CWA, so Noah gets a lot of labor-related work through him.) I worked a little more than the week before because I didn’t have to go into the city three times for dental work. I finished a new product announcement and a product review sheet for an herbal product meant to boost testosterone and then revised a booklet on homeopathic remedies for menstrual and menopausal complaints. I found this pairing amusing. Balance in all things.

In the evenings, we watched the Lord of the Flies miniseries. It only has four episodes, so we dispatched it quickly and moved on to Widow’s Bay by Saturday.

Third Full Week: Late June to the 4^th of July

On the Sunday family call, North told us about their hike in the Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge, where they saw herons and black raspberries (not quite ripe). Beth told us about an overnight trip she and her mom were going to take to Pymatuning State Park in Pennsylvania.

It was even later than the previous Sunday when I got home from grocery shopping, almost dinner time, but that evening I made good on my resolution and read the first three chapters of The 1619 Project. It turns out to be less dense than I expected for a work of history, and I was pleasantly surprised by that. (I am now about halfway through it.) I managed to dip into four different books that day, the two I mentioned previously, Tokyo Express, which I am reading for book club (we always read a mystery in July), and The Rose Field, which Noah and I are reading together.

Noah worked Monday and Tuesday and then went to a concert straight from work Tuesday. There was a heat wave coming, so I decided to mow the lawn myself, even though it’s usually his chore because it seemed cruel to make him do it in 100+ degree weather.

On Wednesday, I started a new work project, writing web copy for fifty products for a company that supplies ingredients to supplement companies. Sara and I will be working on this until September. It’s good to have a big project because work continues to be scarce and Sara’s really had to hustle to find it. Nevertheless, I found it hard to concentrate because the heat was wearing me out.

This may seem odd because most of the time I was in the house, which is air-conditioned (if imperfectly by two window units), but I was still outside over an hour each day taking my morning walk, watering the garden, and hanging up laundry and that would drain me for the rest of the day. Walter snuck out one day and was out for hours before Noah noticed him in the side yard. He was panting, and clearly overheated, but he didn’t come to the door and cry to be let in—he’s that obsessed with being outside. When I brought him inside, he went straight for his water bowl, drank, and then fell asleep on the kitchen floor.

On Friday, Noah and I started watching Society of the Snow, which is about the Uruguayan soccer team whose plane crashed in the Andes in the 1970s. You probably know the story—it was the basis for Alive—but if you don’t, it goes to dark places. The survivors of the crash weren’t found for over two months, and the area was bitterly cold, prone to avalanches, and devoid of vegetation or animals or anything to eat. It was sad and moving and, unlike Alive didn’t feature a cast of white people. It also made a several-day heat wave seem like a small inconvenience.

The next day was the Fourth of July. Our celebration was underwhelming. I stuck some little American flags in the planters in front of the house and made a Facebook album of whimsical flag-related imagery I saw around town intercalated with progressive political signs because I don’t want to cede the symbols of patriotism to the right, but we didn’t do much to mark the day. Takoma Park cancelled its parade, due to the heat, and it doesn’t have a fireworks display. Noah and I considered going elsewhere to see fireworks—not the National Mall for obvious reasons—but in the end we didn’t feel up to a public transportation odyssey and gave up on the idea. I was disappointed, both about the parade and the fireworks, but more so about missing Takoma Park’s quirky and charming parade, because I do love it and I’d been expecting to go.

The other thing we usually do on the Fourth is a backyard picnic, but it was just too hot. We made picnic food (veggie dogs, devilled egg, green beans, homegrown new potatoes, corn on the cob, and watermelon) but we ate it inside.

While we were eating, North texted pictures of their own similar dinner—veggie dogs, baked beans, corn on the cob, watermelon, and the same dessert we would soon eat- vanilla ice cream with sour cherry sauce and blueberries. I sent pictures of our dinner back. It was a fun moment of connection. Beth said later she was sorry she hadn’t photographed her own dinner, which she’d already eaten with her mom, Carole, and Sean—veggie dogs, baked beans, corn, and potato salad.

We got some rain in the evening and after dinner I noticed on my weather app that the temperature was falling—all the way down to the mid-eighties—so we ate our ice cream on the porch, waiting for the rain. We gave up on it before it finally came and went inside to watch the rest of the movie. And that was our Fourth. Beth and her mom did manage to see fireworks from the banks of the Ohio River, which she noted was the same spot where she’d watched the fireworks during the Bicentennial.

Meanwhile, white supremacists were roaming DC, and the President had turned the pre-fireworks celebration into MAGA rally. (The DC fireworks didn’t start until almost midnight because of his rain-delayed speech.) In the days before the Fourth, the mediocre Great American State Fair had replaced the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, which we attend almost every year, usually not on the Fourth, but either shortly before or after to listen to music and eat food from other cultures and to get a picture by the Washington Monument. I was sad not to be able to do that this year. It’s a small thing, almost trivial when things are so dire on the home front of our nation, but small disappointments are still disappointments.

In eight days, I’m leaving to join Beth in Wheeling, possibly for the rest of the summer. We’ll be leaving Noah to tend the home fires. I’ll be sad to leave him and the cats and the garden, but I will be very glad to see Beth (and North when we road trip up to Wyandotte for a weekend soon after I arrive). If we must be in three places this summer, I will just move between them.

Enough

Posted on June 10, 2026 by Steph

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Note to North: There are some vague indications of what’s in your care package included. Read at your own risk.

First Friday:

Beth and I picked my mother up from the airport the last Friday in May, the day before we left for the beach. (Noah was going straight from work to a concert so he did not come to the airport with us.) Mom had scored a direct flight from Sacramento to DC, a rare find, but it was to Dulles and landed around rush hour, so we spent almost half as long in traffic getting from the airport to her Silver Spring hotel as she had in the air flying from the other side of the country. We were expecting it to be a long ride, though, plus we’d just reunited and had a lot to talk about, so we settled in and it wasn’t too bad.

Two days earlier we’d had a worse driving experience. The second day of the Michigan-to-home leg of our trip featured a long traffic jam in Maryland just before Frederick, and a strange noise coming from the back of the car, which lead to Beth renting a car for the beach trip because there wasn’t time to get our car seen by a mechanic. The last bit of that ride, from Frederick to Takoma Park, with the check engine light on the whole time, was quite stressful. A little rush hour traffic doesn’t compare.

We had pizza at a Matchbox near Mom’s hotel. The food was good and we were eating outside on a lovely evening, which made the terrible service easier to bear. The crazy thing about the service was that the food came after a reasonable amount of time, but when it did, we still didn’t have water, silverware, or plates. And we had to keep asking servers, several different ones, and when we finally got these things, they came one at a time with long pauses between. The pizza was cold by the time we started eating it. Mom talked with North on the phone during dinner and later that evening, they called again to give me and Beth a video tour of their apartment.

First Saturday:

That morning, we picked Mom up at her hotel, where she and Noah were reunited, and we drove to Rehoboth as a foursome. It was a smaller group than usual. North, my sister Sara, brother-in-law Dave, and niece Lily-Mei couldn’t make it this year. We’d also invited Beth’s mom and brother John and sister-in-law Abby, but they couldn’t come either.

We made a lunch stop at Taco Bell and Dairy Queen. I texted North a picture of the big red spoon they’ve attached the to the side of Dairy Queen and shared the news with them that the day before Noah had gotten a job offer at the same media company where he worked during the summer of 2024, editing video for businesses, organizations, and Democratic political candidates. His official start date isn’t until the middle of June, but he’d been going into the office on an ad hoc basis since the last week of May, so the offer wasn’t a surprise. He got an official contract to sign later that week. The job is much like the one he had two years ago, but with slightly more responsibility. Also, the office has moved from Georgetown to downtown Silver Spring, which will be a lot more convenient for him. The job will last until the election. He has worked steadily (though not full-time) this spring, editing videos for the National Association of Letter Carriers, so these back-to-back jobs will make a longer stretch of employment than he had in 2025. We are all glad about this.

We arrived in Rehoboth, unpacked, and by 5:15 I was walking on the beach while Beth went grocery shopping for dinner and breakfast ingredients. It was chilly on the beach. It was chilly for most of the week, in fact. We don’t usually come during the shoulder season, but houses are cheaper before public schools are out and back when I reserved the house we didn’t know what North’s summer job would be and as day camp counselor was a possibility I thought before school let out could work well if that was what they ended up doing. As it turned out, I was kind of sorry about coming so early because the water was cold and swimming in the ocean is one of my very favorite things.

We threw together a quick dinner of burgers, fried tofu, corn on the cob, and baked beans. Noah, who has recently become interested in basketball, watched the last NBA semifinal game.

First Sunday:

In the morning Beth did a bigger grocery shopping trip, and I took a walk to BrowseAbout because my sister had ordered a book to be delivered there for my birthday present. It turned out I had not read the notification very carefully and it wasn’t due to arrive in the store for a few more days. I didn’t feel the trip was wasted, though, as the walk was mainly along the boardwalk, and I found something I thought North would like and I bought it for a care package we were putting together. We were buying things for it all week.

We had a video call with North late that morning and they gave Mom and Noah the virtual tour of their apartment Beth and I had already had. They said their training had gone well and they seem pleased with the apartment and the neighborhood. They’d been to the movies twice and were looking forward to starting work the next day. After the call we all went out to lunch at a café that we’d never tried before.

I went to the beach in the late afternoon. I had not slept well the night before and I was tired, so I split the time between lying on my towel with my eyes closed listening to the ocean, sitting on the towel watching the ocean, and wading in the ocean up to my knees. I wasn’t tempted to go in deeper.

Mom made ravioli and salad for dinner. We went to the boardwalk twice that evening. First, Beth, Noah, and I went for a walk and got fudge at Candy Kitchen for later and ice cream and frozen yogurt, including a dish for Mom, which we brought back to her in an only slightly melted state. She did come with us because the arthritis in her left knee (the one that hasn’t been replaced) had taken a sudden turn for the worse a couple weeks earlier and the walk to the café that afternoon had been enough walking for her. She ate the ice cream and then shortly before the moon was supposed to rise, all four of us went back to the stretch of boardwalk a block from our house to watch it. It was a full moon, big, round and orangey red, rising from the horizon over the sea. Venus and Jupiter and the Big Dipper were also visible in the Western sky. It was magical.

Monday:

The next day was the first day of June, so I went on a walk that morning in search of Pride flags to photograph and post to Facebook. I found some, plus a rainbow flag poster in a storefront, rainbow crosswalks and a woman on the boardwalk in a rainbow flag t-shirt. It seemed as if I had to look harder than I expected, though. Beth and I talked about it, and she said she didn’t think Rehoboth was as much of a gay enclave as it was when we started to come here thirty-five years ago. In some ways, this is good because it means LGBTQ+ people are more integrated in society than we were when Beth and I were in our twenties, but it’s also sad to lose gay spaces. (“Kind of like the Negro Leagues,” I said because we’d recently watched part of Ken Burns’ Baseball.)

Noah went out to lunch by himself. He said when you don’t go to the beach, the experience of being in Rehoboth is “largely culinary.” As I was the only person who had even been to the beach so far, this was true for many in our party.

Speaking of going to the beach, I went in the mid-afternoon. It was still windy and cold for swimming, but I did wade almost up to my waist and spent the rest of my time there either lying on my towel, sitting in a beach chair with my wet legs wrapped up in the towel to keep warm and looking at the ocean or reading. I had to leave on the early side because we were going out for Japanese.

The Cultured Pearl is one of our favorite restaurants in Rehoboth and it did not disappoint. We were seated next to a window, and we could see one of the koi ponds out on the deck. I find these fish beautiful and fascinating. I shared seaweed salad with Beth and Noah, edamame with Old Bay with Beth and Mom (she thought she wouldn’t like it, but she did), and vegetable tempura with Noah. I did not share my slice of peanut butter pie. Mom got a seafood pasta dish and Beth and Noah got sushi and noodles and chocolate torte and a banana tempura sundae.

When we got back home, I took a short walk on the board walk to keep my blood sugar from spiking after tempura and dessert in the same meal and then Beth, Noah and I played a complicated card game called Sea Salt & Paper. It’s one of Noah’s recent acquisitions that he got to take to his games group.

Tuesday:

Tuesday morning Beth and I went to the farmers’ market and the cheese shop to get strawberries and ingredients for her dinner that night. In between she needed to take a call from her brother, so I went to a boardwalk pavilion to read a book while they talked.

My mother and I had lunch at our usual lunch spot. We eat there because it’s right off the boardwalk and many tables have an ocean view. The vegetarian fare isn’t great, but I usually make one of my rare departures from vegetarianism to eat clams there. But alas, clams were not on the menu this year. My justification for occasionally eating clams is that they do not have eyes and can never have looked me in the eye. Perusing the menu, I stopped to google “Do scallops have eyes” and they do—up to one hundred! Then I started to wonder, what if clams do have eyes so I looked that up and it turns out it depends on the species, which is something to consider for later. Anyway, I had a salad. The view was nice and we got frozen custard on the boardwalk afterward.

I went to the beach and again could only convince myself to wade in up to my waist. The water was 61 degrees according to the chalkboard on the back of the lifeguard chair and the air was only a little warmer than that. It was pleasant to read and watch the ocean, though. I saw a dolphin jump out of the water upside down (belly up). I’ve never seen that before. For a second I had trouble even understanding what I was seeing.

Beth made her signature beach week meal that night—gazpacho, salt-crusted new potatoes with cilantro-garlic sauce, fancy cheese, bread, and olives. Everyone always looks forward to this and it was delicious as always.

After dinner, Noah and I went to the boardwalk. This is the last summer the Haunted Mansion at Funland will exist in its original form. They are going to renovate it, so though he hasn’t been inside it in years, I convinced him to come with me for old times’ sake. It was the same as always—the many skeletons, the giant spider, the room full of tiny skulls Noah liked best when he was in elementary school (he figured out almost immediately that it was done with mirrors), the zombie that scared North the most when they were about the same age, and the Frankenstein’s monster that most impressed Lily-Mei in her younger years. It made me quite nostalgic for all these children, now a teen and two twenty-somethings (and only one of them with us).

The former child with me wanted to know if we could “integrate ice cream” into this outing and we did, even though I’d already had frozen custard earlier in the day. Well, I only get one summer week at the beach a year and this was it.

When we got home, Noah and I watched the season finale of The Testaments and Mom watched, too, even though she had not watched any of the nine previous episodes. She’s read the novel but by the end of the season, the plot had strayed considerably from the novel so I’m not sure how much sense it made to her.

Wednesday:

We had a mid-morning breakfast at Egg. (Is it brunch if you do it on a weekday?) As per usual in the summertime, Noah and I both got the lemon curd-blueberry crepes and I gave him one of my three and I added a poached egg to my order. Mom thought the crepes sounded so good she got them, too. Beth got a yogurt parfait. We ate on the patio. The cool weather was nice for that.

Mom and I spent some time on the front porch, talking, reading (her), and blogging (me) before lunch. Then I went for a walk on the boardwalk, dropped off a book I’d finished at a Little Free Library, picked up another one, came home and chopped some vegetables for dinner.

Mom and I headed for the beach in the late afternoon. We could only stay a little over an hour because it was my night to make dinner, but it was nice to have company and we saw both dolphins and pelicans, which my mom loves. I still couldn’t bring myself to get in the water deeper than my waist, though it occurred to me that if North were there, they probably would have talked me into it. I’d been thinking of them a lot. I knew what they would have ordered at Egg. It would have been nice to have them with us on our last trip through the original Haunted Mansion. And if they’d gotten me into the water, we probably would have had a nice talk there.

I made mushroom-walnut soft tacos with a citrus slaw for dinner. Then Mom and I retired to the porch and Beth and Noah watched For All Mankind. After that Noah switched to watching basketball and I left to take a short solo walk on the boardwalk and beach. There was honeysuckle growing at the end of our block, right before the boardwalk starts and it smelled so sweet, even more so at night. The beach and boardwalk weren’t completely deserted, but they were quiet and lovely in the gathering dark.

Thursday:

In the morning Mom and I lingered over the breakfast table and then I went for a walk on the boardwalk. Along the way, I stopped and picked up items at Candy Kitchen and the Tea & Spice Exchange for North’s care package. Mom and Noah went out for lunch.

Mom and I went to the beach and stayed from about 3:15 to almost six. This is not a long time for me to spend at the beach, but it was the longest stretch of the trip so far. It was windy, but a little warmer and the water temperature had gone up one whole degree, to 62 degrees, plus the air was in the mid-seventies. (It was the first day I went to the beach without a long-sleeved shirt over my suit.) So, I decided, this was the day I would go all the way into the water, instead of just wading.

I didn’t go in right away, though, because I thought once I got wet, I’d be cold. Mom and I talked and watched dolphins, pelicans, and ospreys and read until a bit after five and I went in. The water was cold, but I got used to it more quickly than I thought I would and stayed in about a half hour. The waves were breaking closer to shore than I would have liked for a really satisfying swim, but it was good just to be in the water at last. It was enough. I emerged feeling happy and sat on my towel, not even cold as I dried off.

Back at the house Noah wasn’t quite finished making dinner, vegetarian crab cakes (made of chickpeas, artichokes, and hearts of palm), so after I showered (in the outside shower, another beach pleasure I was experiencing for the first time on this trip), I gave him a hand. This is his traditional beach meal and Mom said it was “even better than last year” because of the crust he’d gotten on the cakes. We all watched Rental Family that night.

Second Friday:

In the morning I went to BrowseAbout to pick up the book Sara got me. Mom had almost run out of books herself, so she came along. While she was browsing about, Beth and I went to the French bakery on Rehoboth Avenue for beignets, but while I’d had good macarons there earlier in the week, the beignets were unsatisfactory, basically little glazed doughnuts, served cold. I ate mine on the boardwalk, but Beth didn’t even want hers, so we saved them for Noah.

Beth and Noah went out to lunch, then to the Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge, where they saw eagles, herons, ospreys, red-winged blackbirds, turtles, and fiddler crabs. Mom wasn’t up for a hike so she and stayed behind and we went to the beach. This time I went in right away and stayed for an hour. The ocean was calm with no big waves, but it was nice to be embraced and rocked by the water.

We went out for pizza at Grotto and then got ice cream and frozen custard on the boardwalk and sat to eat it and watch as the evening light went golden and our shadows were cast on the dunes. It would have been nice to stay longer but I wanted to get mostly packed that night to reduce morning stress and we did get mostly packed up.

Second Saturday:

Once we were checked out of the house, I went to the beach. While everyone else waited for me in a coffeehouse, I swam in the biggest waves of the week. This happens so often I started to wonder if it had something to do with location. Rather than swimming close to whatever house we’re staying in, on the last day I often swim in front of Rehoboth Ave so I can meet my family for lunch. Could it be the waves are always bigger there? I should do an experiment some future year. Anyway, it was a fun swim, except for the time I dived under a wave that was so close to the shore there was nothing under it and I ended up rolling around on the sand and almost lost my swim bottoms.

We got crepes for lunch at our usual stand, then made a last trip to the beach so Noah and I could put our feet in the water and say goodbye to the ocean. He kept his feet in the water for twenty-six waves, the number corresponding to the last two digits of the year. As we waited in line at the foot bath I told him, “If we didn’t always do this and I asked you to do it, you’d think it was crazy, but it’s fun.”

He agreed and then added “More so in summer, though.” (He does the goodbye ritual barefoot all year long. I tend to wear boots in the fall and winter.)

On our way out of town, we stopped at the Crocs outlet because North and I both needed a new pair. Theirs went into their care package and it won’t be a spoiler to read it here because Beth sent them pictures of options and they chose a flowered pair.

There was traffic coming home, so we were all tired by the time we arrived. We had dinner at a Cava near Mom’s hotel and then went home to be reunited with the cats and check the progress of the garden, and then we watched an episode of Hacks and went to bed without unpacking much or starting laundry.

Second Sunday:

In the morning, Beth and I went to the farmers’ market and then to Takoma Park Pride, which was taking place nearby. We took a selfie at the photo op station, which was draped with folds of different colored fabric and then we watched the beginning of the parade. I always enjoy this parade, which has an emphasis on children and families. There was an elementary school rainbow club, Girl Scouts, people with signs that said things like “Let Me Be Perfectly Queer:” and “Sounds Gay. I’m In,” dykes on bikes who got off them to do cartwheels in the street, and a trans woman who’s running for County Council.

We left the parade in the middle to meet Mom and Noah at her hotel and have a video call with North in the lobby, where we told them about the beach and they filled us in on their first week at work. They are going to be working a Pride event soon (for work), they were planning to see a play (on their own), and they want to adopt a cat. We have our doubts about this plan, as they are going to be moving every few months for the next year at least. They will be in Wyandotte for the summer, Oberlin in the fall, abroad (probably in Ireland) in the spring, and now they are talking about spending next summer in Sweden.

Mom, Beth, Noah, and I had lunch at Lebanese Taverna and then Noah left for his games and the rest of us left for the airport. I walked Mom inside and found an agent when the kiosk wasn’t working right. There were a lot of people wanting the agent’s attention, so once I was sure Mom was on her list, I said goodbye and Beth brought the car around and picked me up and our visit was over. Even with the small group, chilly weather, Mom’s limited mobility and all, it was still enough.

On Time, or Halfway Through

Posted on May 29, 2026 by Steph

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Friday to Sunday: Pittsburgh and Wheeling

“Everyone’s flight was on time,” Beth said, sounding pleased. We were in the Pittsburgh airport, where her brother John’s flight from Savannah and mine from National had arrived within an hour of each other and, as she noted, both on time. Beth had been staying with her mom for two and a half weeks. I was joining her for a several-day road trip to pick North up from Oberlin and take them to their summer job in Michigan and then trek home to Maryland. John was taking Beth’s place at their mom’s house.

Aside from Mother’s Day and my birthday, the weeks Beth had been gone were uneventful. I went to the dentist twice (once for a checkup and once to replace a filling) and to book club twice. At first my work was slow and Noah was busy, working six days in a row. Then his work slowed down and mine picked up. I wrote a 3,000-word booklet on homeopathy for menstrual complaints in less than two weeks. We watched Snowpiercer, Kiss of the Spider Woman, and all the available episodes of The Testaments. There was a three-day heat wave with temperatures reaching the mid-nineties, which was kind of miserable because, having no idea it was going to get that hot while Beth was gone, she and Noah had not installed our window AC units before she left and that is a Beth-and-Noah job.

Our dinner plan for Friday was for me to pick up pizza and bring it out to the baggage claim area where Beth and her mom were waiting, but I couldn’t find any place that sold slices to go, just a sit-down Italian restaurant, and I was carrying a heavy, cumbersome duffel bag and didn’t want to schlep it around any further than necessary, so I gave up and went through the Gate of No Return pizzaless. There was a little café by the baggage claim, so Beth got pasta salad and I got hummus with crudités. When John arrived, we got into the car and drove to Wheeling. I’d slept poorly the night before and Beth was also tired, so we went to our hotel almost immediately and were in bed before 9:30 and asleep soon afterward.

Saturday, we passed a quiet day, mostly hanging around Beth’s mom’s house. In the morning Beth and I took a walk in Wheeling Park, where we saw chipmunks and turtles sunning by the edge of Good Lake. John drove me back to the hotel in the afternoon so I could nap because I’d woken in at five that morning and been unable to get back to sleep and that wasn’t enough to get me caught up on sleep. That night we had Chinese takeout for dinner and paid Beth’s aunt Carole a brief visit.

Sunday to Tuesday: Oberlin and Vermillion

We left for Oberlin straight from the hotel and discovered on trying to get a podcast set up that the car speakers were broken. This led to a trial-and-error process of figuring out which podcasts in my lineup have good enough audio to play directly out of my phone. The answer was most of them.

The drive to Oberlin took three and a half hours. We arrived shortly before noon. The OSCA alumni picnic was scheduled for 12:20 and because North was organizing it, they were a little harried when we got there. At one point someone came over to tell them she couldn’t find the paper plates, while it did seem to be true that they weren’t in the order, enough plates were discovered in the OSCA office and the crisis was averted. The turnout was big, several hundred people, and the meal was vegetarian ba minh sandwiches, a zucchini sauté, and pineapple upside down cake, all of which would have been hard to eat without plates, so that was a relief. All the food was all very good and the weather held, despite some ominous looking clouds.

We were sitting at a table with a couple women from the class of 2001, as it was Commencement and fifty-year and twenty-five-year reunions that weekend. They asked North if they’d been a cook on the meal and when they said, no but they’d budgeted the meal, ordered the food, and gone on emergency grocery runs for missing ingredients, they seemed impressed. Meanwhile, it was kind of blowing my mind that people who graduated in a year that starts with 2 are legitimately middle-aged now. How can that be when I graduated in 1989?

After the meal and a speech from the outgoing president of OSCA, North went around the crowd looking for friends so they could say goodbye and we went back to their room, and assessed the state of their packing, which could be described as in progress. Beth and I left them there and took a short stroll around campus and then we all went to Dollar General to get another storage bin. From there we drove to our hotel, which was closer to Cleveland than Oberlin because Commencement had made lodging scarce. We ordered the pizza we didn’t get Friday and ate it in the room while watching two episodes from the last season of Gilmore Girls. We’ve been watching this show since North was in eighth grade, and now they are halfway through college. Halfway through college, people! How did this happen?

Commencement was Monday morning and North wanted to go because some of their friends were graduating. Beth and I did not care to attend, because honestly, graduations are boring if no one important to you is graduating. We stayed at the hotel until 9:30 a.m. and then went to Keep where we did a load of their and our combined laundry. We took turns sitting on the porch, watching our belongings while the other walked around town. While I was walking, I stopped at Slow Train for coffee. I thought it wouldn’t be that crowded because everyone would be at Commencement, but it was jam-packed with people in academic regalia and at least one young person in graduation robes, who were skipping the speeches to caffeinate. I found this amusing.

While I was on the porch, I wrote a lot of this and listened to Patsy Cline. Keep is an old building, one hundred and thirteen years old to be exact, and I liked the idea of some long before-my-time Oberlin student on this same porch, listening to Patsy Cline, on a radio or a turntable rather than a laptop, but still… It made me feel part of a long line of Keepers, as if I needed any extra reinforcement.

When North got back from Commencement, having cut out after the last person who they wanted to see cross the stage had done so, we drove to Vermillion. North has become quite enchanted with this little town on the shore of Lake Erie. They have a fantasy about moving there after graduation and opening a marriage and family therapy practice.

We had lunch at a hot dog stand that serves vegetarian hot dogs and then went down to the beach. North and I waded into the water while Beth stayed on a bench by the lighthouse. The water was a little cold, but not too bad, considering it was still May. While we were in town, they said they could live in a little white clapboard house we saw but while we were in the water, they pointed to a brick mansion right on the shore of the lake and said they’d like that one instead. I pointed out they had not made much progress on their oft-stated goal to marry rich, preferably to someone they meet in college. “And you’re halfway through,” I said.

When I got out of the water, I saw some of the 250-year flags on the beach and I realized that while this branded semiquincentennial has been annoying me because the President is tying himself so closely to it, it doesn’t have to be partisan. It could just be a celebration of our country’s history, like the 4^th of July, in which I participate without crankiness, despite some of its problematic features. I concluded being in the water had made me mellow.

We got ice cream at the Ice Creamatorium. A few of the businesses in Vermillion have macabre names, based on the history of the buildings. This one is in a former funeral parlor. There’s a B&B in a former jailhouse called The Old Vermillion Jailhouse B&B. There’s also a tattoo parlor called Asylum Ink, so I checked to see if it was on the site of an asylum, but it’s not.

We went back to the hotel where we ordered Indian and ate that, plus leftover pizza for dinner, and watched three more episodes of The Gilmore Girls.

North had to be out of their room by nine a.m. We arrived to help them move out at eight and without any discussion all got to work in different roles. Beth and I carried items to the car until there was enough for her to get started loading the car while I carried the rest out and North swept their rapidly emptying room. By 8:45 we were finished and drove the heavily loaded car to Slow Train for coffee and pastries. The line was as long as it had been the day before and even slower. It took over a half hour to get our food and drinks. Luckily, we weren’t in a hurry, and we got to meet and hang out with North’s friend Eden (who had previously expressed interest in meeting “your lesbians”) and their mother. We talked about Eden’s post-graduation plans (they are going to student teach in Chicago), which made me wonder what a conversation like this with North will look like in two years.

Tuesday to Wednesday: Near Detroit

Then we drove to Wyandotte, Michigan, where North is going to be working this summer doing marketing and event planning at group of a housing co-operatives for senior citizens. Before they start the job, though, they have a few days training at headquarters in a different suburb of Detroit. The organization was putting them up in hotel in that town, so we couldn’t see or help them move into their apartment. (Several people from the office are going to help them do that on Friday.)

We’d gotten a room in their hotel for one night, but we wanted to have a look at the area where they’d be spending the summer. It’s a nice neighborhood right on the Detroit River. The housing co-ops, both high rises, are on a wide tree-line boulevard with a lot of Victorian houses, mixed with buildings in other styles. We had lunch at a restaurant with a river view and took a stroll by the river and to both the co-ops. North will live in one, but they didn’t know yet which one (they’re only a block or two apart) so I took a picture of them outside each one. (I’ve included the correct one here.)

We picked up some groceries for North to eat while they are in the hotel and some prepared food for dinner and ate at the hotel, watching still more Gilmore Girls. On this trip, we got from about a third of the way through the last season to almost two-thirds. Before we knew North wouldn’t come home this summer, we’d intended to finish the show, which was the reason for the binge.

Wednesday was North’s first day of job training. We dropped them off at their office and began our two-day drive back to Maryland. That wasn’t easy, but I am in no position to complain about them spending the summer away from home because I didn’t come home the summer that I was twenty either. While we were walking by the river I asked them if they were nervous or excited and they said, “Both.” It’s quite the grown-up adventure and just the right time of life for it. They are right on time.

Another Stop in the Journey

Posted on May 13, 2026 by Steph

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Mother’s Day

It was a strange Mother’s Day and birthday. North’s still at school and Beth’s in Wheeling with her mom, who has not been doing well. And then on Mother’s Day Noah and I were only awake and in the same place for a couple hours. I returned from a mostly unsuccessful trip to the farmers’ market around eleven-twenty. I’d failed to find strawberries, which they’ve had the past two weeks, and which were my main reason for going. I did buy a little basil plant and got a latte from Takoma Beverage Company, so the trip was not completely in vain.

At eleven-thirty we had a three-way video call with participants in Oberlin (North), Wheeling (Beth and her mom), and Takoma Park (Noah and me). Beth and I opened our Mother’s Day presents from the kids. I opened one of Beth’s for her because it had not arrived when she left. I got two jars of fancy nut butters and Beth got some dark chocolate bars and drinking chocolate.

Noah left for his games gathering shortly after one, and I went grocery shopping, first at the co-op and then at the grocery store. Because I don’t drive and a week’s shopping is a lot of food to carry on foot or on the bus, I came home between legs of the trip to drop off my purchases (and to grab a quick, late lunch of apple slices with my new honey-peanut butter and Babybel). I was tired when I got home from the final leg and I felt a little sick, like I might be having a blood sugar crash, but I checked and I wasn’t. I lay down for a while and eventually felt better.

Early in the day I’d been wondering what to eat for dinner. Sunday is normally a leftovers night for us, but I was tired of the leftovers we had (having eaten both the lentil soup and the white bean-cheddar-broccoli casserole multiple times for lunch during the week before) and I wanted a treat. So, when I was at the co-op, I looked for something that would pair well with one of those dishes and I brought home bake-at-home spanakopita and pistachio shortbread cookies to have with the last of the lentil soup. It made a nice meal. After dinner, I talked to my mom on the phone and then read a few chapters of Julia for book club.

It wasn’t a bad day, and I did get to touch base with my wife, kids, and mom, but it made me think how a day mostly to myself seemed the height of luxury when the kids were small and I was a stay-at-home mom, but now it’s not as precious.

Birthday

My birthday was the next day, and it was less solitary. We had another video call for me to open birthday presents in the morning, I had lunch with my friends Megan and Becky, and Noah was home all day and made me a birthday cake.

On the call, I opened more nut butters, gift cards to two different coffeehouses in Takoma Park, a book, and new bath towels. (I had recently decided my towel, which is older than Noah and is ripped in two places, needed to be retired.) It was a pretty good haul.

On my way to lunch with Megan and Becky, I stopped at Starbucks and picked up my free birthday drink, a half-sweet coconut latte. I am still (mostly) boycotting Starbucks, but a free drink is a free drink and puts no money in their coffers.

Megan and Becky are both friends who date back to North’s preschool days. Megan’s daughter Talia was in North’s class and Becky taught both of our kids in Kindermusik and music classes at the Purple School, so they know each other, but they hadn’t seen each other in years, and they both seemed excited about the gathering.

We ate at the covered tables on Laurel Avenue because it’s less than two weeks until I will see North so we’re in the masking-and-not-eating-inside-restaurants window. The day was damp and cool, but not too cold for outdoor dining. Also, the arrangement allowed us to order from different establishments. Megan got a salad from Takoma Beverage Company, and Becky and I got Thai from Kin-Da (which I later realized was exactly what she and I had done for my forty-ninth birthday). We covered a lot of ground but talked mainly about our kids (who range in age from Becky’s twenty-eight-year-old daughter Eleanor to Megan’s sixteen-year-old son Nate) and about our aging parents and in-laws.

I’d taken the day off work so in the afternoon I spent hours reading Julia and finished it. I highly recommend it and I also recommend re-reading 1984 beforehand if you do. The plot fits very intricately inside the plot of 1984 in a delightful way. While I was reading, Noah was making my birthday cake—chocolate with strawberry frosting. Beth had entrusted him with the recipe and some tips for making it.

Noah and I ordered Indian takeout for dinner, ate the delicious cake, and then we watched an episode of The Testaments. I was glad about this because we were not making as quick progress through this series as I thought we would with Beth out of town (we were only up to the second episode that night—but now we’ve watched four).

I started blogging in 2007, the year I turned forty, so I have now blogged about every birthday in my forties and fifties. Instead of a toddler and kindergartener, I now have two grown kids. My wife has retired and turns sixty in the fall. Time marches on. Thanks for sharing the journey with me, whether you’ve been reading for years, or just joined.

The Boy Who Was Born That Day

Posted on May 6, 2026 by Steph

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Beth, Noah, and I spent a lot of time together the past two weekends, leading up to his birthday. We went to a film festival and a music festival, and we ate out four times. (And in between, Beth took a whirlwind trip to Chicago and she and I went to a poetry reading together.)

On the last Saturday of April, we took an expedition into the city to attend Filmfest DC and to have dinner at China Chilcano. We did the same thing (same festival, same restaurant) last year, on Noah’s birthday. This year the festival ended before his birthday, so we went the weekend before.

Film

We saw a film from Argentina, Risa and the Wind Phone, which takes place in a town in Tierra del Fuego that is still recovering from a catastrophic fire ten years earlier. Many of the characters lost relatives in the fire. There’s an out of commission phone booth where people go to talk to their dead family members. The protagonist, a ten-year-old girl, while using the phone to speak to her father, discovers that unlike other people who are using the phone as a therapeutic device, she can actually talk to the dead and the dead have requests—a lot of requests—and messages they want her to deliver. This becomes her summer project, in which she is accompanied by her babysitter and a hamster. Over the course of the film, she develops a father-daughter-like relationship with the babysitter and learns some unexpected things about her own father. It was magical and not just in a magical realism way. I highly recommend it, if it becomes available to stream.

China Chilcano is a Chinese-Japanese-Peruvian fusion restaurant. We got a lot of the same dishes we got last year, starting with yucca fries and cilantro-squash dumplings. I got Brussels sprouts with chili glaze, peanuts, and a fried egg. Beth got a cauliflower dish, and Noah got a vegetable-noodle bowl. I had a condensed milk custard with meringue and passionfruit sorbet for dessert. It was a fun outing, movie and meal both.

Theater and Novels

Sunday morning Beth left the house at dawn to fly to Chicago to see her high school friend Michelle act in Follies that afternoon. She only decided to go a few days ahead of time and stayed just one night. It was an unusually spontaneous decision for her (she kept exclaiming about it), but she was able to fly with miles, so it felt affordable.

That morning since she wouldn’t be going to the farmers’ market, I delivered baked goods (almond flour banana-chocolate chip muffins and matzoh toffee bark) to a bake sale there to benefit the Montgomery County Immigrant Rights Collective, where Beth has been volunteering since retiring. They were so grateful for the donation (which almost doubled their stock) that I felt I was getting undue credit (having only baked the muffins—Beth made the toffee bark) and I had to keep saying it was from her, too.

I spent much of the rest of the day reading, first Charterhouse of Parma (still slow going) and then 1984, finishing the second half of the latter pretty much in one sitting. I rarely read in long chunks like that anymore and it was nice.

Poetry

Tuesday evening Beth and I went to Favorite Poem Night at the library. Usually I read a poem, but I decided to just go and listen this year because I couldn’t manage to pick one; nothing was speaking to me. I think it was because two years ago I read “Hope is the Thing with Feathers,” with hope in my heart for the election and last year I read “The Mary Ellen Carter,” inspired by its message about rising up in the face of challenges, but this year I am just tired, not as fired up as I was a year ago.

I realized later this was the poem I should have read. It’s by Langston Hughes.

I am so tired of waiting.
Aren’t you,
for the world to become good
and beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife
and cut the world in two—
and see what worms are eating
at the rind.

I enjoyed the event, but I was hoping there would be a poem that would make me feel better about the power of the human spirit and that didn’t really happen. “That’s a heavy lift,” Beth said when I mentioned it in the car on the way home. Poetry does sometimes do that, though, I said. It just didn’t happen to do it for me that night.

Birthday Dinner #1

Noah turned twenty-five on Sunday. We celebrated by going out to dinner three nights in a row. We started Friday with pizza at Roscoe’s. We go out for pizza or get takeout pizza every other Friday (making it at home on the alternate Fridays), so it wasn’t unusual, but we did let him choose where to go. Earlier in the day Beth went to a May Day rally in the city, which I considered attending, but I skipped because I still had a lot of reading for book club, and I knew I wouldn’t get much of it done over the weekend because we had plans. (As it turned out I ended up taking Tuesday off work because that was the only way I was going to finish The Charterhouse of Parma in time, I had sunk way too much time into this book not to finish it, and it was looking like a slow work week anyway).

Music Festival

Saturday afternoon, we went to Porchfest in Adams Morgan. I found it a little ironic that Takoma Park has its own Porchfest we’ve never attended, and we went for the first time to a different one, but Noah wanted to go to this bigger one and we weren’t all going to be in the same place on the weekend of Takoma’s Porchfest anyway. Some of the bands do play on porches or stoops on residential blocks; others play on the sidewalk in front of retail spaces. A jazz group was playing on the balcony of Madam’s Organ.

We saw a few acts. We caught the tail end of a group called Freezer Burn playing classic rock (Beatles and the Romantics) on a stoop, before moving on to Indie band called Staring in Spaces, playing in front of a bookstore. There was a beer pong table set up in front of the tent where the band was playing. It was quite crowded and I couldn’t see very well. I could actually see the beer pong game better. But the next singer we saw, Bryce Bowyn (synth pop), was playing in a plaza in front of a bank, which was more spacious. Also, we found a concrete rectangle where we could sit and I could see, so that was nice. The singer had good stage presence and was quite the energetic dancer.

On our way to the final band that we wanted to see, La Unica (Latin-Irish), we ran into some trouble. Between people watching the band playing at Madam’s Organ and people trying to get in or out of a bar across the street or people trying to walk from point A to B (or B to A), the street and sidewalks were a total logjam. It was almost impossible to move in any direction. I have to say most people were considerate, even solicitous, but there were a lot of people and most people doesn’t translate to all people, so there was pushing and yelling. I got yelled at for not moving and for trying to move. The three of us tried to stick together but we all got separated. I finally got out of the crowd by getting into the slipstream of a big man who was managing to part the crowd. Almost immediately, I found Noah, who was waiting at the edge of the scrum, but Beth was nowhere to be seen.

Because of the size of the crowd, our phones were useless for texting, so after waiting a little while we decided to proceed to the next stage that we’d agreed upon in hopes of finding Beth there. It was in a plaza in front of an elementary school. We tried to text every now and then, but the texts would not go through. I had Noah stay in one spot in front of the stage, so I could find him, while I wandered through the crowd (looking for Beth) and then waited in a long line for the porta potties.

Through all this, I was also listening to the band, which was more Latin than Irish. There was a fiddle, but more Latin instruments. They were singing Celia Cruz and Harry Belafonte songs, among others. People in the audience did a conga line. When they finished, we waited for the crowd to clear out so we could see if Beth had been there all along, but she wasn’t. Noah finally got her on the phone, and we managed to meet up on our way to the restaurant where we’d planned to have dinner. Poor Beth had the worst of it, being more freaked out by the crush of the crowd than either Noah or me—she’d turned back, which is why she didn’t make it to the next stage—and then being alone for at least an hour while we were all trying to contact each other.

Birthday Dinner #2

It was a relief to be reunited. We had a relaxing dinner at Bua, a Thai restaurant in Dupont Circle, near the apartment where we lived from 1991 to 2002, the last year with an infant Noah. We picked it because we’d eaten dinner on the balcony of this establishment the night before Noah was born (on the day my obstetrician told me—“This baby isn’t coming any time soon”). I used to maintain it was the strong Thai iced tea that put me into labor. As a result, we have an on-and-off tradition of having Thai food the night before Noah’s birthday. We managed to get a table on the same balcony where we ate that fateful night twenty-five years ago, which made me happy. From Bua, we headed to Kramerbooks for dessert, another nostalgic spot for us. Even though Noah does not remember living in this neighborhood, it still evokes his baby year for me, so it was fun to be there on his birthday weekend.

Presents, Cake, and Birthday Dinner #3

On Noah’s actual birthday, we had a video call with North, and he opened his presents on the call. He got two gift cards to Panera, one Apple gift card from my mom, a check from YaYa, a new mouse and keyboard, and three books. It was a pretty good haul and he seemed pleased. After lunch we had his birthday cake, a strawberry lemonade cake Beth made.

In the afternoon he went out shopping for presents for Mother’s Day and my birthday and we met up in the city for dinner at an Italian restaurant we’d never tried near Union Station. It was a little higher end than our usual spots, the kind of place where they replace the silverware and wipe down the table between courses. We had focaccia, arancini, and pasta. Noah and I got the same dish, a ricotta-goat cheese ravioli in a lemon-cream sauce with spinach. While we were eating, we saw a couple tables get a flaming chocolate dessert that intrigued us. Turns out it was a piece of tiramisu enclosed in a globe of chocolate. When the server sets it on fire, the chocolate melts and reveals the tiramisu. Of course, we got it, along with a rice pudding brulée with edible flowers, and they also brought a tiny slice of complimentary chocolate cake with a candle and a birthday card for Noah. I thought the card was a nice touch.

This is what Beth posted on Facebook on Noah’s birthday:

A quarter century ago, on May 3, I ate dinner alone at a restaurant across the street from the Columbia Hospital for Women. I had a window table and I will never forget looking out onto M Street and feeling like the whole world was entirely different. And it was. I had become a parent.

Tonight I had dinner with the boy who was born that day, who has grown into a kind and thoughtful young man, and with Steph, who was recovering from an emergency c-section 25 years ago. We capped off a lovely meal with a flaming tiramisu.

So much has changed during Noah’s lifetime. In 2001 I was not his parent in the eyes of the law. But the fierceness of my love for him is the same today as it was on that very first day.

Beth left for Wheeling yesterday, two days after Noah’s birthday, and she’ll be gone a while, so it was nice to spend the last two weekends with the boy who was born that day.

Near Oberlin

Posted on April 21, 2026 by Steph

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Saturday to Wednesday: Before Oberlin

We arrived at the rental house late Wednesday afternoon. When I checked the weather app on my phone in different parts of the house over the next couple days sometimes it told me we were in Amherst, Ohio and sometimes it said Vermillion, so I guess we were somewhere in between (or the borderline runs through the house). The important part, as Beth pointed out, was that we were “near Oberlin.” Beth, her mom, and I were there to see North perform in Standing Strong, the play they’d been writing and rehearsing with a group of students since the beginning of January. They were in dress rehearsal that evening, so we wouldn’t see them until the next day.

Beth and I had driven from Takoma Park to Wheeling several days earlier. I worked from Beth’s mom’s house Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday morning, while Beth and her mom went on expeditions, out to lunch a couple times, and to see the tulips in Oglebay Park. I walked every day, either around the neighborhood, in Wheeling Park or in a nearby cemetery (where I got a little lost). We visited several times with Beth’s aunt Carole, including one time when she came over for dinner. Beth and I cooked dinner most nights and her mom raved about each meal, even simple dishes like a stir-fry or spinach quesadillas. In the evenings we watched episodes of Ken Burns’ Baseball, which Beth and her mom had started back in early March while Beth had visited without me. It starts in the nineteenth century, and I came in in the 1920s, but it wasn’t hard to pick up the thread.

The rental unit was an apartment in a house on a working farm. There wasn’t any livestock, but there were tilled fields where wild turkeys roamed, beehives, a pond, and a dead tree where eagles occasionally perched. There was also a hot tub, where Beth and I soaked for a bit before our dinner of grilled cheese and soup and another episode of Baseball.

Thursday to Friday: In Oberlin (and Vermillion)

We picked North up at Keep the next morning and went to Slow Train for breakfast (or second breakfast for some of us). North has no classes on Tuesdays or Thursdays this semester and they’d cleared the day for us. They’d invited me to come to the pool with them and their friend Camille and because I’d lost my alumni id I needed to get a new one, which involved visits to three different offices in two buildings, but it was free and it also allowed me to swim for free, so I am not complaining.

When we walked out to the pool deck, I exclaimed, “It’s my pool,” which the young people found amusing. I did used to swim there a lot, especially in my sophomore and senior years. North and Camille hung out in the rec lane and chatted while I swam laps, but only for about thirty-five minutes because I didn’t want to make people wait for me.

While I was using a kickboard and had head my head out of the water, I inspected the records on the walls of the pool, as I did the last time I swam at Oberlin (when North was a prospective), looking for the oldest ones and I found some diving records dating back to the 80s I hadn’t noticed the last time. The very oldest one was from 1983, two years before my first year at Oberlin. I like to think of the woman who holds it, now in her sixties, checking every now and then to see if her forty-plus-year-old record stands, and being satisfied that it does. After we were finished, I showered and Camille headed off to the sauna, and North and I left to meet up with Beth and Yaya outside the gym.

We went into Vermillion for lunch, mainly because we wanted to go back to the old-fashioned ice cream parlor we’d discovered there in January. We had lunch at a pub, chosen because it has fried pickles on the menu and North likes those. Then we got ice cream. (North got a root beer float, another favorite of theirs.) We lingered inside because it was pouring rain, but then it cleared up and we took a stroll down to the shores of Lake Erie, where we admired the lighthouse and saw a heron in the water.

We took North to see the house where we were staying. They made themselves some mint tea and curled up with a sudoku book they found there, then they used the hot tub. I didn’t feel like showering again (I have to every time I’m in chlorinated water or my skin gets itchy) so I perched on the edge and soaked my feet and calves.

While we were at the house, I told North, who had just accepted a summer internship in Wyandotte, Michigan (near Detroit), that I was happy for them and proud of them, even though I was sad they weren’t coming home for the summer. I felt it needed to be said because I had accidently posted in the family group chat that I was sad, thinking I was texting just Noah. It’s true, I am happy for them and proud of them. The job is doing marketing and event coordinating for a housing co-operative for senior citizens. They wanted something a step up from canvassing or camp counseling and they showed a lot of hustle applying for jobs. I understand, too, because I didn’t come home the summer after my sophomore year of college either.

We had an early (but not early enough) dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Oberlin. North had bubble tea and some vegetable dumplings but had to leave before the entrees arrived to get to the theater by their call time. We packed up their food for them to eat after the show. When the fortune cookies came, mine said I would soon learn to appreciate the little things in life and Beth’s mom said she thought I already did, based on my Facebook posts. That made me feel seen because that’s one of the main ways I try to use Facebook. We left the restaurant and walked to the theater.

When we entered the theater, we saw four huge banners, each with the face of three cast members. Of course, we chose seats with the best view of North’s face.

Here’s the official Theater Department description of the show:

Standing Strong is inspired by the courage, complex points of views and identities of a group of diverse and multi-talented students, utilizing dance, music, acting, personal stories and original writing. The piece is designed to immerse performers and audiences in reflections, triumphs, and challenges facing young people today.

It was a series of songs, dances, and vignettes, some based on personal experience, some fictional (and in many cases satirical). Topics included race, gender expression, disability, and the current political situation. The actors were in their own pieces and each other’s. North had to play the racist in three different sketches. I speculated later that the director wanted to have one actor do them all to signal to the audience what was coming. Still, North found that challenging.

During the months of rehearsal, North had found it tiring and painful to stand for so long, so they decided to perform the whole show in a wheelchair. The first piece they wrote was about wheelchair accessibility, they had another that recreated a group therapy session from their high school years and dealt mainly with their eating disorder, and there was another segment in which they recited quotes from my blog, all from 2025. The posts described a Free DC protest, a birthright citizenship rally, my reactions to people being seized from our neighborhood by ICE, and my appreciation for the bravery of immigrant communities in these times.

I knew this was going to happen ahead of time, but it was even more emotional than I thought it would be, magical really, to see my words come to life on the stage. In one of the protest scenes, the crew had recreated all the signs I described. The whole show was very good, better than I expected, only because over the past couple months, North kept trying to lower our expectations, saying they didn’t think there was a strong enough throughline. (This was one of the reasons Noah didn’t make the trip with us.)

We didn’t have room in the car for the wheelchair, so North wheeled back to Keep, and I waited for them on the porch with the bouquet we bought for them and their dinner. I was sitting on the wide concrete ledge atop the brick wall that lines the porch stairs, nostalgically thinking of all the times I’d sat there when I was twenty, often talking for hours with friends, when I spotted my own twenty-year-old child, flanked by two friends coming down the sidewalk. It was a full circle kind of moment, even before another friend of North’s who was sitting on a couch on the porch saw me greet North and after North introduced us said to them, “It’s like your face on another person!”

The next morning, we had another (second) breakfast at Slow Train and then we took a short stroll around campus and back to Keep, where North showed YaYa their room. They had an exam in the Psychology research methods class that afternoon and another show that evening, so we left around eleven-thirty and drove back to Wheeling.

Friday to Monday: After Oberlin

We stayed in Wheeling a few more days. I spent a lot of time reading. We’re reading Charterhouse of Parma for book club (which honestly is kind of a slog), and I was also re-reading 1984 in preparation for Julia, which we’ll read in May. It’s my third time reading 1984 and this time around I am really admiring the tight construction of the plot.

We went to Carole’s again and visited with Beth’s aunt Susan’s daughter Carissa and her daughter Lacey. As we were telling them about North’s summer job and the fact that they won’t be coming to the beach, which I thought was relaying in a neutral tone, Carole said to the room at large, “Steph is heartbroken” in her characteristic matter-of-fact tone.

Later Beth and her mom went to the Fiestaware outlet and got some bowls, ramekins, mugs, and plates, including a cool little black plate with a Mexican sugar skull on it for me.

Beth’s brother John and his wife Abby were arriving for their own visit to Beth’s mom on Monday afternoon, so we stayed long enough to see them for a little while before hitting the road, laden with Heath bar cookies Abby made plus Snickerdoodles Susan made.

We’re home now, but always in our hearts, near Oberlin.

(Re)Birth

Posted on April 5, 2026 by Steph

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Birthright

The Wednesday after North left to go back to school, Beth and I went to a rally outside the Supreme Court while the justices were hearing a case about birthright citizenship. The President was inside listening, too, and according to the Post, when he left in the middle of proceedings, passersby “offered a range of gestures.” We didn’t see him, as he left from another side of the building, but Beth said she would have liked to offer a range of gestures if she’d had the chance.

What we did see was several hundred people with signs. Ours were pre-printed ones we picked up there that said, “It’s literally in the Constitution.” But there were plenty of hand-lettered ones that said, “Citizenship is a Birthright,” “ICE Out” (held by a man in a blue bunny hat), “Keep Your Hands Off the 14^th,” “Immigrants Pay Taxes Billionaires Won’t. Deport Billionaires,” “Together, We Are America,” and “Born Here, Belong Here.” The Rapid Response Choir was singing and people played drums.

Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.,” Beyoncé’s “Freedom,” Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” and other thematically appropriate songs played before the speakers got started. Honestly, none of them were particularly memorable (partly because some were hard to hear) but it was notable that a descendent of Wong Kim Ark spoke. And that turned out to be important because there were some hecklers arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment only applied to nineteenth-century freedman, so it served as a reminder that applying the amendment to immigrants is long-established precedent.

I was wearing my “I Stand with Immigrants” t-shirt and someone approached me wanting a picture because she was part of the organization that designed the shirts. I said I’d had it since the first Trump administration (when they were handed out at a rally for the Dreamers), and she said, “I guess it’s a timeless message” and I agreed, it’s evergreen. Later I saw someone else in the crowd with the same shirt, which has never happened before, though I’ve worn it to many protests in the past fourteen months, a lot more often than in the first administration.

We left before the event was over because it was a workday for me, but I was glad to have gone. It feels as if a lot about our country’s identity is riding on how we decide to treat the children of our newcomers.

Re-Birth

Noah worked from Monday through Thursday that week, but he was off Friday, and I didn’t have much work either, and Beth was free after her ICE watch shift, so it seemed like a good day to dye eggs. We had a kit Beth had picked up for sale just after Easter last year, that claimed to produce neon eggs, but the colors turned out like those from a regular kit. The enclosed stickers were in the shapes of neon tubes, however, so maybe that’s what it meant. There was also a glitter packet. Beth tried it out, but it didn’t stick very well. Noah created a batik effect by dyeing an egg yellow, drawing stars on it with white crayon and then re-dyeing the egg blue. It came out nicely. I made two two-toned eggs and used the stickers to spell out “Resist” surrounded by rainbows on the yellow/green one and “No” on top of a crown on the pink/purple one. And of course, we also used the face stickers and the little felt hats we’ve had for ages.

Saturday, I made a batch of almond flour banana chocolate chip walnut muffins because we had a lot of little baggies with frozen overripe bananas in the freezer—I found seven separate bags, some with tiny little stubs of frozen banana. By the time I’d combined them all and mashed them I had 1 ¾ cups, which was enough for my purposes. Beth had asked if we could donate half the batch to the immigrant aid bake sale that’s at the farmers’ market every week. I was glad to be contributing to a good cause, so when we found out the sale was cancelled that week, due to people being away for the public schools’ spring break, we decided to freeze them for the following week.

We’re not religious, so our Easter observation consists of dyeing eggs and eating candy. Sunday morning, I gave Noah his Easter basket with little ceremony shortly after he got up. We’d just we discovered the cats intently watching a wasp on the living room window and to save them from getting stung we removed them to another room while the wasp was caught and released outside. I came out of the room where I’d shut them up carrying the basket and handed to him after he let the wasp go. I’d been resisting the Easter candy (mostly) for weeks, so I had a Reese’s egg after lunch and before my daily walk in hopes the exercise would prevent a spike. It did blunt the rise.

On the walk, I took pictures of flowers, purple ones because it was Easter. I had a lot to choose from: lilacs, redbud, wisteria, grape hyacinth, and a budding iris right outside our fence. I do appreciate all the symbols of rebirth you see this time of year in the form of chocolate bunnies and eggs as well as the real rebirth of the natural world, so reliable and beautiful, no matter what else is happening around us.

Happy Passover and Happy Easter to those of you who celebrate. Whether you do or not, I hope you feel at least a glimmer of hope and renewal in these lovely spring days.

#SpringBreak

Posted on March 31, 2026 by Steph

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North was home for spring break and returned to school two days ago. If you follow me on Facebook, you’ve seen a lot of what we did, tagged #SpringBreak, but here’s more detail about how it all went down:

First Saturday: Hugs and Heights

“Hug again,” I instructed Beth and North. We were in the parking lot of the Shady Grove Metro station where Jaden, their ride from school, had dropped them off. I’d hugged them when we met and then Beth hugged them and I tried to get a picture, but I wasn’t quick enough, so they reenacted it.

Later that evening they were teasing me about the posed photo and I protested, saying the original hug was spontaneous. It wasn’t as if I’d forced them to do it for a picture. And then Noah said it wasn’t as if I’d created an AI image of the two of them hugging. North said that would be surprising, first if I did it and second if I knew how to do it.

When this conversation took place, we were in another parking lot, this one at North’s high school. We were walking toward the building to see the closing night of the spring musical, In the Heights. North didn’t expect to see too many people they knew on stage as it’s been almost two years since they graduated—and they said it felt strange to walk into the building— but they like the show and they were curious to see it.

It was an ambitious production, with hundreds of students involved, between the large cast, the crew, and the pit orchestra. There’s a new theater director and by choosing a play with mostly Latino characters, she brought in a lot of students who haven’t been in the theater program previously. (The school is about half Latino.) She also took advantage of the fact that the school has a large and well-regarded salsa dancing club. The club did all the choreography, and it was fabulous. Unfortunately, the sound system wasn’t the best and it was often hard to hear the dialogue, especially from the boy playing Usnavi. So, it was lucky that three of the four of us saw this play just a year ago on North’s last spring break and were familiar with the plot. And North did end up seeing some people they know—a few on stage and some fellow STAGE alums in the audience. They met up with Rowen (who came with us to In the Heights last year) and Arwen in the lobby during intermission.

We got home late for us, around ten-thirty. I pointed out it was the second night we’d been out in the evening because the night before Beth and I had gone to see a performance of music and poetry on the theme of sanctuary (performed largely though not entirely by immigrants) at the community center.

Beth said, “We like the night life, baby.”

“But we really don’t,” I said. Noah’s the only one of us who likes to stay up late. Even the college student wanted to go straight to bed, after a long day featuring a drive from Ohio and a show.

First Sunday: Flora and Fauna

On Sunday afternoon, while Noah was at his weekly games gathering, Beth, North and I went to Brookside Gardens. It was one of the warmest days of their break, a beautiful day with highs in the low eighties and no humidity and it seemed incumbent on us to get outside. We saw daffodils and flowering trees, turtles sunning on a log, and sculpture in the shape of a crow, ginkgo leaves, and a frog.

Once we got home, we started watching shows we hadn’t watched since we were with North in Oberlin for their surgery in January (North and I watched one episode of Emily in Paris and Beth, North, and I watched two of Gilmore Girls). Over the course of North’s break, we finished the current season of Emily in Paris (which North thinks has gone on longer than it needed to, but they want to see it through to the end to see if Emily and Gabriel end up together.) I am wondering if we can finish Gilmore Girls, which we started the summer North was fourteen, this summer.

Monday: Birthday, Blossoms, Banana Cold Foam, and Beyond

When North came into our bedroom on Monday morning, Beth and I sang “Happy Birthday” to them. We discovered that morning that the cherry trees that line the street that runs along our back yard had burst into bloom overnight, as if to mark the birthday of our cherry blossom baby. Cherry trees have a wide range of bloom periods, but the ones on our block track well with the ones at the Tidal Basin. We thought from the original prediction of peak bloom that North might miss it, but now everything looked good for a Friday expedition. This was cheering.

After a discussion about the moral implications of picking up their birthday reward drink from Starbucks when we have all been boycotting it since the strike started last fall, I confessed I had just been there the day before for the first time in over four months to claim a reward for expiring stars. North decided it was okay if they didn’t spend any money, just took a free drink. (My calculation had been the same when I got a free slice of strawberry-matcha loaf.) So that morning North and I took a bus to downtown Takoma, got a free venti iced latte with banana cold foam from Starbucks, then went to Takoma Beverage Company, where I got a latte for myself and a chocolate croissant to split.

We walked home and took a detour to the hospital parking lot where there are still scattered remnants of the glacier-like ice pile that has been there since late January. I have been fascinated by its slow melting and wanted to show it to North, and they were polite enough to indulge me by going to look at several two-month-old, four-foot-tall mounds of dirty ice. (It used to be twelve feet high and at least eighty feet long.) Next, we walked down the length of the block of Garland that has a couple dozen blooming cherry trees. It was as if we were performing a symbolic walk from winter to spring.

When we got back home, there was a chocolate cake cooling on the dining room table, and Beth was getting started on the strawberry-cream cheese frosting.

Around lunchtime, North got a call from my mom and sister, who were on a layover in Seattle on their way to Alaska, where they (and Dave and Lily-Mei) were taking a trip to celebrate Sara’s fifty-fifth birthday and see the Northern Lights. They sang “Happy Birthday” to North and they must have failed to confer with each other ahead of time because they both sang the harmony part. Apparently, Dave and Lily-Mei did not care to sing in the airport. It was a short call because they were in a hurry, but it was nice of them to think of North.

That evening, after North’s requested dinner of mushroom ravioli and vegetarian sausage, we had cake and ice cream and North opened presents. Our main present to them was to pay for a second tattoo, but they also had checks from the grandmothers, gift certificates to the closest coffeeshop to our house and the closest book store, maple sugar candy, a box of caramels with a cherry blossom pattern on them, and two crochet kits (one to make an apple and one to make Snoopy). We let them choose the evening entertainment. They chose Juno, which we all enjoyed.

I had been a little sad that this was North’s first birthday without a celebration with friends because none of their closest friends from high school was home for break the same week as them, but then I found out their college friends are throwing them a party after break, so I was less sad.

Tuesday: Coffee, California Tortilla, and Clothes

North had a psychiatrist appointment in the morning, so I met up with them afterward for coffee and tea at Lost Sock, which is on the same block in Takoma, DC. Then Beth swung by to pick us up, drop me at home, and take North shopping for clothes with their birthday money.

They came home in the mid-afternoon with leftovers from their lunch at California Tortilla, rave reviews for the new quinoa base there, a pair of embroidered jeggings and a yellow high-waisted bikini for North and a pair of striped grey and white pants for Beth.

I made breaded tofu sticks, carrots, and strawberry-applesauce for dinner. North said, “Thank you for making tofu sticks when I was home because you love me.” This meal is a favorite of theirs. That night we watched a couple episodes of Grownish. The shows in the Blackish universe (Blackish, Mixedish, and Grownish) are another longstanding family viewing commitment (since North was eleven!) and we were close to finishing. (We finally did several days later.)

Wednesday: Swimming and Cinema

What spurred North to buy a bathing suit was that I’d asked if they wanted to go swimming while they were home. (They hadn’t brought one home and needed a new one for summer anyway.) So, with the new suit procured, North and I went to the new recreation center in Silver Spring, where Beth goes frequently since retiring, but where I’ve only been once before (last month). Beth couldn’t go with us because she had an appointment to take her car to the shop. There’s a café in the lobby, which we patronized before swimming and soaking in the hot tub.

From there we proceeded to Panera where we had lunch, and then to a movie theater where we saw undertone. This is not Beth’s kind of movie, but we think Noah, as the family’s cinephile would have had interesting things to say about its innovative use of sound. Unfortunately, he couldn’t come. For the past several weeks, he’s been working two to three days a week editing a series of short videos for the National Association of Letter Carriers and he never knows until right before the work comes in when he will have to work, as the project is passing back and forth between several people. Anyway, because of this, thinking he might have work we ended up not going one the one day all three of us could have gone (Tuesday). I was bummed about that.

That night North made a cucumber salad with vegetarian chicken and a topping made of smashed tater tots and I went to book club to listen to the opening lecture on The Charterhouse of Parma. I’d stopped reading it after three chapters because I thought I needed the historical background on the Napoleonic wars and other cultural factors before I continued with it and the lecture was clarifying. While I was gone, everyone else watched Twinless.

Thursday: Trip to Tattoo

This was the day North got their tattoo (of a branch of cherry blossoms) under their collarbone. They’d selected a studio in Southern Maryland, near St. Mary’s, which is two and half hours away, so we made a day trip out of it. While they were getting the tattoo, Beth and I took a pretty hike on a trail that was mostly in the woods with occasional views of the St. Mary’s River.

Later North told us that the tattoo artist and the receptionist were a lesbian couple who want to raise kids, and they were full of questions about having lesbian moms. From their curiosity, North concluded that having lesbian parents is not as common in Southern Maryland as it is in Takoma Park or Oberlin.

Afterward we picked them up, we had a late lunch at Noodles & Company and got frozen custard at Rita’s. There was a lot of traffic coming home, so by the time we got home, Noah, who’d been working that day, was making dinner (gnocchi with fresh mozzarella and cherry tomatoes).

Friday: Chilly Cherries

Friday morning, North wanted to go to Koma to use their gift certificate. If you’re counting, this was the sixth coffeehouse we patronized together in the first seven days of their break. We swung by the hospital parking lot ice piles on the way home and found them smaller than four days earlier but still there. North and I finished our season of Emily in Paris and Beth helped them do their taxes and in the early afternoon all four of us set out to see the cherry blossoms.

It was a chilly, gray day, in the low fifties with intermittent rain, but we had plans for the next day, so it was this day or never and never wasn’t really an option. We had pretty good luck in that the rain mostly held off while we were at the Tidal Basin, and the blossoms were perfect puffs of pale pink and white. North posed, pulling the collar of their sweater down to show off their cherry blossom tattoo. A couple saw Noah taking pictures with a real camera and must have sized him up as a good photographer and asked him to take their picture (with their phone). We finished up with visits to the MLK and FDR Monuments, as those are our favorites. It was a nice expedition, marred only slightly by seeing at least a half dozen National Guardsmen near the MLK Memorial. And honestly, nowadays, when I see them, I think at least it’s not ICE.

On the way home, we picked up North’s favorite pizza (from Roscoe’s) and then watched A Date for Mad Mary, which Beth had put in the movie pool around St. Patrick’s Day because it’s Irish. (The random drawing part of our movie selection process means seasonal picks are often watched early or late.)

Saturday: Democracy and Death

Beth and I went to No Kings 3 on Saturday. In the driveway, before I got in the car, I stopped for a minute to pet UNO because he was approaching me and meowing. (I was glad later that I did that and didn’t hurry into the car.)

We could have walked to a No Kings action from our house, as we did in June, or go to a big one in D.C., as we did in October, but instead we drove an hour and a half west to Hagerstown, where an ICE detention facility is planned. On the way, we saw people crowded onto at least six Beltway overpasses with signs. One of my favorites was “No Kings, Only Queen,” with a picture of Freddie Mercury.

We’d packed lunch and ate in in the parking garage, then we proceeded to No Kings. People were spread out along four blocks radiating from an intersection, about a quarter to a half block in each direction, several rows deep near the middle and sparser at the ends. There were columns of balloons in each of the colors of the Maryland flag (red, gold, black, and white) with a No Kings crossed out crown on top at each of the corners.

There was a stage with someone leading chants and a few speakers. I often couldn’t hear who they were, but one was the comptroller of Maryland, who apparently has some role in authorizing the facility, and is against it. A lot of local officials are for it, thinking it may bring economic development. Western Maryland one of the more conservative parts of the state. Hagerstown went for Trump by about 60%.

That’s why I was surprised that the reaction from passing cars was so overwhelmingly positive. There was only car from which people yelled out obscenities. Some drivers had no reaction, but around half were honking, smiling, waving, and giving thumbs up. Some cars were circling around repeatedly, though, presumably to increase support. I have no idea how much of the crowd was, like us, outside agitators from more liberal parts of the state.

After standing awhile, I wandered through the crowds to get a look at the signs. I liked “Grantifa: Grandmas Against Fascism,” and “Salt the Roads: Keep ICE off Our Streets,” but the best one was held by a Latino family whose members were taking turns holding it: “We Are Not Animals & You Are Not King.” There weren’t a lot of Latinos in the crowd, and I thought they were brave to be there.

I ducked into a coffeehouse to use the bathroom and get a coffee and a dark chocolate bar. When I exited, I saw two twelve- or thirteen-year-old white boys go by on scooters. One said to the other, “Are they against ICE?” and the second one said yes and the first one said, “I support that,” which I took to mean they supported the protest, but I was wrong. Later I saw the same two boys had gone to the sign making station and gotten supplies to make “Trump is King. Support ICE” signs and then aggressively positioned themselves in front of a woman with a camera.

We stayed almost two hours and drove home. Shortly after we got back, we got a group text from Rose, one of UNO’s people, letting us know that in the few hours we were gone, he’d been seriously injured and they had to put him down. It was a shock because I’d just seen him and he’d been fine. It feels so strange not to have to check for him in the driveway before we pull out, or to think the next time I take Walter outside, he won’t be able to eagerly follow an utterly uninterested UNO around the yard. He was old for an outside cat, at least fifteen, and as Beth said, “he lived his best life.” Still, we are very sad and we will miss him.

Sunday: Goodies and Goodbye

Sunday morning, North was in the living room watching television, Noah had yet to get up, and Beth was gathering tote bags to go shopping. I came into the room holding something behind my back. And told North, “I just saw a big rabbit leave your room.” Their eyebrows shot up and I brought the Easter basket forward and they laughed.

It was a week before Easter, but it seemed nicer to give it to them in person rather than mailing the candy. They dug in immediately.

Shortly after lunch, we all got in the car to take North back to the Shady Grove Metro parking lot, where we met Jaden. After we were all surprised by seeing someone in a Santa suit entering the station, we said our goodbyes, dropped Noah off at Panera for his Sunday games, and then headed home for an afternoon and evening alone in our suddenly emptier nest. It won’t be long until we see North again, though, as a road trip to see them act in a play in mid-April is in the works.

Six Years, Not Back to Baseline: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 85

Posted on March 16, 2026 by Steph

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Getting Covid

When North was home for winter break in December, they got covid and Noah and I were sick, too. He and I never tested positive, but we only tested once each, so it’s possible that we had it, too. If all three of us did, it would be the third time North’s had it, the third for me, and the second for Noah. Beth has only had it once (as far as we know). The pattern seems to be that some combination of us gets it about once a year since the fall of 2022, which was the first time it breached the perimeter of our family.

Negotiating Covid

One night at dinner during that same break, North said they often get sick at home and made a request that the rest of us resume masking in public, at least while they’re home and for two weeks before each time they come home. So, we masked when we left the house for the rest of their time at home and again before and during our trips to Wheeling and Oberlin in December and January.

North never stopped masking and is part of a group called Covid Safe Oberlin that distributes masks and advocates for masking. This puts them in a small minority even in the liberal enclaves of Oberlin and Takoma Park. But I do still see more people out and about in masks than I did before covid. It’s one of the covid-era changes that never went all the way back to baseline.

Beth, Noah, and I are not masking when North’s at school, so I circled March 7 on the calendar (two weeks before the day North comes home for spring break) so we would remember to start again. The day before that when I reminded Noah, a series of conversations unfolded, first just between me and him (Beth was in Wheeling visiting her mom) and then between the three of us when Beth came home the next day and then between all four of us during our weekly Sunday morning video call.

It turns out we are not all in accord about how to handle masking in the long term, especially when North comes home for the summer and we’re kind of at an impasse. But during the run-up to their spring break, we have continued masking—at the grocery store, the gym, and a museum (Beth); coffeeshops, public transportation, and book club (me); and public transportation, Panera game night, and a concert (Noah). We will have to revisit the issue for summer and see if we can find a workable compromise.

Before these discussions, when Noah and I were sick again in late February and early March, he decided not to go to his game night, and I decided to get takeout rather than dine in when I wanted to patronize a local Mexican/Salvadoran restaurant’s fundraiser for immigrant aid. I also masked before going in to pick up the food. I think pre-covid we wouldn’t have been as careful about not spreading our germs, especially with something that just felt like a mild cold. In varying degrees, we are all more careful about contagion. The problem is the variance.

Not Getting Covid

Of course, not every illness is covid. Last summer North and I each thought we might have it, but we didn’t. North spent a week at the beach with friends in June and came back with pinkeye and an upper respiratory infection. They tested negative for flu and covid, and it turned out to be a sinus infection. Similarly, when I was sick in June and July with a sore throat that lasted for several weeks, I was tested for covid, strep (twice), and flu and all the tests were negative. I never did find out what it was.

In the interest of not getting covid, or at least getting milder cases of it, we do get the covid vaccine every fall, along with the flu vaccine.

Remembering Covid

As the crisis phase of covid recedes further into the past, it can be hard to remember what it was like, or rather, how long certain phases of it lasted. I recently read the graphic novel Spent, by Alison Bechdel, which takes place in Vermont from the fall of 2022 to spring 2024. It’s not about covid, but it’s often in the background. Some characters get it. Some are shown masked in stores. And there’s a scene early in the book in which the characters attend a party, everyone takes a covid test at the door, and no one enters the house until they get their results.

At first, I wondered—were such precautions still widespread so far into the pandemic? And of course, it depended a lot on where you lived and (sadly) your political orientation. But when I thought about it, I realized fall 2022 was North’s junior year of high school and the beginning of their psychiatric crisis. I remember them having to test to be admitted to the psych unit and the partial hospitalization program they attended and being masked when we visited them and when I went to North’s school to update all their teachers about the situation. So, I guess that scene is credible, especially in liberal social circles.

Then after going through this thought process, I came across a post about masking from early March 2023 in my Facebook memories. I asked, “Are you still masking. Where and where not?”

Answers ranged from, yes everywhere outside the house to we never really did except where it was required (this from my cousin who lives in Idaho), with a lot of people in between making decisions based on locale. This is what I had to say:

Thanks, friends. I still mask almost everywhere indoors in public (and on trains and buses). Thinking of loosening up but trying to decide what the new parameters will be. We ate inside a restaurant tonight and it felt odd, even though it was a big space and nearly empty.

So that’s where we were almost exactly halfway between the beginning of the shutdowns and now. It was several more months until I stopped masking on a regular basis. I remember this because I’d just stopped when we started again in August 2023 after North came home from camp with covid, but that didn’t last long.

Gathering, After Covid

It seems kind of crazy that we are still experiencing post-covid firsts, six years after the virus upended our lives. But we are. Here are a couple from the past year:

7/11

We attended Takoma Park’s quirky little parade in the morning. We used to go almost every year, but between cancellations for covid in 2020 and 2021 and various people’s travel the next three years, we hadn’t been all together since 2019, so that was fun.

10/4

She answered, “Steph. I haven’t seen you since that other wedding. The one that didn’t take.” Here is a good time to explain Sara has had three weddings. One in her late twenties, the one to which Abigail was referring. Then in her late forties, during the first summer of covid, she legally married Dave in an outdoor ceremony with a handful of local friends who would not need to travel during those perilous times. This third wedding was the party with a wider circle of family and friends Sara wanted and couldn’t have five years ago.

And this doesn’t affect us directly, but I was interested to learn from our friend and the kids’ old preschool teacher Lesley that the school, which became an all-outdoor school during the pandemic, just this fall back went to a hybrid indoor/outdoor model.

8/13

During covid, the school stayed open by becoming an outdoor school and it has stayed that way ever since. But starting this next school year, they are going hybrid, and the inside space has been re-imagined. Most of the interior walls have been knocked out and there are circular windows in some of the remaining walls that let you see from room to room. The whole back wall is sliding glass doors. The idea is to let you see more of the outdoors from any part of the building, which is very much in keeping with the nature-based philosophy of the school.

The Purple School is not quite back to the way it used to be, because a lot of things aren’t. Beth’s office, for example, never required people to come back to work in person and once people did start coming back it was mostly on an as-needed basis. Before she retired, she was only going into the office about once a week, occasionally twice.

Not all the changes covid caused were bad. Beth preferred working at home to working in the office and Lesley helped scores of young children forge a deeper relationship with nature when they stayed outside. One thing covid did, I guess, was to allow us to reimagine the status quo and consider if we even wanted to go back to baseline.

I realize there’s a certain amount of privilege in these examples. Not everyone has a flexible office job or sends their kids to private preschool. Some D.C. area public school systems have been using remote instruction during weather-related cancellations since covid, though, so there’s at least some wider applicability. Also, the tents in downtown Takoma Park that were erected for outdoor dining early in the pandemic are being replaced by a wooden gazebo so the restaurants on Laurel Avenue will now have outdoor seating for the foreseeable future.

Is there any aspect of your life that changed six years ago and never completely went back to the way it was?

A Richer Place

Posted on February 22, 2026 by Steph

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We welcomed the Year of the Fire Horse at the National Museum of Asian Art yesterday. We arrived about a half hour before the lion dance was scheduled to start so we wandered around the museum, looking at early modern Japanese pottery and ancient Iranian metalwork. Have you ever heard about the tradition of mending broken pottery with gold and how this practice could be seen as a symbol of how our scars can be seen as something that makes us stronger or more beautiful? I feel like I see it all the time on social media and I don’t know if that was the original symbolic intention, but I did see a pot like that, which was kind of cool.

We went outside to the steps of the museum, which were crowded with people who had come to watch the lion dance. It started about fifteen minutes late and the couple behind us was having a protracted discussion about whether it was worth continuing to wait. It was. There were two full-sized lions (one purple and one red), with two adults inside each, and one orange baby lion with two small children inside. The three lions danced to the music of the drums and received red envelopes from a few members of the crowd and pretended to gobble fortune cookies out of a basket on the ground and then threw the cookies to the crowd. The baby lion had a chaperone, an adult not in costume who followed it around and gave it instructions when it got off course. It was seriously cute.

We used to go to see the Lion Dance in Chinatown occasionally when we lived in D.C., and I think we might have taken Noah once when he was very small (pre-blog). Seeing the tiny children inside the dragon costume did shake loose a memory I hadn’t thought of in ages. One year one of my grad school professors at the University of Maryland invited her students to see a lunar new year performance at her small son’s Chinese dance school, followed by a buffet feast. Try as I might, I could not remember her name or even what class she was teaching but I remember her son’s first name, even though I only met him once. It was Logan, which his mother explained his parents gave him because it was an English name that sounded like a Chinese one. (The child was biracial.) It’s funny the little glimpses into other people’s lives we remember years later. Given that this event happened about thirty years ago, Logan could have his own kid old enough to learn the lion dance by now.

When the dance was over, we headed over to the Arts and Industries Building, where there were food and crafts booths and more performances. I initially had some trouble finding food that was both vegetarian and not too diabetic-unfriendly, but I ended up with eggrolls, a tofu dish, and half a small and very expensive Korean black sesame seed cheesecake, which I shared with Noah. Beth and Noah had noodles, and she got a Vietnamese bahn mi sandwich, which is a favorite of hers. Everything was delicious. I only regretted that I couldn’t have a Thai iced tea. I used to love those, but they are super sweet and I have yet to try one since diabetes. We briefly listened to some Mongolian singers before heading home.

As we walked across the Mall, headed back to the Metro, I was feeling emotional about multiculturalism. When the kids were small and we’d go to the Folklife Festival (which, sadly, has been cancelled for this year in favor of some fake State Fair* on the mall) or to Takoma Park’s Fourth of July parade and we’d be watching musicians and dancers from all over the world and eating food from different cultures I would so often talk to the kids about how the United States is a country of immigrants that one year when Noah was around twelve he interrupted and supplied the lesson himself. But it’s true. I like living in a country and a region with a lot of immigrants. I think it makes us stronger and more interesting.

So that’s one reason Beth has gotten involved with a local organization that helps support immigrant communities. She’s not sure what she’ll be doing yet—maybe delivering groceries to people who are afraid to leave their houses, maybe observing drop-offs and pickups at our kids’ old majority-Latino elementary school in case ICE shows up. It’s a way to protect and give back to the people who make our home a culturally richer place.

By the way, I read that the year of the fire horse, which happens only every sixty years is supposed to “bring intense, fast-paced change.” That could certainly be good or bad. Let’s keep our fingers crossed for good.

*No shade to real state and county fairs, which I really like.

All For The Love Of You

A Chronicle of Suburban Lesbian Family Life

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Six Years, Not Back to Baseline: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 85

A Richer Place