About Steph

Your author, part-time, work-at-home writer.

Red, White, and Blue

We had a quiet few weeks after No Kings. We didn’t go to any protests, though I wrote a couple batches of postcards encouraging people in Florida whose vote-by-mail enrollment had expired to re-enroll. North quit their canvassing job, which ended up being too physically strenuous, and started a new one at a day camp in D.C. It’s an afternoon program at a Montessori school that has academic classes in the morning throughout the summer. North’s working from noon to sixish most days.

They had a week off between jobs (the last week of June) and during that week we had a heat wave, with several consecutive days of highs at or near 100 degrees. They were happy to be home and not out walking door to door talking to people about microplastics. (It’s still hot now, but more regular summer hot.) During their week off they made cookies and read Fun Home, which seemed like an excellent use of leisure time to me. Fun Home will be performed at Oberlin next winter and they are thinking of auditioning. The following week North started the camp job and Noah finished up the video editing job for a solar energy company he’d been doing on and off for over a month.

North had a four-day weekend after their first week at their new job, so Beth and I took the same days off so we could better pack a lot of fun activities (and some chores) into the Fourth of July weekend. This plan took a little determination for a couple reasons. After all, I have been feeling more red with anger, white with fear, and blue with sadness than filled with patriotism these days. And I have been sick for almost two weeks, never intensely so (and most of my symptoms are gone now), but I still have this worrying sore throat that just won’t go away or rather has gone away and come back more times than I can count.

White: Long Weekend and Beyond, Fence 

First the big chore… last April and May, after we were cited by the city for peeling paint on our picket fence, Beth, Noah, and I painted it, or rather the side of it that faces the street. We have a corner lot, so it’s a long fence and once the most visible part was finished, we kind of lost interest in the project and hoped no one would notice the side facing our house wasn’t painted yet. We did intend to finish the job, but on our own timetable.  

Well, we were cited again, so we picked it back up and throughout the long weekend between excursions, we were working on it. The kids were power washing it and I was treating the part they washed with a vinegar solution to retard algae, and Beth, who worked on it longer than anyone else, was painting. The following week, we all took turns painting and we finished it this afternoon.

Red, White, and Blue: Thursday, Smithsonian Folklife Festival

Onto the recreational activities… this year I had some reservations about taking our almost-annual family photos with everyone dressed in red, white, and blue in front of the Washington Monument we’ve been taking since Noah was two months old. But as authoritarianism encroaches, I don’t want to cede the symbols of patriotism or its substance, so we went ahead with it. 

In addition to taking the picture, we were also on the mall to attend the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. The theme was Youth and the Future of Culture. The festival varies in size from year to year, but it seemed smaller than usual, in terms of displays and performances. At only six days, it was also on the short side.

One of the first things we saw was a colorfully painted board with little doors depicting slang terms from different decades you could flip to see definitions on reverse side. I was surprised to learn “moxie” had its heyday in the 1940s, as I would still use it. When we saw “scrub,” (90s) Beth said she knew what that meant because there was a song about it and I deadpanned, “A scrub is a guy that won’t get no love from me,” which made her laugh. From the current decade, there was “rizz,” which I do know, but probably wouldn’t use for fear of sounding like a middle-aged mom who is trying too hard.

We watched a skateboarding demonstration. Not everyone skating could be said to be a youth, as the oldest one looked like 40-something dad and maybe he was. He was wearing a t-shirt that said on the back he’d skated 47 miles to raise money for a rare disease (I forget its name). On the front was a photo of a small child and the words, “Never give up.” I wondered if it was his child and if the child had the disease. The youngest skater was a tween girl who was having trouble with one of her tricks. When she finally nailed it, she lit up and said, “I did it!” It was more charming than if everyone had executed every move perfectly.

Next, we looked at low-rider cars and then went to see two bands (a youth mariachi band and a group of young black percussionists) play together. They were practicing for weekend performances and considering it was their first time playing together, they sounded quite good. Among other pieces, they played a medley of songs from Carmen. Everyone but me got agua fresca to sip while we listened. It’s always inspiring to watch young people do something well. And of course, I have a soft spot for young percussionists.

The food offerings weren’t that tempting. We considered the vegetarian tacos, but Beth said if we were going to get overpriced Mexican food, we should go home and get San Pancho, which we did, followed by ice cream from Red Hound. It was nice to eat at the outside tables on a pretty evening, but I was starting to feel my energy ebb. I’d been under the weather for several days at that point and it was starting to catch up with me. 

Red, White, and Blue: Friday, Fourth of July

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. On our way there, as we walking past the groups lining up for the parade, we saw Noah’s sometimes boss Mike and his family getting ready to march in a “Dance Against DOGE” contingent. Mike had his sound system on wheels; it was the same one he brought to Takoma Pride.

The parade was much the same as always—swim teams, dogs from an obedience school, Cub Scouts, bagpipes, Japanese and Caribbean drums, politicians (including Jamie Raskin handing out copies of the Constitution), people in papier mâché animal costumes, and whimsical floats of various sorts, but what really spoke to me was the woman in the Wonder Woman costume carrying a sign that said, “Evil Wins When Good People Do Nothing.” We stopped at an ice cream truck for something cold to fortify us for the walk home. Ice cream before lunch is one of our Fourth of July traditions.

After the parade, North made homemade pizza for lunch. We’d had a dinner dilemma because we always have pizza for dinner on Fridays, but we have variations on the same picnic dinner every Fourth of July and this year the Fourth was on a Friday. So, a pizza lunch was how we resolved it.

We worked on the fence in the afternoon, and we had the picnic dinner in the back yard. Everyone pitched in—North shucked corn and made sour cherry sauce for ice cream, Noah sliced watermelon, I made devilled eggs, and Beth cooked the hot dogs, cleared off, washed, and set the patio table with all the aforementioned food, plus cole slaw and baked beans.

We planned to watch the D.C. fireworks from the roof of Beth’s office building, which we’ve done a couple times before, but as we were eating our dinner, I decided I was just too wiped out, so everyone else went without me. I heard later that it was a nice display, but there was a malfunction of the fireworks that were supposed to spell out USA, with the letters tilted as if falling over or superimposed over each other. That seemed a little on the nose.

Blue: Saturday, Berry Picking 

Saturday afternoon, after working on the fence, we went berry picking at Butler’s, our usual berrying destination. We got four quarts of blueberries and two quarts of blackberries. We picked two varieties of blueberries, one of which was supposed to be sweeter and the other tarter. I thought I could tell the difference, but North said they tasted the same.

There were only three other people on the wagon that took us to the blueberry fields, not many people picking and no kids, so Noah said he was afraid no one would instruct anyone else to only pick the blue berries and without hearing that it wouldn’t be a proper berry picking trip. But soon after that, a family with kids arrived and almost immediately we heard what color berries we were supposed to be picking. The funniest thing we heard was a mom telling the wagon driver that her small son didn’t want to pick berries, just to ride back and forth on the wagon, and would that be okay?

I found a robin’s nest with three eggs in it hidden in the blackberry canes. I hoped it was not abandoned, that the mother was laying low during berry picking hours and would return in the evening and that the weather was warm enough that the eggs would still hatch, but who knows? After the second mourning dove nest on our porch this spring failed (I can’t remember if I wrote about that, but the babies disappeared soon after hatching) and the harrowing death of the starling nestlings last month, I need to believe they had a chance. Please don’t correct me if you are wise in the ways of robins. We got ice cream and a doughnut at the snack bar and then picked up produce, cheese, and more treats at the farm market and our trip to Butler’s was complete.

We watched the first two-thirds of The Secret World of Arriety that night, but I was too tired to finish it.

Red: Sunday, Urgent Care

Sunday, still sick, I finally broke down and made an appointment at urgent care. I was tested for covid, flu, and strep. (I had already tested negative for covid several days earlier at home.) I was seen quickly, which is why it was surprising that I ended up spending two and a half hours there, mostly waiting for the second provider after the first one administered the tests. I never did find out why it took so long, it didn’t seem very busy when I arrived or left, but maybe it was busy while I was sequestered in an exam room for hours with not much to do. That was on me. I considered bringing my laptop, my book club book, and/or the newspaper and I was sure I’d stashed the paper in my bag, but when I opened it, I found I had not. So, I paced and sat and looked at my phone and listened to podcasts and sometimes paced while listening to podcasts. Beth had driven me there and was waiting at a nearby Starbucks, so I was also sorry to have taken such a big chunk of her day.

Anyway, I tested negative for covid, flu, and strep, and based on physical exam and questions I didn’t seem to have a sinus infection or pneumonia either. I walked out with no clue what I did have and two prescriptions I didn’t intend to fill because they were for symptoms that had nearly abated (congestion and cough). So far, it’s a mystery with no solution, just red herrings.

Afterward

Those of us with jobs went back to work and everyone continued painting the fence and Noah pruned some tree branches that were in the way of painting. The first sunflower in our garden bloomed on Monday, followed by the first zinnia on Tuesday, and the second sunflower on Thursday.

After exchanging several messages with my primary care provider, I went into the office for another strep test on Thursday. The culture is supposed to be more accurate than the rapid strep test, but I won’t get the results until next week. I don’t even feel that sick beyond the sore throat, so under normal circumstances, I probably would have decided to ride it out and skip the second strep test. The only reason I went to urgent care is that I am going to see extended family soon, including my almost eighty-two-year-old mother and I thought it would be good to know, though as it turns out I will find after I see her, so the information will be less useful than it could be.

One more thing happened I want to mention. On Wednesday morning, ICE agents seized several people off my street, just a ten-minute walk from my house. I don’t know for sure, but given that there’s ongoing roadwork in that area, I’m guessing it was the road workers. I walked by the next day on my way to the Metro and noticed all the workers I could see were either black or white and, in our area, that’s not the normal demographic for work crews. It should have been a mix of black, white, and Latino guys. I don’t know what became of them, if they were released, or sent to detention facilities domestic or foreign. I don’t know if they left families behind. I do know I am not feeling very proud to be an American today.

No Kings

The Takoma Park No Kings demonstration was a fifteen-minute walk from our house, so Beth and I went on foot. When we got close, we started seeing people with signs, headed in the same direction we were, some of whom wanted to know which way to go. But eventually they didn’t need to ask because the No Kings logo (the crown with a slash through it) was chalked on the sidewalk with arrows pointing the way to New Hampshire Avenue.

New Hampshire Avenue is a four-lane thoroughfare with a median in the middle. There were people lined up on both sides of the road and some in the median. It was like the Tesla protest we went to in March with people standing on the curb, holding signs, occasionally chanting, and waving to passing drivers who were overwhelmingly supportive. Mostly drivers honked their horns, waved, held up raised fists, or yelled “thank you!”  but some had come prepared with their own signs and American flags and a few kept going in circles to pass through the line of protesters multiple times. In the over an hour and a half we were there, there was exactly one carful of counter-protesters. They had a flag that was probably a Trump flag, but it was bunched up and I couldn’t read it. They also had a MAGA hat they were holding up through the car’s sunroof.

There was a woman next to me with a tiny baby strapped to her chest. She told her companion, who had asked, that it wasn’t the baby’s first protest. I said, “I bet there’s no line for that in the baby book,” and she replied that while that was true, she had recorded her baby’s first protest there. These are the times we live in, I guess.

Beth said later that No Kings was a great organizing theme because it was straightforward and the logo was easy to draw, and it allowed people to exercise a lot of creative interpretation while staying on topic. There was a man across the street from us in a colonial costume, which I thought showed an admirable level of committing to the bit.

After we’d stood for about an hour, Beth and I decided to walk up and down the length of the protest on both sides of the street to stretch our legs and get a better look at people’s signs.

King-related signs I liked included:

I Support the U.S. Army. They Got Rid of the Last King We Had
No Faux King Way
No Crown for a Clown
My King is Martin Luther King (There was also a similar one for Billie Jean King)
America: Ousting Kings Since 1776
Only Monarch I Want (with a Monarch butterfly)
No Kings. Yas Queen

Beth’s sign said “Unions Yes. Kings No” with an American flag at the top and the No Kings logo at the bottom. Mine also featured a flag (I’d taped a little one to the sign) and the No Kings logo made out three colors of electrical tape. (I got the idea from a friend on Facebook.) It said “Since 1776. No Kings.” I usually just scrawl something on posterboard with a marker, but I’d put more care into this sign than usual, and I liked how it turned out.

Flags were a common design element, not surprising as it was Flag Day. People were also carrying a lot of American flags, both right side up and upside down.

Of course, there were non-monarchical signs, too:

Don’t Let the Bastards Grind U Down (though I would have liked it better in Latin, like Nicole’s t-shirt)
Beat the Heat with Crushed I.C.E.
Immigrants—We Get the Job Done (which inspired me to listen the Hamilton soundtrack and then the Hamilton Mixtape when we got home)
They’re Eating the Checks! They’re Eating the Balances!
Our Parade Is Bigger (referring of course to that other event taking place in D.C. on the same day)

As we walked, we heard people playing guitar, drums, and bells. I walked through a sprinkler someone had set up to water both a lawn and the sidewalk, possibly for the benefit of the protesters on a warm, muggy day. We ran into all kinds of people we knew—one of the members of my dissertation committee, someone I used to teach with at GWU, quite a few parents of our kids’ preschool classmates, and the leader of my book club. And that was just the people we saw. I found out later there were quite a few more people we knew there, including the director of the musical drama camp North attended for years. I’m not great at estimating crowd size but considering how big it was compared to the Tesla protest (which did get an exact count) I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a thousand people there, in our town of 17,500 people.

We left before it was quite over and went to Walgreen’s to get some cough medicine for North. They’d come home from the beach four days earlier with pinkeye and an upper respiratory infection. (At their first visit to urgent care, on Tuesday, flu and covid were ruled out, and at a second visit to urgent care today, they were diagnosed with a sinus infection.) As you might expect, they’ve been feeling lousy and haven’t been to work all week. From the drugstore we proceeded to Starbucks for iced drinks, including a pink drink to bring home to North. I was hot and sweaty, so my own pink drink was refreshing, even though I did not have a sore throat.

Back at home, I looked at pictures of other No Kings demonstrations. They happened in 2,000 locations all over the country, in big cities and small towns, in blue states and red states. In some big cities, like New York, there were as many as 50,000 people. Near home, four or five thousand people turned out in Rockville, and a friend of mine said there were protesters on every overpass on the Beltway, with hundreds of people on some of them. I’ve seen estimates of 5.5 to 12.1 million people attending nationwide.

The photos and videos of events big and small were inspiring. I loved the picture of people in formation spelling out “No Kings” on the beach in San Francisco. Beth’s favorite, after those taken in her hometown of Wheeling, was the video of seniors coming out the door of their nursing home in walkers and wheelchairs.

Along with a picture of one of the chalked drawings on the sidewalk, Beth posted this message on Facebook: “Thanks to all of the #NoKings organizers for helping us find our way today, as individuals and as a country.”

Did you go to a No Kings demonstration? What was it like?

Proud

Takoma Pride

Takoma Pride was the first Sunday in June, which was the very first day of June this year, so Pride Month started off with a joyful celebration. It’s a small event, compared to Pride in the city, but I was surprised at how big it was this year, more crowded than I’ve ever seen it. I think there’s a reason for that.

We got there early so Beth could visit the farmers’ market in the parking lot just behind the block where the booths were located. North and I stood in a long line to get coffee and a blueberry-rhubarb pastry to split at Takoma Beverage Company. While we waited for our order, North asked me. “Are you proud?”

I said yes. I am proud to have been out for almost thirty-eight years, and to have come out at time when it was harder for young people to come out than it is now, but I am also disillusioned to be seeing cultural backlash, especially against trans kids.

Ever since I was a mostly closeted teen, it has always seemed that the LGBTQ+ community was seeing progress, sometimes agonizingly slow, sometimes surprisingly quick (as during the exciting years when gay marriage was legalized in first a handful of states and then all of them). But now we are moving backward in ways big and small. I think that’s why so many people turned out to our little pride festival this year. People want to feel seen, perhaps more urgently than we did just last year.

We watched the parade. Bikers and roller skaters were in front, followed by the members of the Rainbow Club of two local elementary schools. Our Congressional representative Jamie Raskin was walking with the kids. There were trans people with paper mâché butterflies (symbols of transformation presumably), people with signs (“Love Wins. Hate Loses”), and people dressed as fairies.

We chatted with people we knew. North’s friend Rose, who was a counselor at Girl Scout camp with them last summer was there, as were her two younger sisters and their parents, Sara (a former colleague of Beth’s) and Mike (the filmmaker who occasionally employs Noah). Mike had brought his portable sound system with him—he’s been taking it to Tesla protests every weekend apparently—and he was playing Kool and the Gang’s “Celebration” and other tunes. “It’s a whole project now,” Rose wryly commented of the sound system. The family dog was getting in on the action, too, wearing a rainbow harness.

We perused the booths. North got a pamphlet from Trans Maryland with information they hoped might help them sort out their passport dilemma. Beth and I posed in front of a photo op background made of multicolored fabric. She held up the rainbow chard she had bought at the farmers’ market—even the vegetables were proud that day. Beth peeled off to get a tomato cage from the hardware store while North and I continued to browse the booths, scootching past very long lines for ice cream and face painting. We all met up at the end of the block of booths and headed home.

That night, after a dinner of rainbow chard and tofu stir-fry, Beth and I went to a Pride concert at Rhizome, an art space in Takoma, DC. (Explainer for nonlocals—Takoma is a neighborhood in Washington, D.C. that borders Takoma Park, Maryland.) There were five bands playing, but we only stayed for the first two because we are early-to-bed people and we did not want to turn into pumpkins. Luckily, the first band that played was Ammonite, who we saw at the Takoma Park Folk Festival last September. This was the band Beth most wanted to see.

Between Prides

The next week, three of us were working, as Noah was editing a promotional video for a solar energy company for Mike. He worked on it for a couple weeks—it’s the longest gig he’s had since November, so I was happy to see him employed. North had the week off from their Environment Virginia canvassing job (yes, they got it) because they were going to the beach with five friends from high school, all except North graduating seniors. They left on Tuesday, but North took Monday off, too, so they could pack and rest before the trip. Canvassing is physically taxing, which combined with the late hours, is why when they got another job, working at a day camp in DC, they decided to take it. They will keep the canvassing job until late June when the camp job starts. Meanwhile, Beth went to the veterans’ protest on the Mall on Friday, but I skipped it because Sara and I had a rush job that week writing web copy for a line of probiotics.

That’s why I was home Friday morning when the workers found the nest in our porch roof. We are having the porch roof rebuilt and when they removed a sheet of plywood, they found a nest with several tiny pink babies with sparse gray down and big yellow beaks.  I suspected they were starlings because of something that happened about a week earlier.

I’d walked into the kitchen and found both cats on the stovetop looking up. I paused, listening, and heard a rustling sound in the cabinet above the range hood. Thinking mouse, I opened it to have a look and much to my surprise (but perhaps not the cats’) a starling flew out.

Pandemonium broke out with the bird swooping around and the cats running after it. It took two people (me to remove the cats from the room and Beth to open the back door and a window for the bird to exit) to restore order. Further examination uncovered a vent pipe in that cabinet with a hole in it. (We had the workers take a look and they said the mesh covering the venting slats on the side of the house was torn so we put replacing that on their to-do list.)

I did a little research, and the nestlings did look like baby starlings, plus it was the right kind of nesting location, time of year, and number of babies (four to five—they were huddled together too close to count), so that’s still my hypothesis.

As the porch roof where the nest was built was dissembled, the workers relocated it first to the porch wall and then to the ledge the doves use in the early spring. I thought there was no way the parents would find it and the babies were doomed. I spent a lot of the morning fruitlessly trying to find a wildlife rehabilitator who would take them. I just kept getting passed from the Humane Society to the Maryland Department of Natural Resources to a rescue organization that turned out to be for raptors, to one that took songbirds, but only native ones, and I learned starlings are not native.

Then in the afternoon, noticing the nestlings had perked up, I started to wonder if the parents did find them and had fed them. I was checking on them every few hours and sometimes they seemed lively and sometimes listless. I couldn’t figure out what was going on. It was emotionally exhausting. But when we went to bed and when we got up the next morning, they were all alive.

Unfortunately, by early afternoon Saturday, two of them had died. I asked Noah to dig a hole in the back yard so we could bury them as soon as they were all dead. By this point I was hoping it would happen sooner rather than later or that a predator would put them out of their misery. I even wondered if I should move the nest somewhere more visible to speed that along, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to because I was still half-entertaining the possibility that the parents were feeding them. They were so tiny, and it had been over a day by that point. How could any of them they still be alive otherwise?

Well, I never saw any parent birds at the nest, and by mid-morning Sunday, the last one had died and all but two of the dead bodies had disappeared from the nest, taken by a scavenger maybe? Beth and I buried the whole nest in the hole Noah dug. The nest itself was much better constructed than a mourning dove nest and surprisingly large with just a tiny cavity for the babies. In my time as a suburban homeowner, I have learned a lot about different species of birds and their nesting habits.

I am sad about the way it ended, and not very proud of myself. It was a slow death, and they must have suffered. I keep wondering if I could have done something differently, mostly tried harder to find a rehabilitator, I guess. I never seriously considered learning how to feed them myself because I didn’t want to end up with four to five tame starlings unable to fend for themselves.

DC World Pride

World Pride was in D.C. this year. There were all kinds of events, but the second weekend of June there were three main ones—the parade, the street festival, and a political march. Since the march was unique to this year, and we’ve done the parade and the festival many times, Beth and I decided to do the march.

Various labor unions were meeting up at the AFL-CIO building for a pre-march rally, so went there. People gathered in the Solidarity Room, which is a long rectangular space with windows along one long wall and a beautiful tile mosaic, much like the one in the lobby, depicting various scenes of labor, along the other. We were in the room over an hour listening to speeches by leaders of various unions, including Randi Weingarten from the American Federation of Teachers, who joined via video call. Many of the speakers talked about intersectionality, which made sense because the event itself was intersectional. Two people from SEIU spoke about the alarming events in Los Angeles and the detention of David Huerta.

We also heard from people organizing at Starbucks, a local restaurant, and the Kennedy Center. Beth said she never gets tired of hearing from young organizers. I also like hearing from gay people older than us, especially when they talk about their lives, which have seen even more change than ours. As Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union, reminded us, “Unimaginable rapid change is possible,” both good changes and bad ones. I know that. I’ve been witness to both.

We left the building to meet up with the larger march a little after one. It had started raining while we were inside and I had to juggle my umbrella, my sign, and a tote bag containing food, water and other necessities (backpacks were not allowed), so I didn’t take as many pictures as I might have otherwise. The crowd was moderate-sized and spirited. There was drumming and chanting. One of the more unusual chants was “What do we want? David! When do we want him? Now!” Of course it was referring to David Huerta, but I was thinking David is such a common name there must be at least one in the crowd who was feeling rather amused.

Once we got to the Washington Monument and away from the shelter of tall buildings it was much windier, and I started to get sprayed with rain from the side. We proceeded to the mall where we crossed paths with a different protest, a queer pro-Palestinian one. We stopped there and it wasn’t clear if that was going to be the end point. We never met up with the larger march, having left the AFL-CIO too late. Beth and I decided to head home. We skirted along the edge of the street festival as we walked to the Metro. There was music playing, and people coming in and out, so the rain didn’t shut it down the celebration either.

As I said to Beth on the way home, you go to these things and sometimes they are big and sometimes they are small, and sometimes the sound system works and you hear the speeches and sometimes it doesn’t and you don’t, and sometimes you find the event you intended to attend and sometimes you don’t. But we made our own event, I suppose, and being in different places, maybe more people saw the disjointed parts of the march than would have if they’d been together. I am trying to look on the bright side here and to see the rainbows in the rain.

Strawberry Fields Forever

Yesterday morning, we were in a wagon heading for the strawberry fields at Butler’s Orchard when we heard parents quizzing a small boy on what color strawberries to pick. Should he pick the green ones? The white ones? The pink ones? The red ones? He had learned his lesson and knew the answers. No, no, no, yes! “Red like Daddy’s shirt,” he added for clarity.

Both Noah and North were smiling at me. After we got off the wagon, North commented, “It wouldn’t be a trip to Butler’s without parents telling kids what color berries to pick.” And I remember being that parent, even if they don’t remember being those small children. We’ve been picking berries (strawberries in the spring; blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries in the summer) there since Noah was tiny and before North was born. It’s easier now that they don’t need any instruction and no one is likely to dash off toward the dirt road and possible collision with a farm vehicle.

There were different obstacles, however. The website reported “scattered” picking and rain was predicted on and off all day, with different sources of weather information in disagreement about exactly when. It was sunny when we arrived and soon after clouded over. We picked four quarts of berries quickly. Despite what it said on the website, ripe berries were plentiful, at least in the field where we were. Our containers were so full we had to keep our hands over the tops on the bouncy ride back and even so one of my berries rolled out and away from me.

We visited the snack bar to see if we wanted to get lunch there and decided no, though we did pick up some snacks (I got a strawberry hand pie and ate half of it, saving the rest for later.) It was busy at the snack bar and North and I surveyed the crowd for small children in clothes with strawberries on them, which always charms them. They have a fantasy about taking their own kids berry picking and dressing them in strawberry-themed clothes. We only found two little girls in strawberry t-shirts. Often there are more. North had also dressed for the occasion, wearing earrings that featured ghosts carrying strawberries and crocs festooned with strawberries.

It had started to drizzle while we were in the wagon on the way back from the field and while we were under the shelter of the snack bar the skies opened. By the time we’d eaten (standing up because the picnic tables were outside in the rain), it was back to drizzling so we returned to the car and drove to the farm market where we picked up vegetables, cheese, apple juice, and various treats.

For lunch, we proceeded to a shopping center where Beth and North had lunch at Noodles & Company and Noah and I went to a bakery where we got sandwiches. Then we met up at Sweet Frog for frozen yogurt.

Noah asked me “what we do with strawberries” and I said if we go berrying before Memorial Day, I make strawberry shortcake with them, but I’d already done that with farmers’ market strawberries the weekend previous, so I said we had no definite plans for them. I said if he wanted to bake something with them, he was free to do so, but the day after bringing the berries home we have already eaten a quart of them, so I’m not even sure if I am going to freeze some of them, which I was planning to do.

It was a sweet expedition, with echoes of berrying trips past and visons of possible future ones, too.

The World You Want to Live in

Wednesday

The day after we got back from Oberlin, we had my birthday cake (lemon with strawberry-cream cheese frosting, made by Beth, delicious as always) and Beth and I opened more birthday and Mother’s Day presents, those from Noah and gifts that had arrived in the mail while we were gone. Counting what we opened in Oberlin, Beth got a big pile of dark chocolate, and I got four books, three jars of nut butter, and tickets to see a Bernice Johnson Reagon tribute concert. It was nice to stretch the celebration out a little.

Thursday

The next day Beth and I went to the Supreme Court because they were hearing a case about birthright citizenship. North had to go into the city at the same time because they had an interview for a summer job, canvassing for the Fund for the Public Interest. If they get the job, they’ll be working for most of the summer in the Virginia suburbs on a campaign to get people to support legislation to reduce plastic pellet water pollution.

It was a warm, sunny day and there was a moderate-sized crowd in front of the court, with only one counter protester from a sketchy organization called the European Legal Defense and Education Fund. I hadn’t brought a sign, but I picked up one that said, “American Born Children Are American Children.” I thought that went right to the point. Others I liked said, “Made by Immigrants” (held by a young Asian American woman); “Born Here? Belong Here!”; and “‘All Persons’ Means All Persons.” I mean, really, the Fourteenth Amendment is crystal clear on this point. I can’t believe we even have to protest about this one, but that’s where we are.

The sound system, as is so often the case, was terrible, so I have nothing to report about the speeches. Even Representative Jamie Raskin, who can almost always make himself heard, was only intermittently audible. Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi was there, too. In fact, she walked within a few feet of me on her way to the stage. I wished I could have heard her. She is not as often at these events, so I don’t know her talking points as well as some other members of Congress. She got heckled by a young woman in camouflage and a beret for not having done enough when she was Speaker. I get annoyed at woker-than-thou people sometimes, when it would be more helpful to stick together and support people who show up, even those who are more moderate than you’d like. Not that I think this kind of thing probably bothers Pelosi much.

North was thinking of joining us for the end of the rally after their interview, but it was already wrapping up when they finished, so we met at Union Station instead and had lunch. They said they have a second interview on Monday and that they were given to understand most people who get a second interview get a job offer. Still, we are not counting unhatched chickens.

Friday

Late Friday afternoon, Beth and I drove out to a pizzeria in Bethesda, where we got an eggplant parmesan small plate and pizza with arugula and cherry tomatoes. I also had half a slice of tiramisu. It was a pre-concert dinner date. We were going to the Strathmore Music Center and since we got there early, we took a stroll in the sculpture garden and by a couple ponds with fountains and noisy frogs.

We were there to see a tribute concert to Bernice Johnson Reagon, civil rights icon and founding member of Sweet Honey in the Rock, organized by her daughter the singer Toshi Reagon. On entering we were given tote bags emblazoned with a quote from Reagon, “When you begin to imagine and act as if you are living in the world you want to live in you will have company.”

Family members, scholars, and singers sang and spoke about Reagon’s life and work. There were sing-alongs for some of Reagon’s more famous songs (with very precise and pointedly humorous instructions from Toshi about when the audience was to sing and not sing). She also spoke about different political issues between songs, especially environmental ones.

The two surviving members of the original SNCC Freedom Singers sang and though they looked somewhat frail in body, their voices are still strong. Hearing them felt like a brush with history.

Saturday

Saturday morning, Beth, North, and I headed to the mall to see a display of art by trans people on blue, pink, and white panels arranged into the stripes of the trans flag with panels in the middle spelling out “Freedom to Be.” You can see an overhead photo in the link above. The project was sponsored by the ACLU and inspired by the AIDS quilt. The panels were from all over the country, with a surprising number from Idaho and West Virginia. There was supposed to be a rally at noon, but by 12:25 it hadn’t started, and we had decided to leave when there was an announcement that it wouldn’t start for fifteen to twenty minutes.

We decided we’d already seen the most unique facet of the event already and we’d rather have lunch than go to another rally, so we headed for a vegan fast-food place nearby. I got a cheesesteak, and it was quite convincing, though you should bear in mind I haven’t had a real one since the late 80s.

Sunday

We stayed close to home. I was coming down with a cold and spent a lot of the day in bed, reading my book club book and writing much of this post and the previous one. North made almond butter chocolate chip cookies and Beth put a lot of plants in the ground in the garden and built a mesh structure with a gate to enclose them.

Monday

North’s second interview consisted of shadowing a canvasser and then giving the spiel a try themselves. They got people to give money at two houses. They will do this for three more days (Wednesday through Friday)—and be paid for those days—before they find out if they have the job. But they also have an interview at a day camp on Friday morning, so they are keeping their options open.

Today

Meanwhile Noah volunteered to do some extra chores today (scrubbing fans in addition to mowing the lawn) so he could be excused later in the week. He is supposed to have some work from Mike soon, which is good because he hasn’t been working much recently. His last gig was a day of sorting through archival footage for a documentary about a labor union last week. I hope both kids are gainfully employed this summer, with bonus points for the work being enjoyable and/or meaningful. Honestly, I’d be happy with two out of three for each of them.

But beyond the short term, this is the kind of world I want to live in—one full of celebration, one in which newcomers are welcome and valued for their contributions to our country, one in which the heroes of the past are honored and we don’t have to re-litigate all the battles they fought, and one in which people are free to be themselves. Let’s try to imagine it.

(Almost) Perfect Days

Oh, it’s such a perfect day
I’m glad I spend it with you
Oh, such a perfect day

You just keep me hangin’ on
You just keep me hangin’ on

Just a perfect day, problems all left alone
Weekenders on our own, it’s such fun

From “Perfect Day” by Lou Reed

Friday

The night before we left to pick North up from school, I made pizza with broccoli, and we watched Perfect Days. The film tells the story of a middle-aged man who cleans public toilets in Tokyo and his ability to take pleasure in the little things in life. Of course, it’s not that simple. We learn obliquely that he has a traumatic past, which could explain his insistence on order and his ascetic way of life. There’s a lot of American music from the 70s and 80s in the film and it takes its name from the Lou Reed song. I recommend it, if it sounds like your kind of movie.

Saturday

Beth and I set out for Oberlin around 10:15. Noah was staying at home because he was going to attend a town meeting hosted by Zeteo from MSNBC with Senator Chris Van Hollen and others to discuss the current political situation on Monday evening. I was a little sad we were going to be separated on Mother’s Day and my birthday (which fell on the same day this year), but I also didn’t want to discourage him from being politically active, so I didn’t press him to come.

On the drive we started with music and Beth chose Lou Reed’s Transformer (the album with “Perfect Day” on it) because the movie had put her in the mood. We also listened to eight out of the nine episodes of a podcast called Let’s Make a Rom-Com, about writers collaborating on, you guessed it, a rom-com pitch. It was light and more diverting than talking about politics, which is what we might have done left to our own devices. We stopped for a late lunch of salads at Next Door, a vegetarian-friendly restaurant in Bedford, Pennsylvania that may be becoming our go-to lunch-on-the-way-to-Oberlin spot, followed by gelato, and arrived in Oberlin around dinner time. 

We found North sitting on the grass in front of Keep with people eating leftover wedding cake from wedding-themed party that had recently happened there. North had skipped dinner to go out for Chinese with us. After dinner we dropped them back off at Keep and settled into our rental house.

Sunday

Sunday was my birthday and Mother’s Day. We’d chosen to take a day trip to Put-in-Bay, an island in Lake Erie Beth and I once visited in college and where she’d also been as a child with her family. It’s a place Beth and I remember fondly.

We’d resolved to try to have a politics-free day, and we mostly did, though we slipped up a few times. This one didn’t count, though, we decided. In the ferry parking lot, the attendant asked us about the message “No Kings. June 14” Beth had written on the back window of the car with washable paint. (She’s been keeping it updated with the names and dates of whatever the next big national protest is.) We’d been a little nervous driving through Western Maryland, Western Pennsylvania, and Ohio with this on the car, but no one said a thing about it up to now. (Interestingly, I’d noticed there were dramatically fewer Trump yard signs, flags, and billboards compared to the last time we made this drive, in early February. The change was especially notable in Pennsylvania.) Beth told the attendant about the protest, and he said, “Is that the day he’s having his stupid parade?” So, that was a satisfying exchange.

You are discouraged from bringing cars on the island and there are golf carts you can rent, so we did that. It was fun riding in an open-sided vehicle along the roads. The day was cool (with highs in the fifties) but sunny so it wasn’t too cold. Our first stop was a short wildflower trail. There was an informative sign at the beginning so we could identify May apples, Jack in the Pulpit, blue phlox, and other blooms.

Next, we had lunch on the patio of a restaurant in town. I got a vegetable crepe for my meal and split a chocolate-peanut butter one with Beth for dessert. The wildflower trail had been both my and Beth’s first priority, so our next stop was North’s—Crystal Cave. We knew the cave purports to have the world’s largest geode, though North looked it up and found a cave in Spain says the same thing, so who knows? In any case, it contains a very large geode. In fact, the whole cave is the geode. A dozen or so people can stand inside it and walk around, and it looks just as you would imagine such a thing would look. It was very cool.

We decided to visit the butterfly house next. It’s a greenhouse filled with hundreds of butterflies, and it had just opened for the season, so there were a lot of butterflies hatching in nursery you could see through a window. North got to release a newly hatched one from a plastic cup. It wasn’t quite ready to fly, so it fell to the ground, but it wasn’t hurt, just sat there, gently stretching its wings. The butterflies were all different colors and sizes and very beautiful.

We took another short trail to a cliff overlook and then went to visit the old lighthouse before we got on the ferry to go back to the mainland.

Right near the ferry, there was a store called Cheese Haven, advertising that it sold 125 kinds of cheese, so we felt obliged to go inside and buy some (a big hunk of Parmesan, brick, and smoked Swiss) and to get some candy and raspberry-cheesecake fudge, too. Beth had been looking for strawberry fudge all day because we both remember having excellent strawberry fudge at Put-in-Bay. On consideration, Beth thought we might have actually gotten it on a different, nearby island. It is difficult to recreate memories from almost forty years ago, but we had a truly lovely day, and we made some new memories with North.

Back in Oberlin, I opened birthday and Mother’s day presents (though I was saving my cake for later at home) and we had Mexican for dinner and then went to Dairy Queen. It was packed and I have never seen so many employees behind a fast-food counter. There were so many they seemed to be trying not to get in each other’s way, but they also seemed quite cheerful. I wondered if the store was training all its new employees for the season. Anyway, the line was long, but it moved quickly, and no one seemed impatient. The atmosphere was more festive than harried.

Monday

Monday morning was North’s acting class showcase. The students were divided into seven groups with two to three actors in each and each group performed a scene from a play. They were all well done. The first one, about a married couple splitting up, seemed like it could have been a one act, but the others were clearly parts of something larger and left you curious about how the play unfolded.

North had a comic role, a thirty-something man high on mushrooms. (I asked if they did any extracurricular research for the part, but they said no.) I always like seeing North on stage and they shone. Afterward, the professor said to us, “Wasn’t North great?” and what parent is going to disagree with that?

North had three take-home finals but they’d finished them early so when the showcase was over, so was their first year of college. We had lunch at Keep (a tasty tofu scramble with sautéed carrots and zucchini, rice, and mini cinnamon muffins) which we ate on the porch. North’s friend Cal came over to eat with us and North asked the assembled diners to sing “Happy Birthday” to me, even though it wasn’t my birthday anymore.

They spent the afternoon packing up and cleaning their room, and after we helped them load everything into the car, we had a picnic dinner on Lake Erie. We got takeout from The Root Café, a hippie sort of vegetarian place. After we ate, we walked on a path near the water. You could see the Cleveland skyline across the lake. There were a lot of people walking on the path and North said they felt like a character in Bridgerton, taking a promenade. From there we got ice cream and drove back to Oberlin. North spent the night in our rental house because their room was vacated and cleaned.

Tuesday

Tuesday morning North attended another acting class showcase to see a friend of their perform in an abbreviated version of Chekhov’s The Seagull. It was a little before lunchtime when we left Oberlin. It was a long, rainy, traffic-stalled ride home. We had lunch at a highway rest stop and dinner at a dinner in Western Maryland. When we got home, North was reunited with the cats—Willow initially ran down to the basement on seeing them but soon remembered who they were—and their brother who had been saving funny memes on his phone to show them.

I had a very nice birthday weekend. I can’t say they were perfect days because I was separated from one of my kids on Mother’s Day, but it was nice to reunite with North in a special place and then it was nice to be back home and all together again for the summer.

Plus, my birthday celebration was not over…

May Days

May Day

Often on May Day I will go to downtown Takoma Park in the morning, get a coffee and a pastry and watch the Morris Dancers usher in the second half of spring. During the first spring of the pandemic, back when North was more actively Wiccan, we built a Maypole and promenaded around it. This year instead of celebrating the pagan aspects of the holiday, we embraced the more political side of May Day and attended not one, but two protests.

The first rally was in support of immigrants. I met Beth at her office, and we took the Metro to Franklin Square where the rally started. It was supposed to go from 11:30 to 3:00, but Beth needed to work before and after, so we showed up at Franklin Square at noon. The sound system (which had been working early on, we learned from one of Beth’s colleagues), had given out and speakers were trying, with limited success, to make themselves heard with bullhorns and microphones.

But it was a warm, sunny day and there were a lot of people Beth knew from work, and interesting people-watching, as there often is at these events. I especially liked a cardboard cutout of Trump labeled “Liar” with flames that emerged from and retracted back into his pants. It was operated with a lever, I think.

I noticed a lot of images of butterflies, abstract purple ones on little hand-held signs and big fabric monarch butterflies that people were carrying. You can see one in the middle ground of the first photo—between me and the White House. I asked one person with a little sign what it meant, and she said she didn’t know, someone had given it to her. Beth guessed that it was probably a symbol for migrants because some species of butterflies migrate and it turned out she was right. (I married a smart cookie.)

Around twelve-thirty, we began a long, round-about march to Lafayette Square in front of the White House. It took an hour and a half to get there, and we walked through our old neighborhood, where we lived from 1991 to 2002, a time span that included the first year of Noah’s life. When we passed within a half-block of our apartment building, we peeled off the march to pay homage to it. Beth noted that in the twenty-three years since we lived there, the gingko trees that line the block have grown taller. It wasn’t the only change—the commercial blocks of 14th Street have an almost completely different set of businesses than when we lived there. Beth suspected we were walking down 14th Street so we could chant “What’s disgusting? Union busting” at a restaurant that’s been trying to stops its employees from unionizing.

Once we turned onto R St, the gracious townhouses and old apartment buildings looked more familiar. On 16th Street we passed NEA and AFL-CIO headquarters, where staff stood outside their buildings with signs. We cheered them, they cheered us, and then they joined the march. (There was support from passers-by along the route, too.)

We didn’t stay long at Lafayette Square once we got there because Beth needed to squeeze in a couple hours of work before the next rally. I had brought my laptop, thinking I might work, too, but I forgot the notes I needed at home, so I ate the lunch I’d packed, read a few sections of the Post I’d brought with me, and started writing this.

By four-twenty, Noah had arrived at the office to accompany us to a labor rally. Beth was in a meeting, but we left as soon as she was ready. We proceeded to Freedom Plaza. As we approached, I noted that there was an ice cream truck and that I had already walked 18,000 steps that day (by bedtime, I was up to 21,000 steps) and according to my monitor, my blood sugar was getting low and falling quickly. “Do you need ice cream?” Beth asked. I said I did, and I got some for myself and Noah, too. Beth had been so busy at her office she had only just eaten lunch, so she abstained.

The sound system was better at this rally so we could hear speakers from various unions and workers who were organizing. We heard from a kindergarten teacher, a bartender, a flight attendant, and others. There most notable Trump cutout at this rally portrayed him as a vampire, with blood running down his face. We left around six, though the event was supposed to continue until eight. We were footsore and my legs had chafed from all the walking, and I needed to get dinner started.

Birthday

Two days later, Noah turned twenty-four. We got the party started a day early by going out for our traditional Friday night pizza at his choice of restaurant—Roscoe’s, followed by gelato, and then we came home and watched La chimera. I’d asked Noah if he wanted to draw a movie from the pile of index cards on which we’ve written the names films we’ve agreed to watch (this would be the normal procedure) or if he’d like to watch the one that he’d contributed. He opted to leave it to chance. Beth said later, “I could have predicted that,” and pleasingly, it turned out he picked his own movie.

Saturday morning Beth made the cake, chocolate with fresh strawberry buttercream, and Noah watched car racing. In the afternoon, Beth and I both painted the fence—this project is ongoing—but we excused him from fence duty since it was his birthday. We took a break in the mid-afternoon to eat the cake and for him to open his presents. He got an upgraded membership to a podcast he likes, a t-shirt from a show he likes, and three books (two from the Discworld series and one from the Murderbot series) with more presents still to arrive. Over the course of the day, he talked and texted with both grandmothers and North.

That evening we set out for the city, to have dinner at a Chinese-Japanese-Peruvian fusion restaurant Noah chose and to the D.C. Film Festival to watch an Icelandic film. (Noah had been to the festival earlier in the week to see a movie, in his words about “a Turkish phone sex operator who has to coordinate a disaster response.”)

At dinner we got several dishes to share—yucca fries, cilantro dumplings filled with squash, Brussels sprouts in a chili glaze, cauliflower, a deep-fried egg (crunchy on the outside and soft inside), and fried rice decorated with watermelon rind cut into the shapes of little airplanes. The dish is called “Aeroporto” (Airport). For dessert, Noah and I tried the national dessert of Peru—a custard made of sweetened condensed milk with passionfruit shaved ice and meringue sticks on top. Everything was very good. If you’re local, it’s worth a visit. Our only complaint was that the fried rice dish was supposed to come with egg noodles and none were in evidence.

The movie was about a middle-aged trans woman, the main cook at a seafood restaurant in a fishing village, and how her relationship with her best friend, the owner of the restaurant, changes when she comes out. The friend is also coming to grips with his own struggling marriage and his relationship with his gay teenage son and the restaurant is undergoing significant changes, too. It was well done, and I recommend it if it’s streaming any time soon.

Beth and I are early-to-bed types, so the movie kept us up past our bedtime, but it was a fun evening and worth it to celebrate the birth of our eldest. And with my birthday and Mother’s Day in less than a week, more celebration is on the horizon.

Rise Again

Rise again, rise again!
Though your heart it be broken, and life about to end
No matter what you’ve lost, be it a home, a love, a friend
Like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again!

 From “The Mary Ellen Carter,” by Stan Rogers

I first heard of the song “The Mary Ellen Carter” when a friend posted it on Facebook on Easter about a year into the pandemic. It’s not literally about Easter, but about a shipwreck, and more broadly, resilience and not giving up on valuable things when others have. Because of when John posted it, I often think of it at Easter now. Though I haven’t lost life, home, love, or friends, some people already have, so the song’s message is certainly needed now.

Here are a few things we are not giving up on:

Wednesday: Justice

A week ago today, Beth, Noah, and I went to protest for Kilmar Abrego Garcia in front of the Civic Center in Silver Spring. Seeing the plaza fill up with people reminded me of this protest, almost five years ago. There was a group of people in pink, fluorescent vests that read “Rapid Response Choir” on the back, which made Beth laugh and say, “Everyone has to have their thing.” The choir was practicing “We Shall Not Be Moved,” and accompanying themselves with bongo drums and a tambourine.

We had responded rapidly as well, only hearing of the protest that morning. Beth made a sign that said, “Stop the Abductions Now” on one side and “Bring Them Home” on the other. Mine said, “No Concentration Camps” on one side and was blank on the other because I forgot to do both sides. We were there early, so we paced back and forth across the plaza to get some steps.

When the program of speakers began in the area where there’s a skating rink in the winter, people moved in closer to hear. It was mostly state and local elected officials and people from non-profits. Being packed in, I could see a lot of signs. Of course, there were signs that went right to the point, saying things like “Bring Kilmar Home,” “Detention without Due Process is Kidnapping.”

There was someone holding a sign that quoted the Emma Lazarus poem from the Statue of Liberty “Give me your tired, your poor…The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” There were a lot of signs that said things like “Due Process,” “Rule of Law,” or “No Kings.” These are the things we want these days—it’s that basic.

Signs thanking Senator Van Hollen were among the most common because the day of the protest was the day our senator was flying to El Salvador to visit Abrego Garcia. Most of the speakers cited his visit and people clapped enthusiastically each time. It’s interesting that Van Hollen was the one to step up because he’s the more moderate of our senators. He’s on the Foreign Relations Committee, though, so maybe that’s why. Or maybe this was just his moment to rise to the occasion.

Toward the end of protest, I dropped my phone on the hard cement that’s under the ice rink part of the year. The screen didn’t just crack, a small piece of it fell out and you could glimpse the inside of the phone through the hole. Surprisingly, it didn’t immediately stop working, but fairly soon it had stopped responding to touch, even though I could still see messages flashing across the screen.

To make a long story short, it took three days to get it fixed and for someone who didn’t even get a smartphone until 2015, I had an embarrassingly hard time living without one for that long. I missed my podcasts the most. It was difficult to motivate myself to take walks or do outside chores without them. I also felt as if I was wasting the glucose monitor on my arm (which is read with my phone). They only last two weeks and my insurance has decided to stop covering them and I’m not sure yet what I’m going to do about that, so missing three days’ use of what could be one of the last ones was disheartening.

Friday: Art

Beth had the day off for Good Friday. She worked on our fence in the morning. We’ve been scraping off the loose paint, sanding it, washing it, and rubbing it down with vinegar to halt the growth of mildew in preparation for re-painting it. We’ve been at this for a couple weeks. It’s a big project (and not one we chose—the city cited us for peeling paint).

That afternoon, at Noah’s suggestion, we visited the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. DOGE had already been to The National Gallery of Art, so it’s clear the Smithsonian and art in general are in the crosshairs. It seemed like a good idea to see uncensored art for free, while we still can.

We started in the Portrait Gallery and since I didn’t have my phone, I asked Beth to take pictures of Toni Morrison and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Moving at different speeds, we kept drifting apart and reuniting so I didn’t remember to ask her to take any more, but I was particularly drawn to paintings and sculptures of writers—Sappho, Edgar Alan Poe, Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, etc. Speaking of writers, we caught the James Baldwin exhibit which was days from the end of its run. Afterward, I wished I had lingered longer there, but I found the photos of Baldwin with Nina Simone particularly joyful.

We also went through an exhibit of portraits all the U.S. Presidents in order, including this one of Barack Obama. His was the most recent one. There are placeholder photographs of President Biden and Trump who have not had their portraits done yet. I saw a preschooler in a MAGA hat lingering with his parents near the Trump photo, which was upsetting, but I suppose we were lucky to see only one such hat in the roughly three hours we were there. But still, on an innocent child…

We left the museum and got pizza at Wiseguy and ice cream at Haägen-Dazs, went home, and watched the first two-thirds of The Last Showgirl, too tired to finish it.

Saturday: Rest

There were big protests all over the country on Saturday, and millions attended. There were at least three separate events in D.C. to choose from. Beth went to another march for Abrego Garcia, this one starting at the Washington Monument and proceeding to the White House. I thought about going, but I didn’t. I had not slept well the night before and I was feeling fatigued and generally burned out. I felt a little guilty about skipping the protest, but Maya reminded me that self-care is important, too.

Beth dropped me off at the mailing center where my phone was being fixed on her way to the Metro, and I picked it up. Within ten minutes of getting it back, I texted Beth to demonstrate that it was indeed fixed, checked my blood sugar, and restarted a podcast that had been in progress when the phone broke three days earlier. I walked for almost an hour and when I got home, my mood was much improved, and I had a big appetite. I had a veggie burger, broccoli, carrot sticks, and a half dozen tater tots for lunch and I was surprised how good the food tasted.

Over the course of the day, I read six chapters of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (for book club), Noah and I read from Norwegian Wood and watched an episode of The Handmaid’s Tale and later we made crispy gnocchi with roasted asparagus and leeks for dinner and then all three of us watched the end of The Last Showgirl. It was just the kind of day I needed.

Easter: Tradition

We don’t usually have big plans for Easter, but I’d sent North a care package—a box full of Easter candy, packed with Easter grass—and they’d received it the weekend before Easter. “It’s good to know the Easter Bunny delivers,” they said when we spoke to them that morning.

We had candy, here, too. I put Noah’s in a basket, but I didn’t hide it, just left it on the kitchen counter, and Noah commented the Bunny “didn’t do a very good job” hiding the goods.

Beth and I had been going back and forth about whether to dye eggs this year. I wondered if it was a strange thing to do with no minors in the house (though I announced I will carve pumpkins at Halloween for the rest of my life and then Beth said she was visualizing me carving a pumpkin on my death bed).

Anyway, I asked Noah if he was interested the day before Easter and he said yes, so Beth bought extra eggs when she did the grocery shopping on Sunday morning and after Noah watched a Formula One race and Beth and I washed part of the fence, we gathered to dye the eggs. We did two each. Beth’s are on either end of the line, including the red egg holding a protest sign. Mine are the red and purple one covered in stickers and the green and yellow one that says “Resist” in white crayon (the whole word isn’t visible in the photo). Noah made the blue smiling one and the pink and teal one with the white zigzag. It was fun. I was glad we did it.

Easter Monday: Memories

The next day, Beth and I were back at work and Noah worked on treating a stretch of the fence with a vinegar solution. I made egg salad out four of our Easter eggs and served it on toast with crudites for dinner. It seemed a shame to peel off their colorful shells just a day after dyeing them, but I was storing them in the fridge, so no one was seeing them anyway.

Earlier in the day I was walking through the living room, and I caught sight of another Easter egg, a pale green wooden one from the 2014 White House Easter Egg Roll, with Barack and Michelle Obama’s signatures printed on the back. And it occurred to me that this year’s Easter Egg Roll, sullied with corporate sponsors who seem to be trying to buy their way out of federal lawsuits, was underway right then. That was a depressing thought. But I took the wooden egg off the mantle and set it next to my computer to keep me company for a few hours while I worked. Every time I looked at it I remember taking my eight-year-old child to have an iconic Washington experience, in brighter days.

Earth Day: The Environment

I had hoped to plant some sunflower and zinnia seeds on Earth Day, but I didn’t get around to it. My only observations of the day were making a cream of spinach soup for dinner (because it was a vibrant green color) and writing a check to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. I’d read about how federal cuts and a budget shortfall in Maryland will endanger the decades-long cleanup efforts that have been moving in the right direction but are not finished. This breaks my heart because I love the bay.

But I haven’t given up on the Earth, its large ecosystems or our tiny corner of it, so I will eventually plant those seeds. Keep planting yours, too.

Hands Off

When we had our weekly video call with North on Sunday morning, Beth commented that it seemed like more than a week since we’d seen them. North pointed out it had been almost exactly a week, as we’d dropped them off at the Frederick park-and-ride at 11:30 the previous Sunday and it was currently 11:15 a.m. But it was an eventful week, wasn’t it? Trans Day of Visibility on Monday, Senator Cory Booker’s historic speech from Monday through Tuesday, the encouraging results of the Wisconsin Supreme Court election on Tuesday, the tariffs being announced, also on Tuesday, and the stock market tanking over the following few days, and Hands Off rallies at 1,400 separate locations nationwide on Saturday. Plus, a small, happy thing happened on our porch on Wednesday.

Monday: Trans Day of Visibility

On the last day of March, just a day after North left for school, Beth and I went to a Trans Day of Visibility rally. On my way to meet Beth at her office, I spotted a woman with a sign that said, “You’re Worried About the Wrong 1%” on the Takoma Metro platform and I knew she was going to the same place I was.

It made me think how differently that 1% estimate of the trans population is used rhetorically than the 10% estimate of the whole LGBTQ+ community was used back in the 80s, 90s, and beyond. People used to imply that 10% was a sizable minority, one big enough to be considered mainstream and to deserve rights we didn’t currently have (like marriage equality or employment nondiscrimination). Now the 1% statistic is used to imply that the trans community is so tiny that it won’t bother anyone and should not have any rights it currently has—in some places—taken away (like using public restrooms or playing school sports or getting accurate identification). It’s a disheartening difference. The ask is just “please leave us alone” or to phrase it a different way, “hands off.”

I met up with Beth at her office and we walked to the rally, which was at the very edge of the mall, right across the street from the Capitol. It was a warm, overcast afternoon, with rain forecast, and we’d both forgotten to bring a rain jacket or an umbrella. But the atmosphere was festive, and the crowd was the biggest of the three trans rallies I’ve been to since February, despite the threat of a storm. There was music playing when we arrived, and I commented to Beth that we shouldn’t have any trouble hearing when the speakers, as they had a good sound system. We sat on the grass near the stage with our signs—Beth’s made by North—and waited and people watched, which is always fun in a queer crowd.

The music played through the whole event in between the speakers. Some was probably chosen because of the artist (Kim Petras) and others because of the lyrics (Kacy Musgraves’ “High Horse.”) It kept the mood energetic. I also liked that each speaker introduced the next one, which kept things moving along without longer breaks between each person.

And speaking of the speakers, I mentioned when I wrote about the last trans rally that we attended that these are the only ones with no elected officials. Well, I need to take that back. There was elected official after elected official, a lot of Congressional representatives and some state-level officials as well. In fact, there might have been too many of them. Their speeches started to run together after a while, though Representatives Summer Lee and Maxwell Frost were particularly forceful. I noticed almost all of them mentioned a trans relative, which made me wonder, is that what takes for elected officials to be brave enough to speak up for trans folks?

It made me think how nice it had been that at the second trans rally we went to, several weeks earlier, nearly all the speakers were trans. That was more of an in-group gathering, and this was more of an expression of allyship. But both are necessary, and I was glad to see both, and for elected officials to see that people will turn out for trans folks, in case they need that encouragement to do the right thing.

At one point one of the speakers noted that the crowd on the mall was sitting in the sun while the Capitol behind the stage was in shadow. Eventually, though, it did rain, not for long, but hard. Not too many people left, though. Folks held their signs above their heads (I did this) or draped themselves in their pride flags. Another speaker noted that you need rain and sun to make a rainbow. 

We got home on the late side, so it was nice to be able to dig into the grilled cheese sandwiches and soup Noah had made for our dinner while we were on the bus coming home.

Wednesday: Fledglings

If you’ve been reading here long, you may know we get mourning doves nesting on a ledge on our porch every spring. Occasionally, there’s more than one nest a year, but the predictable one happens in March through April. The nest does not always result in fledglings. Sometimes the eggs fail to hatch, sometimes the nest is attacked by predators. So, I try not to get attached. Guess how well that goes? But in attempt not to break other people’s hearts, I’ve stopped posting much about the chicks on Facebook or here until I know whether there’s a happy ending. Well, this year we had a happy ending.

The dove parents had been sitting on the nest for a few weeks when North was home. (Mourning doves are egalitarian parents, the mother and father take turns on the nest.) I told North I thought maybe the eggs wouldn’t hatch. Late March was colder than usual, and I thought the mother may have laid the eggs too early. But a day or two before North went back to school, I caught a glimpse of one of the parents feeding a chick. It wasn’t tiny either, so I guess the parents did a good job hiding them after they hatched, and they continued to hide them. It wasn’t until after North was gone that I spied two good-sized chicks alone in the nest. They looked almost ready to fledge.

Sure enough, on Wednesday, around lunch time, I spotted them out of the nest, sitting together on a pile of sandbags on the porch wall. Noah came out to get some photos. The dove chicks stayed there all the rest of the day, not taking any of the little test flights across the porch young doves often take. When one of the parents came back to the nest and called to them, they ignored it and stuck to their post. (“Hands off, Mom and Dad,” I imagined them saying.) I wondered if they’d ever leave the porch wall. But the next morning, they were gone. Beth has since spotted one of them perching on the hammock in the side yard.

It always makes me happy when the dove chicks survive and leave the porch for the outside world, but this year it made me even happier than usual. I think I desperately needed a win, even if that win is as small as two more live birds living in my yard. 

Saturday: Hands Off

Saturday morning Beth and I went to the Hands Off rally by the Washington Monument. I know a lot of you went to these events in your hometowns. I saw pictures on Facebook from all over. Both of our mothers went, mine in Sacramento and Beth’s in Wheeling. I’ve heard the total number of participants was in the hundreds of thousands, or two million, or three million, or five million. It’s hard to say. I can say, though, that the D.C. crowd was the largest protest I’ve seen since the original Women’s March in 2017.

We met up with people from various unions at the AFL-CIO building. I’d never been in that lobby before, and I was taken with the beautiful mural. I’d been in a rush to leave that morning and hadn’t had time to make a sign, but they had sign-making materials, so I customized a Hands Off sign by adding a list of causes and vulnerable populations: Foreign Aid, Free Press, Canada, Greenland, Panama, NATO, Science, Trans People, Federal Workers, Unions, Immigrants. It was what I came up with off the top of my head. I wondered later if I should have left NATO off the list, since what we truly want is more of a hands-on approach to the alliance.

The AFL-CIO building is a couple blocks from the White House so after taking pictures of the labor delegation, we walked the half hour or so to the Washington Monument, chanting all the way. When we chanted, “What’s disgusting? Union busting!” I said to Beth it was really kind of an open-ended question to get just one answer, especially these days.

The speakers were on the Sylvan Theater stage, but without jumbotrons (which would have been a good idea) there was no way the vast majority of the people there could get anywhere close enough to hear, so people were wandering around the grounds of the monument or clustering together to listen to drumming and to do their own separate chants in smaller groups. Beth skillfully steered us close enough to the stage that we could hear a lot (but not all) of the speeches. It was packed there and hard to move around, so I could only see signs for one tiny slice of the throng, but even so, I saw a lot.

Several people made signs that made MAGA spell different things. My two favorites were: “Morons Are Governing America” and “Make Authoritarianism Go Away.” Of course, many people went with the rally theme and chose either a single issue or like me, a laundry list. I saw “Hands Off My Future” (held by a teen girl), “Hands Off LGBTQ Rights,” “Hands Off the Constitution,” and “Hands Off Our Medical Care, Unions, Benefits, Bodies, Schools, Parks & Oceans.” I thought “Will Trade Racists for Refugees” was a good one, too. Flags—American, Canadian, Ukrainian, Rainbow, and Trans— fluttered in the breeze.

As I said, from where we were standing, up on a hill closer to the Monument than the stage, we could hear a lot of the speakers. There was a preacher who was very fired up, an undocumented immigrant talking about the threats to her community, and Jamie Raskin was there, because he’s almost always there, but I don’t get tired of hearing my Congressional representative speak. We also heard Maxwell Frost again. We arrived a little after eleven and the program was supposed to go until three-thirty, but we left around two when the speakers became inaudible again and enough people left that it was easy to walk away.

On the way to the Metro, we stopped at an ice cream truck and split a brownie sundae. Then when we got home, Noah and I made a spinach paneer lasagna. I was tired from standing and walking for several hours, so I did all the KP tasks (chopping, grating, etc.) sitting at the dining room table and he did the mixing and sautéing standing in the kitchen.

Post-Rally Pause

That was five days ago. Since then, there’s been chaos in the markets with the tariffs being paused and a bill has passed the House with such stringent voting requirements that it would potentially disenfranchise people without passports and married women who took their husbands’ last names. Plus, more information keeps coming out about the hundreds of mostly Venezuelan immigrants, most with no criminal records, abducted from the U.S. and sent to what can only be called a concentration camp in El Salvador with no due process whatsoever. Just another week in the second Trump administration.

But it’s been relatively quiet on the home front. In her capacity as Communications Director of CWA, Beth has hosted a couple evening Zoom calls for labor activists, one of which Jamie Raskin attended, and she introduced him. I am almost finished with a monograph on household toxins I’ve been writing on and off for a year but working on steadily for the past four weeks. For the first time in a long while, we don’t have any protests on the horizon. I could use a rest. But not too long a rest, because these are terrifying times, and we need to keep making our voices heard.

Nine Days, Nineteen Years

North was home for a little over a week for spring break. During that time, they turned nineteen, had a birthday party, saw a play, and toured the Tidal Basin while the cherry trees were blooming. If you’d like more than that highlight reel, read on.

Day 1: Saturday, Arrival

North got a ride home from school with Ember and Max, friends from their co-op. We and another set of parents met the car with the three Obies in the parking lot of the Shady Grove Metro. Or I should say one of the parking lots at the Shady Grove Metro because that station has a massive complex of lots on both sides of the tracks, and not knowing this, we drove to the wrong side of the tracks and had to cross over to the other side, which was a ten-minute drive and then we went to the wrong lot on that side. The college students had their own adventure getting to the right lot, but eventually we found each other and hugged North and chatted briefly with the other parents and set off for Cava, because it was mid-afternoon, and North hadn’t had lunch or much breakfast. (The young folks drove almost straight through with just one bathroom break.)

Back home, North was reunited with the cats and their brother, in that order. North and I hung out at the dining room table while I wrote postcards for Susan Crawford in Wisconsin because after the first one, it’s just copying, and I can do that and talk at the same time. Then North and Beth hung out in our bedroom while Noah and I made a white bean-tomato-cheese casserole for dinner. After dinner, we watched a couple episodes of Grownish. North went to bed early. They had a cold and they’d been up since 4:30 a.m., so they were wiped out.

Day 2: Sunday, Birthday Party

“Happy birthday, early bird,” I greeted North in the kitchen at 7:50 a.m. They protested that it wasn’t that early, but then reconsidered, saying maybe it was early for a nineteen year old.

Not quite two hours later, North and I walked to Starbucks, detouring briefly to see the only cherry tree in bloom around the corner from our house. This tree is at the end of the block and always blooms early. It was already slightly past peak while the other couple dozen trees had just a stray blossom here and there and dark pink, swelling buds. These trees tend to be in sync with the ones at the Tidal Basin and we were hoping for peak bloom before North left the following weekend, but based on their progress it looked iffy to me.

At Starbucks, we each got a birthday cake pop and North got their free birthday drink, an iced cherry chai. I’ve been wanting to try that but decided to wait for a warmer day. It was in the low forties that morning, so I got a warm matcha latte.

Back at home, Beth got home from a bigger than usual grocery shop (including treats for North such as fermented pickles, kalamata olives, dried mango, fresh strawberries, and Takis) and I put the groceries away. Once that was done, North opened their presents from us. Noah got them honey caramels and chocolate-covered toffees from Zingermann’s. Beth and I got them a $19 gift certificate for the closest coffee shop to our house and tickets to see In the Heights at Signature Theater in Arlington, Virginia. They talked to both grandmothers on the phone, both of whom were disappointed their birthday checks had not yet arrived. (The checks were here within a couple days.)

Beth frosted the cake she’d baked the day before. It was a chocolate cake with strawberry-cream cheese frosting, topped with freeze-dried strawberries. North and I watched an episode of Emily in Paris before North’s party guests arrived.

North had invited three high school friends (Maddie, Miles, and Grey—all of whom are currently seniors), a camp friend (Ruby), and a college friend (Cal), both of whom live nearby. It was a nice mix of people from different parts of their life. The guests started on the porch, came inside briefly to see (or meet) the cats and then moved out to the back yard where they stayed for most of the party. It had gotten somewhat warmer, but the temperatures never rose beyond the mid-fifties.

Miles and Maddie had to leave early. They didn’t get any pizza or cake, but they did take some almond butter chocolate chip cookies Cal had brought because that’s North’s favorite cookie. North also got sea dollar earrings and a necklace with sea-green glass beads from Grey.

Beth and I picked up a takeout feast from North’s favorite pizza place, Roscoe’s—two pizzas, a salad, two orders of devilled eggs, marinated olives, and an eggplant sandwich. It was twenty minutes late and the restaurant ended up comping us the whole meal. Beth and I ate inside the house, but when it came time for cake and ice cream, I joined the celebrants outside, as I wanted to get acquainted with Ruby and Cal, whom I’d never met. Cal seemed interested to learn I’d lived in Keep, too, and to talk about that.

Grey left around eight and the party moved inside for another forty-five minutes or so when the last guest left. When it was down to North and Cal, they were talking about co-op matters, specifically the price of eggs, because North is a food buyer and Cal is a head cook so it a concern for both of them. It was kind of funny though, to hear two teens talking about grocery prices like cash-strapped parents trying to make ends meet.

Days 3-5: Monday to Wednesday, The Middle Part

Monday was low-key. Beth and I worked (as we did every day from Monday to Friday), North and I watched another episode of Emily in Paris in the afternoon and we all watched a couple episodes of Grownish in the evening. I’d set a television goal of getting halfway through Emily in Paris season 4 and finishing Grownish, season 3 over the course of North’s break. Yeah, I know I said I was thinking of watching less tv, but I wasn’t going to start while North was home, and probably not week after next when the last season of Handmaid’s Tale starts. I set North to work mending one of Noah’s bottom sheets that had a rip in it because I was hoping it could be salvaged. We’ll see. I’ve had mixed luck mending sheets when I’ve done it myself. For dinner, I made a tater tot-topped vegetarian chicken, carrot, and pea casserole that’s a favorite of North’s.

Tuesday morning, North had a psychiatrist appointment, and I met them afterward for coffee at Lost Sock. North was eager to try their jasmine latte and enjoyed it. That evening they went out to dinner at Kin-Da with Anastasia and Ranvita, more high school friends who were unable to come to their party. It’s been kind of lucky for North that they had so many friends in the grade behind them (more than in their own grade) because everyone’s home during their break, at least this year. When they came home from dinner, we watched an episode of Emily in Paris.

Wednesday morning, I had to go to the library to return a book and North tagged along because there’s a Starbucks near there and there are many items on their spring menu they want to try. We took the long way, walking along the creek and enjoyed seeing all the flowers and flowering trees. Both kids did some yardwork in the early afternoon and then Maddie came over and North and Maddie went to Koma. I made tofu sticks and strawberry-applesauce for dinner, another favorite dinner of North’s.

Day 6: Thursday, In the Heights

Thursday North made brownies, their only baking project of break, possibly because we were finishing up the cake the first few days that they were home and we had Cal’s cookies, too. North also made dinner that night, black bean-mushroom quesadillas. That was helpful because I was trying to finish up a work project and we were eating dinner early so we could go to the theater.

We got four tickets to In the Heights, but because of a mix-up in the family calendar, Noah was misinformed about the date, and he bought tickets for a Senses concert on Thursday. He decided to go to the concert, and we had an extra play ticket on our hands, so North invited Rowen, another high school friend. Rowen has an afternoon internship at an elementary school in Bethesda, so we needed to drive from Takoma Park to Bethesda to Arlington, quite the suburban odyssey. We left the house more than two hours before showtime, just to be safe.

The young people were chatty in the car, trading stories about working with kids in school and camp settings. We arrived in plenty of time (allowing me to go back to the car for my phone but not enough time for me to go back a second time for my glasses). I was distracted because I thought I might have skipped my diabetes meds at dinner, and I had some I carry in my backpack, but I wasn’t sure if I’d really skipped it, so I kept going back and forth about whether to take a dose. I decided I was more afraid of a crash than a spike, so I didn’t. And it was the right decision. I’d taken the meds after all, I discovered when we got home.

The show was fun and well done. Did you see the movie? I think it was the first movie we saw in theaters in the immediate post-vaccination phase of covid, in the spring or summer of 2021. It has some joyous associations for me because of that, but there’s joy in the plot, too, which is a tale of immigrant struggles, hopes, and dreams. It seems relevant and honestly bittersweet to watch now, especially the part where everyone is dancing during a street carnival and waving the flags of their homelands.

The play was performed in the round, and we had balcony seats. Beth was worried the view would be party obstructed, but it wasn’t bad at all. We had to lean forward to see the actors when they were right in front of the bodega, but otherwise it was fine.

We were out late. For context, intermission took place at 9:20, when Beth and I are normally getting ready for bed, and it was after midnight by the time we’d dropped Rowen off in Gaithersburg and gotten home. These are the sacrifices we make for art.

Day 7: Friday, Cherry Blossoms

The next day was the day we’d decided to see the cherry blossoms and we picked just right. It was the first day of peak bloom, an overcast day with temperatures in the high sixties. We took the Metro to Smithsonian and walked from there. As we passed between the mall and some grand federal architecture, the Department of Agriculture, I think, North said, “I love D.C.”

I do, too, which makes it so hard to see so many of its important institutions being dismantled. We’d driven by the Kennedy Center on the way back from the play the night before, all lit up and now a melancholy sight, and just that day we’d learned the administration has its sights set on the Smithsonian. We really can’t have nice things any more.

The Tidal Basin was as crowded as you’d expect on a Friday afternoon during peak bloom. And as always, it was a diverse crowd, people of all ages and races and nationalities. There were people speaking many languages, people in Muslim and Mennonite garb, people in wheelchairs, an Asian or maybe Latino couple posing for wedding pictures, and three separate girls in enormous dresses doing quinceanera photo shoots. People of all sorts were pushing strollers, walking dogs, standing in line for food trucks and listening to music performed on the stage or played by buskers. Everyone was delighting in the puffy profusions of white and pink blossoms and strangers were cheerfully taking each other’s pictures. When I’m in a crowd like this I usually find the display of diversity inspiring, and I still do, but it’s also a little disheartening that so many people can’t see the beauty of it as easily as the beauty of the cherry trees.

And they are beautiful. They always are. We’ve gone almost every year since 1992 for a reason. Three of us got ice cream and North got a smoothie and we took pictures (Noah using a new camera lens that allows for extreme closeups), and we walked until North got tired and decided to wait for us at the MLK Memorial. The rest of us wanted to go as far as the FDR Memorial because we love it and because there are bathrooms there. Beth posed at MLK with a quote that spoke to her, and I did the same at FDR.

It started to drizzle toward the end of our tour and Noah was worried about getting his new lens wet, so he ducked under a food tent to swap it out. We swung back for North and caught a Lyft to Metro Center, where we caught a train home. The driver was listening to the news on the radio, which was mostly about the stock market tanking in expectation of tariffs to take effect next week. It is so hard to disconnect from the news sometimes. It’s just always there.

Days 8-9: Saturday to Sunday, Goodbyes

Saturday Beth went to another Tesla protest, this time in Silver Spring. I would have gone with her, but it was North’s last day at home, so instead I stayed home, and we watched Emily in Paris (reaching the goal of watching half a season) and then we went to Koma. They’d forgotten their gift card when they went with Maddie, but this time they remembered. North got an iced chai; I got peanut butter soft serve because the afternoon was warm, in the high seventies. On the way there we walked down the block right around the corner from our house, where all the cherry trees were in exuberant bloom, just like their Tidal Basin cousins.

North spent some time on their last full day home applying for summer jobs and internships, doing their taxes, and making a sign for Beth take to the trans rally they would miss by just one day. Noah and I made ravioli with rosemary-garlic sauce and broccoli for dinner, then we all watched two episodes of Grownish, successfully finishing season 3 (three more to go!). This season, which takes place in the 2019-2020 school year, was filmed entirely before the pandemic, so there’s an in-person graduation and one of the characters is headed off to compete in the Tokyo Olympics. That was jarring to say the least.

Sunday morning North packed up the chia seeds, matzoh, and more dried mango Beth bought them to take to school, they said their goodbyes to the cats and their brother, and then Beth drove us out to a park-and-ride parking lot near a bus stop in Frederick where Ember was waiting to take them back to Oberlin. We hugged them goodbye until May, when we’ll be back in Ohio to watch their theater class showcase and bring them home for the summer.

Beth and I had lunch in Frederick at a place called Hippy Chick Hummus, which is very much what you’d expect from the name. We got a hummus sampler plate and if you’re ever in Frederick, Maryland, I recommend the olive hummus—the lemon is pretty good, too. We took a stroll through Carroll Creek Park, following a brick path along a canal and admiring the collection of kinetic sculptures in the water. We got ice cream (coffee for Beth, maple walnut for me) and picked up a couple bottles of soda for Noah at a specialty soda shop (cherry and cherry-lime).

Then we drove home. It’s sad to say goodbye to our youngest, but it won’t be too long until they’re home, and I can’t help but think how when their brother came home for his first college spring break (in the 2019-2020 school year), well, you know what happened. He didn’t go back for seventeen and a half months. This is better. They’re where they should be.