About Steph

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Investigations and Celebrations

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Steph

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

Investigation #1: JWU Meeting

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

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

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

Investigation #2: Towson University Open House

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

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

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

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

Celebration #1: Birthday

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

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

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

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

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

Interlude: Before Mother’s Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

Celebration #2: Mother’s Day

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

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

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

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

22

Posted on May 4, 2023 by Steph

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Yeah, we’re happy, free, confused, and lonely in the best way
It’s miserable and magical, oh yeah
Tonight’s the night when we forget about the heartbreaks
It’s time, oh-oh

I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling 22
Everything will be all right if you keep me next to you
You don’t know about me, but I’ll bet you want to
Everything will be all right (all right) if we just keep dancing like we’re 22

From “22” by Johan Karl Schuster, Taylor Swift, and Martin Max Sandberg

“Happy, free, confused, and lonely in the best way” are the lyrics that jump out at me in this song. The specific age it evokes—when many people graduate from college—is a pivotal one, and a contradictory one. You’ve been an adult for several years, but in a provisional kind of way. When you leave college and begin to support yourself, you start to feel a lot more adult, or at least I did. And that can be exciting, but also a little scary.

When I left college, I went straight to grad school. Losing no time at all, I started in summer school. My folks weren’t going to pay my bills anymore, but I did get a graduation gift of enough money to buy a computer (a Mac SE I used for more than a decade) and to cover my rent and food until my teaching assistantship in in the Rhetoric department at the University of Iowa started in the fall semester. Beth and I had been dating for two years at this point and we’d moved from Oberlin to Iowa City together. She had a research assistantship in the Education department. We lived in a co-operative group house with ten other people for two years until we finished our master’s degrees and moved to the D.C. area, which was a whole other adventure of young adulthood. Everything felt like an adventure then, sometimes miserable, sometimes magical.

Noah is on the brink of his own adventures now. He graduates from college in two and a half weeks, and he turned twenty-two yesterday. It was a busy day for him. He had an oral presentation in his Machine Learning class, and he worked a shift at his IT job that was at least five hours long. I know this because he was at work when the cupcakes that I had delivered from a local bakery arrived at his apartment at noon and he didn’t get off until five, but he went to his building’s lobby on his break get them.

Finally, in the evening, he had an interview for an internship with a company in Los Angeles that makes film trailers. He said it went pretty well. He’s heading to L.A. just a few days after graduation, whether he gets that internship or not. He has housing through the end of July and his airline ticket is one way, because he doesn’t know when/if he’s leaving or where he’s going when he does. I am finding this unsettling, but I guess that’s my first taste of having a grown child.

Thanks to covid, Noah spent his first two birthdays of college at home, so this is only the second time we’ve been apart on his birthday. It’s probably a good thing it’s not the first time. I have enough transitions to cope with as it is.

I marked his birthday by making a red curry soup with tofu and vegetables the day before. Beth and I went out for Thai the night before he was born, so this some kind of Thai food on his birthday eve is a tradition. I also got a birthday cake pop from Starbucks and made a post of twenty-two pictures of him wearing hats for Facebook, which most of you have probably already seen. It’s captioned: “Steph Lovelady’s son is 22 today. Through the years, he has worn many hats. She can’t wait to see which one he wears next.” I didn’t realize until I made it how much he liked hats when he was little. He was very fond of dress up, which is maybe why as he got older, he made such elaborate Halloween costumes. He can’t see it because he’s not on Facebook, but I’ll show it to him when I see him next.

In addition to the cupcakes, Beth and I got him an Air Tag and some books and North got him a vegetable peeler (these were all was on his list). His grandmothers and aunt got him money, more books, and a citrus juicer, also from his list. We’re also going to get him some sheets, but I haven’t bought them yet because I needed to consult with him about what size he needed and whether he uses a top sheet these days.

He has a little more than a week of classes left. He says his classes and his capstone project (the fictional film about someone who dies by suicide) are going well. Filming is done and he’s editing it. When he finishes, he’ll have a week between the end of classes and graduation so maybe he’ll spend some of it reading, eating peeled vegetables, and drinking fresh-squeezed lemonade on his balcony. I like this image.

Though it’s still strange to be apart from him on the anniversary of the day we came apart in another way, there are familiar things about his birthday. I’d be surprised if he’s ever had a birthday or Christmas without getting books, he’s gotten kitchen tools before, and he’s had cupcakes, too.

There are a lot of changes for him on the horizon, but some things never change.

Arts & Sciences

Posted on April 29, 2023 by Steph

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It’s been a busy week for all of us, full of artistic events and (mostly medical) appointments.

Monday Afternoon and Evening: Visual and Musical Arts

In art class, North’s most recent project is a painting of cherry blossoms, based on some photos Noah took while he was home for spring break. The cherries on our block were just starting to bloom when he left in mid-March. On Monday, their teacher asked North to finish the painting so she could put it in the art show at their school later in the week. This was a nice thing to learn because the kids don’t always know ahead of time what’s going to be on display.

That night Ithaca’s Campus Band (for non-music majors) had its twice-yearly concert. It’s livestreamed, so we got to watch Noah play triangle, suspended cymbals, snare drums, and timpani. It was a short concert, just four songs, but I always enjoy hearing him play. I have since he was nine and it was a little bittersweet watching his last college band concert after all these years. My favorite song was the last one, “The Cave You Fear,” because I could hear him playing the timpani pretty well. I asked Noah about the title, and he said it’s a Joseph Campbell quote: “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” That’s something to think about, as he stands on the brink of his adult life.

Tuesday Morning: Medical Science

North had an appointment at the pain clinic at Children’s on Tuesday morning. They were being evaluated for POTS because of some dizziness they’ve been having. I didn’t go because I thought it would mainly be a procedural appointment, during which their heart rate would be measured in different positions (laying down, sitting, standing). And they did do that (and found they don’t have POTS), but they also had a long consultation about pain as well.

It was a new doctor and Beth and North both reported that they liked him. North has had a lot of experiences of not feeling heard by pain doctors, but he seemed to listen, to have reviewed their chart before the appointment, and to have consulted with the neurologist they’re seeing for their migraines, all points in his favor. He gave them a referral to see another doctor to consult about possibly getting braces to help stabilize their joints and he mentioned that the new migraine drug they are about to start might help with other kinds of pain, too. We’re all feeling cautiously hopeful about these developments. North mentioned it would be nice to have their hands freer if braces made it possible to use their cane and crutches less. They were specifically thinking of standing for long hours in the kitchen at culinary school more easily.

Tuesday Evening: Literary Arts

That night was Favorite Poem Night at the library. North was considering coming with me but didn’t because they’d gone to bed with a migraine. For years I didn’t read a poem at Favorite Poem Night because the pressure of picking one favorite poem was too overwhelming. Seven years ago, I chilled out and realized it could be just a poem I liked, and I read an Emily Dickinson poem (#670, “One Need Not Be a Chamber to Be Haunted”). I’ve read a poem most years the event has been held since then. It was cancelled for covid in 2020 and I think in 2021, too.

Tuesday, inspired by all the spring wildflowers (dandelions, asters, buttercups) in my yard, I returned to Dickinson and read poem #81, even though it’s actually about fall flowers and how they extend the floral season just when it seems to have ended.

We should not mind so small a flower—
Except it quiet bring
Our little garden that we lost
Back to the Lawn again.

So spicy her Carnations nod—
So drunken, reel her Bees—
So silver steal a hundred flutes
From out a hundred trees—

That whoso sees this little flower
By faith may clear behold
The Bobolinks around the throne
And Dandelions gold.

There were many lovely poems read, including pieces by Edna St. Vincent Millay, Alice Walker, Jack Prelutsky, Ada Limón, Mary Oliver, Robert Penn Warren, and Maya Angelou, among others, but I was particularly excited to see “What You Missed that Day You were Absent from Fourth Grade,” on the program because I just love this poem. There were two precocious little girls who read poems in French and the poet laurate of Takoma Park—yes, we have one—read from his work. It was a fun event.

Thursday Evening: Visual Arts

We had a fairly uneventful 504 meeting at North’s school Thursday morning. We didn’t make any changes to their accommodations, decided that they will stick with the half-virtual, half-in person schedule they’ve had since January for the rest of the school year, and discussed possible changes to their senior year course schedule, but we didn’t make any final decisions about that.

After the meeting was over, we decided to take a sneak peek at the art displayed in the hallway and we discovered that not only was North’s cherry blossom painting there, but also their winter landscape, which is based on a composite of a photo Noah took of me at Blackwater Falls State Park and other photos both kids have taken there. North noted with some amusement that the cherry blossom picture had been hung upside down. The blossoms are supposed to be dangling down from the branch. Beth needed to get back to work so we didn’t have a chance to look at the other art right then, but we returned that evening.

Walking through the art at a more leisurely pace, we found North had three pieces in the show. The ink wash cityscape they completed largely at home last fall and winter was there, too. We got to chat with their ninth-grade ceramics teacher who taught them virtually during the pandemic, and with their current painting teacher, and to look at painting, drawing, photography, and digital art from other classes. There was a whole room that was dedicated mostly to ceramics and other forms of three-dimensional art, which interested North because they are signed up for Ceramics 2 next year.

Friday: Theatrical Arts

In the morning, North had a psychiatrist appointment, again pretty uneventful. That night North and Beth went to see Sister Act at a high school in Virginia, so North could review it for Cappies. They’ve been really busy with this activity recently—in the past two weeks they’ve also attended and reviewed Mean Girls and Legally Blonde. The theater director and Cappies’ co-ordinator for their school reads the reviews and he pulled them aside recently and told them he really enjoys their writing.

Beth has gone to many of these shows with North and I intended to at the beginning of the school year, but because the Cappies have a meeting to debrief after the play and many of the plays are at schools pretty far away (often in Virginia), going to one usually means getting home after midnight. After the one time I did it in October, I was never up to it again. I am not the night owl I was in my youth. I always had mixed feelings about skipping the plays because I like theater and I would have liked being familiar with the performances when I read North’s reviews. And as this was the last play North would review this year, I had some FOMO as Beth and North left the house, around five p.m.

It turned out to be a good night for me to stay home, though, because an hour or so after they left, I started to feel dizzy and sick to my stomach. I ended up putting the pizza and salad I’d ordered straight into the fridge as soon as it arrived and crawled into bed at seven. I listened to podcasts for a couple hours until I fell asleep during one. I woke recovered in the morning, so I’m not sure what was wrong.

Apparently, I missed the best show of the year, according to Beth. She raved about the acting, the choreography, and the pit orchestra. North wrote the production was “dynamic and enchanting, with stunning acting, magnificent vocals, and expert behind the scenes work.”

Upcoming: Visual Arts, Medical Science, and Pastry Arts

The play was just the beginning of a busy weekend for North that will include a therapist appointment, Sol’s birthday party, and a trip to the National Art Gallery with Ranvita. Then next week North has in-person appointments at urology, the pain clinic, and a Zoom meeting with Accessibility Services at Johnson and Wales University to get more detail about what accommodations are possible in the Baking and Pastry Arts program.

Speaking of pastry arts, North has volunteered to make my birthday cupcakes next month, so in addition to appreciating both offspring’s musical, photographic, artistic, and theatrical talents, we’ll soon have the opportunity to appreciate the younger one’s baking, too.

Dragons, and Seahawks, and Cats, Oh My! College Tours

Posted on April 8, 2023 by Steph

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Friday: Takoma Park, MD to Providence, RI

It took us over ten hours to make the six-state drive to Providence for the first of three college visits we did over North’s spring break. It could have been done more quickly, but we took a lot of breaks for lunch, restroom visits, and for those of us with hourly step goals to try to meet them. I also need to walk every hour or two to prevent leg cramps.

We ordered pizza ahead of our arrival, but apparently not early enough because when we got to the busy pizzeria, the friendly young man at the counter said it wasn’t going to be ready for another forty-five minutes. That was what the app said, too, but we thought it might have been a mistake because we’d ordered almost an hour earlier. I was hungry and it was almost eight and I try not to eat after eight p.m., so I bought a slice, or I tried to—he gave it to me for free, stage-whispering not to tell anyone. I ate it in the car. It was good.

We settled into the house and Beth went back to get the much-anticipated pizza. Beth and North ate their slices while we watched the first forty minutes of Do the Right Thing. I’d nominated this film for family movie night, back in February for Black History Month, and now on the last day of March, we were getting around to it. We were too tired to watch the whole thing, though.

Saturday: Providence and Environs

The next morning, we attended the open house for Johnson and Wales University’s culinary school. This school offers the only bachelor’s degree in Baking and Pastry Arts in the country, and it is currently North’s top choice.

The event began with a scavenger hunt in the Culinary Arts Museum. There were spaces to explore, like a diner built in the 1920s and a colonial era tavern. (It wasn’t clear to me if they were real or recreations.) North had a list of things to find, such as the jacket of a celebrity chef and a prototype of the microwave from the 1940s. It was fun and North found all the items on the list. Unfortunately, they missed hearing when you were supposed to turn in the paper, so they didn’t win a bag of cooking utensils and swag.

I sampled a small cinnamon roll from the table of student-baked treats, and we visited several booths, including one for study abroad and another for accessibility services. The woman at that booth was surprisingly discouraging about accommodations for a student with chronic pain and mobility issues.

We proceeded to a panel discussion. While we waited for it to start, we discussed how the school seems to have two mascots. The official one is the Wildcats, but the school’s logo includes the flag of Wales, which has a dragon on it (although at first, I thought it was a griffin). You actually see as many if not more dragons than wildcats in the graphics around campus. Depending on how far you can zoom in, you might see one on the right side of the chef’s jacket North’s wearing in the first photo, across from the words “Future Wildcat.”

At the panel, a dean and about a half dozen professors who described the program and explained how the different tracks in the culinary school are structured. A few of them stressed how JWU’s culinary school is unique in that it’s housed in a university and students also take academic classes. Toward the end, during the Q&A Beth asked about accessibility again and got a very different, more positive answer from the dean. So that’s something to investigate in more detail because except for this one concern, North is really sold on this school. At the discussion we picked up samples of student-made confectionary. I choose a bag of salted caramels that I saved for later—they were excellent.

We went on a tour next. There are two campuses, one in downtown Providence and another on Narragansett Bay. The culinary school is in the harborside campus, though students can also take any academic classes that aren’t offered there in the downtown campus. We toured the two main harborside classroom buildings, which were bustling for a Saturday morning. Several clubs were meeting—including a Latin American cuisine club that was holding a competition and a baking club. We were invited in to watch students present their meals and baked goods, and we were offered pastry samples. I had an almond cookie even though I’d already had a cinnamon roll and I did not regret it. (It reminded me strongly of a tart I used to get at the Portuguese bakery in Provincetown where Beth and I often travelled back in our twenties and thirties. That and the fact that something called “New England coffeecake” was on offer made me wonder if that day’s baking focus was New England regional pastry.)

We could have boarded a bus to tour the downtown campus at this point, but there wouldn’t have been time for lunch if we did that, so we decided to wander around downtown Providence on our own later. We checked out a food court-style dining hall where North could have used their visitor’s badge for 10% off, but they were in the mood for Panera, so we went to one just across the Massachusetts border, before walking around the downtown Providence campus. We tried to go to the Admissions Office and the bookstore, but they had both closed for the day.

While we were driving to Rhode Island the day before we’d glimpsed the ocean from the highway (in Connecticut) and that got me in the mood to see it again. We considered going to the beach that afternoon, but it was late afternoon by the time we got back to the house, and we were farther inland now, almost an hour away from the Atlantic, so we decided Greenwich Bay was a better idea.

However, North didn’t want to risk leaving the house during prime migraine time because they get one in the late afternoon more often than not these days and they were saving their last dose of the really effective medicine for the next night because we had evening plans. After some discussion, we decided to leave them alone in the house. We have not done this since they were hospitalized in October, though we’d been considering it for a while. It felt momentous and anticlimactic at the same time.

It was a short drive and a long walk to the bay. It was a scenic walk, though, along a wooded, riverside path. When we got to the beach, we sat on a bench and looked at the water for about fifteen minutes before we headed back.

When we got back, North had gone to bed with a headache after all, so it was just the two of us for dinner. After considering a few options, we ordered takeout from a Japanese restaurant the dean recommended during the part of his spiel in which he lauded the many fine dining options in Providence, where many alums work as chefs. His praise was not misplaced. We got several small dishes, and the garlic eggplant and crispy cauliflower were especially good. You should go there if you’re ever in Providence. It was very satisfying.

Sunday: Providence to New York, NY and Union City, NJ

Sunday morning, we drove to New York City. North was supposed to meet a friend from camp for lunch in Brooklyn, but the friend cancelled by text when we were right outside the city. That gave us enough time to reconsider our next destination and our lunch plans. We stopped at a pretty little park by the Hudson River, had a picnic, and regrouped.

We decided to go to Coney Island. It took us longer to get there than we thought it would—isn’t that always how it goes in New York?—and when we did there was no legal parking to be had anywhere so Beth kindly volunteered to stay with the illegally parked car just in case she had to move it and North and I took a quick jaunt to the amusement park and beach.

We had early evening theater ticket so we could only stay about forty-five minutes and we had different priorities. North was hungry for pizza and drawn to the wooden roller coaster and I just wanted to go to the beach. I bought two slices, one for North and one to take back to Beth, and North found it unsatisfactory as New York pizza. After they’d eaten the subpar pizza, I gave them money for the roller coaster, and they got in line. I took off my shoes and socks and walked on the beach for about ten minutes before North texted that the ride operators didn’t take cash. By that time it was too late to figure out how to get tickets and stand in line again, so we decided to get ice cream, hit the bathrooms, and meet up with Beth. The expedition didn’t go exactly as we hoped, but I did get to walk barefoot on the beach on a sunny day and eat strawberry cheesecake gelato, and that doesn’t happen every day.

We got to the theater (a converted church basement) where we were seeing Stranger Sings!, a musical parody of Stranger Things, a half hour before the show, which was a relief. If you’ve seen the source material (as North and I have), the show is funny and a lot of fun. If you haven’t (like Beth) it’s baffling, but she says she enjoyed it anyway so we will take her at her word.

We stopped at a hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant to get a post-show dinner of vegetable and tofu stir-fried noodles for North. The food came really quickly, and we took it back to our AirBnB in Union City, New Jersey. North liked it so well they left a glowing Yelp review.

Monday: Union City and New York to Takoma Park

On Monday we had a busy morning planned. We had a mid-afternoon tour of NYU and before then we had three stops. First was the Catacombs by Candlelight tour at Saint Patrick’s Old Cathedral. This consists of a guided tour of the outdoor cemetery at the Cathedral and the vaults underneath it. The guide gives a lot of historical information both above and below ground. It was a little less creepy than North was hoping for, I think—no stacks of skulls and bones like in the Paris catacombs they read about in a 39 Clues book in elementary school, just sealed vault doors lit with electric candles—but it was still atmospheric and interesting.

From there we visited a high-end chocolate shop, which was Beth’s primary goal for our day in New York. We all picked treats (mostly candy, but North got a jar of fancy olives). The only thing I’ve tried so far was a pistachio truffle, but it was so good it made me take the lord’s name in vain when I bit into it. I still have a dark chocolate-cherry bar to try.

North wanted a pizza do-over so we went to another place they’d found. Here I should mention that North planned a lot of our activities in New York and navigated us to them. It made them seem like someone who’s almost ready to go to college, maybe even in a big city. They found the pesto, olive, and fresh mozzarella pizza at Prince Street Pizza much more to their liking than the boardwalk pizza. There were outside stools and counters, though we needed to wait a while for other diners to vacate the stools. There’s a lot of open air or semi-enclosed sidewalk dining in New York. I’m guessing at least some of it was born of the pandemic. A lot of the spaces are quite decorated and festive, but this one was more utilitarian.

At NYU, students were only allowed one parent and as I enjoy these tours more than Beth does, she walked around Greenwich village and sat in Washington Square Park while North and I went on the tour. Oddly, there was no introductory information session, which I’ve come to expect. We watched a two-minute video and set out. The other strange thing was that the tour was almost entirely outside the buildings we visited. We didn’t enter a residence hall or dining hall or classroom, though we approached them. We did go inside the student center and the main library and it’s lovely, twelve stories with an atrium in the center and the floors all enclosed in glass with an abstract gold pattern painted on it. We learned that NYU’s mascot, the Bobcat, is named after the card catalog. Bobcat is short for Bobst Library Catalog. You’ve got to appreciate a school that names its sports teams after the library catalog. Our guide was affable and informative. North was especially impressed with the study-abroad opportunities.

By the time it was over, North was done in—between the catacombs, our perambulations through the neighborhood, and the campus tour, it had been a lot of walking. They were starting to drag, so they sat down at a table outside a café to rest while Beth fetched the car from the parking lot. I went inside to buy a flourless chocolate-walnut cookie to justify our presence, and while I was inside a young woman took the other chair at the table where North was sitting and did not leave when I stared at her, so I ate the cookie standing up.

It was around four-thirty when we hit the road. We had long drive home, so it was past our bedtime when we arrived, stashed our perishable food in the fridge, and fell into bed.

Tuesday: Takoma Park

We had a one-day, two-night pit stop at home. North rested and Beth and I worked. I wrote half of the April issue of an e-newsletter for a supplement company, did two loads of laundry, mailed a care package of Easter candy to Noah, and cleaned most of the kitchen (losing steam and leaving the kitchen floor un-mopped) and started writing this.

North got a migraine in the late afternoon and tried their new device which arrived in the mail while we were gone. You strap it to your arm, and it vibrates in a way that’s supposed to block migraine pain signals, but it didn’t work (at least this time) and they ended up napping the rest of the day.

Wednesday: Takoma Park to Saint Mary’s City, MD and Ridge, MD

Wednesday morning, we set out on the southern leg of our trip. We arrived at Saint Mary’s historic site around lunch time, so we had a picnic there. Saint Mary’s was the first settlement in Maryland and its capital in the seventeenth century. Now it’s a living history museum and archaeological site. All fourth graders in Maryland public schools visit it. The year North went, I chaperoned. Turns out I remember this trip a lot better than North does because everything there looked very familiar. We wandered around a little before it was time for our tour and decided to return the next day when we’d have more time.

Saint Mary’s College of Maryland is a public honors college that’s located right next to the historic site. It’s on the shore of Saint Mary’s River, which feeds into the Chesapeake Bay. It’s a gorgeous campus, full of red brick buildings, woods, and ponds. Their mascot is the Seahawks and we saw many actual seabirds, including ospreys, while we were there.

We listened to a presentation by an administrator and then set out for our tour. When North was registering for tours, Saint Mary’s was the only school that asked if the student had any accessibility needs, so North had requested a slower-paced tour. (They were able to keep up with the tours at JWU and NYU, but it was a concern ahead of time, and the NYU tour left them pretty wiped out.) We ended up with our own private tour, the three of us, plus two guides.

The tour was quite thorough. We went all over the small campus, and we saw the main dining hall, a dorm room (with a view of the pond), a townhouse (housing for juniors and seniors), the bookstore, and a classroom. We visited the boathouse where students can take out boats and paddleboards and saw students on the water and others sunbathing on the docks. We saw students wearing waders standing in the pond with nets and clipboards taking samples, presumably for a science class. The guide was attentive and at the end of the tour remembered to find out the answer to a question we’d asked that he didn’t know the answer to, even though we’d forgotten we’d asked.

After the tour, we checked into our AirBnB which was also on the water and had its own private dock on Saint Jerome Creek. It was so lovely we all sat out there for a half hour before we even unpacked. North went to bed with a headache soon after that, and I cooked dinner—vegetarian fish filets and roasted asparagus and carrots. Beth and I ate on the deck and then I went back to the dock to watch the sun set.

Thursday: Ridge and Saint Mary’s to Takoma

We didn’t have to be out of the house until noon, so we had a leisurely morning there. I ate my breakfast of yogurt, banana, and granola on the dock. North came to join me and we talked about the schools we visited and the college application process. Beth went for a walk and then went kayaking—the house had its own kayak you could use—and then I went for a walk. We got back about the same time and left the house to return to Saint Mary’s.

This time we bought tickets, and we took a guided tour of the Maryland Dove (a recreation of a seventeenth-century ship), a store, and a print shop, where we watched and participated in a demonstration of a printing press. We also wandered around some of the other buildings and read the historical signs about the people who lived and worked there. I was struck by the story of a woman who at the age of seventeen married a widower who had five children, and then bore him seven more. Being seventeen in the 1600s was a lot different than being seventeen now, I thought.

After a couple hours in Saint Mary’s, we left for lunch and our drive home. North’s considering a few more schools, so we’re not finished with college tours, but I think they’re off to a good start, with a lot of different ways to imagine their future—as a dragon/wildcat, a bobcat, or a seahawk.

Boons for Their Birthday

Posted on March 26, 2023 by Steph

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North turned seventeen on Thursday so the week has been filled with little celebrations. Here’s how it all went down (plus a few more of our doings).

Before the Birthday: The Edge of Seventeen

“This is the beginning of your birthday celebration,” Beth declared as we all gathered around the dining room table on Sunday morning, four days before North’s birthday. We were about to take Noah to the bus stop for his trip back to school and North was going to open their birthday present from him. North pointed out it wasn’t the very beginning because they’d received a card with a generous check from YaYa a couple days earlier, but this was the first wrapped gift. We all sang “Happy Birthday,” and North stripped the rainbow-colored paper from the box. It was a tumbler they’d asked for, lavender, with two straws, and different lids for hot and cold beverages. They thought it might help them drink more water, which is a migraine prevention goal. They seemed pleased with it.

Noah’s break had been low-key, but pleasant. We read a book from the Discworld series and watched a lot of television (finishing a whole season of His Dark Materials with me and making progress in other shows he was watching with various family members), he helped with house and yardwork and gave North a hand with their computer science homework, we celebrated Pi Day with apple and cherry turnovers from the bakery and St. Patrick’s Day with soda bread North made and two Irish movies (My Left Foot and The Banshees of Inisherin). I enjoyed listening to him drum for the first time in a year. He has his last band concert (probably ever) next month and I’m looking forward to hearing it online.

On the ride to Bethesda, Noah observed with surprise, “You didn’t give me any nuts.” I always pack him a snack for the bus, and it usually includes nuts. The reason I do this, other than just the urge to mother him as he leaves, is that the bus doesn’t always stop for meal breaks and it’s a seven-hour ride to Ithaca. I’d intended to pack him some pecans, his favorite nut, but in the commotion of leaving I forgot. We were running early so we detoured to a 7-Eleven, where we gathered a little bag of cashews, a banana, and a bag of Cheez-Its.

“Is that enough?” I asked him. He drifted wordlessly toward a display of cookies. “Do you need cookies?” I inquired.

“I think I do,” he said.

Back in the car, Beth predicted “he won’t starve” if there was no lunch stop.

We said our goodbyes, put him on the bus, and drove to REI, where Beth bought herself some new walking shoes and I went to a nearby Starbucks to drown my sorrows with a latte. It was an emotional day, not only because Noah was leaving, but because in the afternoon I was attending a gathering in support of a friend (the mother of one of North’s preschool classmates) who has stage IV pancreatic cancer.

The friend’s family moved to Switzerland six years ago and we haven’t been in close touch, except during a couple of their visits back to the States, but I was distressed to hear of her illness. At the meeting, attended by a half dozen preschool parents plus a teacher, we had a Zoom call with her husband, he gave updates, and we discussed ways we could help. After he got off the call, we talked more about our own lives and a few people had heavy news of their own. Despite the sad occasion, it was still good to see the mothers of a couple of North’s classmates and their beloved teacher, none of whom I’d seen in a while.

North requested some special dinners in the runup to their birthday. On Tuesday we had ravioli with vegetarian meatballs and on Wednesday I made a tater tot-topped casserole they like. That night they didn’t have a headache for the second day in a row and they were in a good mood. They proposed a walk down the block to see the cherry trees that line the block around the corner. They were almost at peak bloom, so after dinner, we all strolled down the street, admiring the delicate pale pink blossoms. Cherry blossom time always seems magical to me. I guess it helps that my youngest’s birthday often coincides with the bloom. That’s why we sometimes call them our cherry blossom baby.

On the Birthday: At Seventeen

“Happy Birthday to me,” North said when they came out into the dining room and saw the “Happy Birthday” gold balloon banner we’ve been re-using since 2020, and a new balloon with an image of a slice of rainbow-striped cake on it. North has appreciated balloons since they were a small child. I remember how excited they were when they were turning two and Beth took them to the grocery store to get “b’oons for my birfday.”

I offered to make them cheese grits for breakfast, but they wanted leftover tater tot casserole from the night before. Their astronomy class was cancelled, so they only had one online class (English) before they left for school.

While they were at school, I sent them a playlist of songs about being seventeen. I’ve been working on it for months. I got the idea to make it because I noticed a long time ago there are a lot of songs that mention that age, more so than any other teenage year. I have two theories about this. The first is that if a songwriter needs a three-syllable age of a teen to fit the meter of the song, there’s only one choice, whereas there are six two-syllable choices, so those get spread out across songs. The second is that there must be something particularly evocative about the year before you turn eighteen, graduate from high school, and leave home.

The playlist is called “At 17,” after the Janis Ian song. There are twenty-four songs on it, arranged chronologically from Chuck Berry’s “Little Queenie” (“She’s too cute to be a minute over seventeen”) to Demi Lovato’s “29” (Finally twenty-nine/Seventeen would never cross my mind). When I told North about it ahead of time, they asked if it had ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” and Olivia Rodrigo’s “Brutal” on it. The answer was yes on both counts.

A lot of these songs are about the painful side of being seventeen, as you know if you’re familiar with the lyrics of “At Seventeen” or “Brutal.” But there’s joy in some of them, too. As Frank Sinatra sings, “When I was seventeen/It was a very good year.” My aim was to pick songs that ran the gamut, because there’s no one way to be any age. They listened to about half of the playlist on the school bus ride home and told me of the songs they didn’t know, they liked Amysthst Kiah’s “Wild Turkey” best.

I met them at the bus stop, and we walked to Starbucks so they could claim their birthday reward. They got a pineapple refresher and didn’t like it as well as their standard strawberry-açai refresher, but they wanted to try something new, and they said they weren’t as disappointed as they would have been if they’d paid for it. It was a warm day—I was in a t-shirt—and I got my first iced latte of the season. On the way home, we lingered on the bridge that goes over the creek and admired all the daffodils and other flowers growing in the woods. “It’s so pretty here,” they said.

North’s cooking night is Thursday, so they made their own birthday dinner. I’d offered to switch with them, but they said no, and they heated up some canned soup. If this seems like kind of a sad birthday dinner, I should re-assure you that North really likes canned soup. Plus, they wanted to have some of the higher carb dinners they requested earlier in the week so they wouldn’t interfere with my ability to eat birthday cake, which was considerate of them.

Beth made the cake, red velvet with cream cheese frosting and cherry blossom decorations, which North had requested. We ate it after North opened presents—a new Apple pencil to replace one they lost, a book and many shirts. They’d asked for long-sleeved shirts, but we also got them a short-sleeved one because on the Cherry Blossom Festival website, Beth found one that had blossoms on stripes that look a lot like the trans flag, and she could not resist it. North received it enthusiastically and slept in it that night. After presents and cake and ice cream, North wanted to play Clue, so we did. I won, by default, because Beth and North both made false accusations.

After the Birthday: When They Were Seventeen

When North got home from school the next day, they opened more presents that had arrived in the mail—another shirt and a glass with a pattern of bees and rabbits and other spring symbols on it.

At 5:30 we met four of North’s friends outside Roscoe’s, picked up a stack of pizzas and took them to the community picnic tables that have been under tents on Laurel Avenue since the beginning of the pandemic. It was in the high forties and raining, not particularly inviting weather for outdoor dining, but North had decided against having their party inside a crowded restaurant, and we’ve all gotten hardy about this sort of thing. Some of the guests went to North’s middle school and some go to their high school, and some have been involved with theater at one school or the other, so conversation bounced between these and other topics. North got some presents: a blank journal from Zoë, and some window clings of flowers, a snail, and a raincloud, plus a small plush octopus from Sol.

After we’d all eaten, the party moved to our living room. Beth drove everyone back to the house in two shifts and we served the guests leftover birthday cake and peppermint tea to warm them up and left them to talk for the next couple hours. All the guests except Zoë, who was sleeping over and spending most of the next day with us, left by 9:30.

Saturday morning, we left the house around ten, hit the closest Starbucks for provisions, and drove to the Tidal Basin to view the cherry blossoms. In the car on the way there, Zoë said turning seventeen was “kind of terrifying” and I asked why, and she said it’s because you’re a year from being an adult and you can’t make mistakes anymore, and I said you can make mistakes the rest of your life and she said, “I’m going to make that my motto.”

The trees had reached peak bloom two days earlier and I was worried the rain on Friday would have knocked them down, but they were just perfect. And the fact that it was now in the mid-forties and still drizzling kept the crowds away. Beth let us off and parked the car. North and Zoë took a lot of pictures, with Zoë offering instructions like “look pensive” and then complaining her subject was insufficiently pensive. At one point she was taking a picture of North taking a picture and I asked her if she wanted a picture of herself taking a picture of North taking a picture and she was all over that.

We walked over the bridge, took in views of the monuments across the water, and wandered around in the FDR Memorial and the MLK Memorial, where we met up with Beth. North didn’t want to go any further, so Beth and I left the kids to wait there and walked back to the car among the profusion of pink puffs.

I commented that even though we’ve lived in the DC area for over thirty years, and we’ve visited the blossoms almost every year, “I will never not be awed by this.”

Beth agreed, “It’s not over-rated.”

Parts of the path were flooded because of rain and sea level rise—we saw ducks swimming by partially submerged benches—so we had to double back and walk on the grass a couple times.

We got to the car, drove to pick up the kids, and headed to Silver Spring after a pit stop for North to grab some catheters and to order lunch from Cava. Then a few blocks from home we had to go back again so North could get their i.d., which could be required for the afternoon plans. We ate inside Cava because it wasn’t as crowded as Roscoe’s and there was no good, sheltered place to eat outside.

After we’d eaten our salads and rice bowls, we went to a movie theater to see A Good Person. North’s vision was to walk up to the ticket taker alone, because as a newly minted seventeen year old, they no longer need adult accompaniment at R-rated movies. We followed behind, with Zoë, who won’t be seventeen for a few weeks and still needed us to get in, or maybe not because though North anticipated being carded, they weren’t. “It’s your new maturity,” Beth said.

The Post gave the movie a rather harsh review, so I didn’t have high hopes, but it was considerably better than I expected. After the movie we dropped Zoë off and North’s birthday celebration was over.

The week was full of boons: most of the items on their wish list, a lovely cake, natural beauty, and time with friends. I hope the year ahead has many more.

Three Years, Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 79

Posted on March 16, 2023 by Steph

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Well, here we are three years after the world changed. With every update I do (and here are a few), covid impacts our everyday life less and less, though of course, it’s still with us. As of Sunday, the death toll in the U.S. is up to 1,119,000 (it’s almost seven million worldwide) and 2,000 Americans a week are still dying from it. The death rate has been very stable for over a year. Does that mean it’s endemic now? Apparently not, but it’s trending in that direction.

Falling Sick

The diminishing presence of the idea of covid in our lives makes it a little ironic that it was in this tail end (fingers crossed) phase that we actually got covid. North, Beth, and I all had covid in November—two years, eight months into the pandemic. You can read about that here and here if you missed it. North had it first, testing positive two days before Thanksgiving. We all had mild cases, though North’s was the worst, about like having the flu. Mine was like a cold and not even a bad one. We had a trip planned to Rehoboth for Thanksgiving and we went anyway, keeping to ourselves in the rental house, cooking, ordering takeout, and taking walks on the beach and boardwalk. Beth and I didn’t test positive until the day after we got home.

Traveling Further

Even though we got sick, in the past six months, our world has opened up considerably. We’ve traveled more widely than any time since the Before Times. Noah spent the fall semester in Australia, and I spent a week in Oregon while my mom was recovering from knee surgery in September. It was the first time flying since covid for both of us.

And there’s more travel on the horizon. Noah is looking for an internship in Los Angeles and he’s bought an airline ticket for three days after he graduates in late May. (A one-way ticket! I don’t even want to think about the implications of that.) North and I will be visiting family in California and Oregon in early July and Beth will be heading to Saint Louis for a convention while we’re gone.

Continuing Precautions

We still take precautions, though. We’ve all gotten the bivalent booster (Beth and North in September, me in November, and Noah in January). We test when we feel ill, and when required, though that doesn’t seem to happen as much as it used to earlier.

Of the four of us, Beth is the strictest about masking, as she always wears K95s in public buildings, whereas North and I often wear cloth or surgical masks. North still masks at school every day, one of a shrinking minority. Noah doesn’t mask at school, but he did when we went to the play last Saturday.

At the beginning of the winter, I started wondering when I would stop masking, but since there were big spikes the past two Januarys, it seemed prudent to wait until the end of the winter and see if it happened again this year. Well, it’s mid-March now and there hasn’t been a spike, so I’m thinking more seriously about it. I still notice when people are masked when they’re not and it can affect my behavior. Here are some examples. In this one I was trying to decide whether to go to book club shortly after having covid:

12/4

The average age of members is probably around seventy and some of them are in their eighties and frail, plus masking in the group has gone from almost universal to about fifty percent, just in the past few months. It didn’t seem responsible to go, so I stayed home.

The last time I went to book club, last week, I was the only one in the room wearing a mask.

Here I was picking Noah up at the airport:

12/23

We had some trouble finding the driver and when we did connect, the driver was irritated with me and rude and accused me of wasting his time. Then in the car when I cracked the window because he was unmasked, he rolled it back up. Also, he was vaping the whole time. It was the first time in my many times in a Lyft I didn’t tip the driver…

Speaking of tipping, when I get takeout coffee, I am still more likely to tip a masked barista than an unmasked one. And speaking of restaurants, eating inside them is another tough call. We don’t in general, though we make occasional exceptions, as you know from my last post. Here’s the dilemma: Right after we let North eat in a diner with friends in November, they brought home covid. Then when North ate in a café with friends in February one of the friends got covid, although they didn’t. It can be hard to balance caution with letting them have a more normal teenage social life. North’s birthday party is going to be in a restaurant that’s usually crowded but if the weather’s nice, we’ll have it outside.

Experiencing Normalcy

One time I especially appreciated not being in the grip of the worst days of the pandemic anymore was when Xander died in October. He got to die at home and had a much more peaceful passage than his brother.

10/17/22

When Xander’s brother Matthew was paralyzed by advanced heart disease three months into the pandemic, he was euthanized in the parking garage of the animal hospital and only one of us was allowed to be with him. This was much nicer and more peaceful. We were all petting Xander and talking to him, and he wasn’t scared. The vet was gentle and respectful. It’s some small comfort that his end was quick enough that he didn’t suffer much but not so sudden we didn’t get a chance to say a proper goodbye.

This used to happen more often, but occasionally something still happens for the first time since Before. The biggest one in the past six months for me is that I am back to swimming weekly.

1/31/23

I went swimming on Saturday afternoon at the pool where I used to swim weekly before it shut down first for the pandemic, then for extensive repairs. It re-opened in late November, but between being out of the habit, being salty about the fact that they were not honoring pre-pandemic punch cards, and the pool’s erratic schedule (it’s always been prone to unannounced closures and still is), I didn’t manage to show up at a time it was open until this weekend.

2/15/23

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

Turns out my pass lasted a little longer than that because in late February the boiler broke and the pool was closed for a week, but it opened again the first Saturday in March, and I used up the pass last weekend.

Another normal thing that happened at North’s school was that the Winter One Acts were put on… in winter.

1/18/23

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

Questioning Normalcy

Sometimes it can be hard to know if things that didn’t happen did not happen because of covid or some other reason, as when I was trying to figure out whether there would be a Visitation Day at North’s school in on Columbus Day, like there used to be at every other MCPS school my kids have attended. (The answer was no.)

10/20/22

That made me think, okay, maybe this school has never done this, and it wasn’t a casualty of covid until another senior parent posted, no, visitation day did happen the last year before covid, so now I don’t know what to think about the past or the future, but it didn’t happen this year.

And it can also be hard to know if covid has caused things. At one point, I thought the leg cramps I started experiencing in late November could be an after-effect of covid.

12/11/22

We got back home just in time for me to attend a virtual meeting with my own health care provider about some mysterious leg cramps and pain I’d been experiencing. It had been worst while we were at the beach and right after and seemed to be resolving by the time I saw her, but I kept the appointment to talk about what to do if it comes back. I’m wondering now if it had something to do with having covid, because of the timing.

I do still have hints of them, mostly in the car, but they are much improved since I started taking magnesium for them, so I don’t question their origin as much.

Imagining Other Pandemics

In 2020 and 2021 I read a lot of books about real and fictional pandemics—the plague mostly, but also polio and the flu. By 2022, I guess I was over it and didn’t feel the urge to read any more. (Or maybe I just switched to pandemics on screen. Noah and I watched Station Eleven during his spring break last year and over the summer we watched the first couple seasons of The Strain. Earlier, in 2020, we watched Counterpart.)

My interest in reading about pandemics was piqued again as the third anniversary of covid approached. In February I read Hamnet and Love in the Time of Cholera (which has less to do with cholera than I expected) and I’m currently reading Sea of Tranquility. I don’t know if I’m finished with this particular obsession or not. Time will tell.

As for depictions of this pandemic, we only recently got up to the part of Blackish that portrays it.

1/18/23

[W]e got to the midpoint of season 7 of Blackish. We’ve reached the covid era episodes and while the first couple about it were excellent and very evocative, I was disappointed that it basically fell out of the plot after that, as if it barely happened and didn’t deeply alter our lives for years.

We’re still in season 7, up to the episodes aired in February 2021, and it continues to surprise me how the characters seem to be living in a parallel universe in which it’s not pre-vaccine (for most people) covid times.

How does covid still affect your day-to-day life? Or does it?

Where They Are, Part 5

Posted on March 13, 2023 by Steph

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Friday: End Game

North is finished with their afterschool therapy program. Their last day was Friday, about a week before we expected. The confusion arose from the fact that in the last two and a half weeks, they were only attending three days a week so they could stay after school and help with costumes for the spring musical, and we were under the impression those five missed days would extend their enrollment, but they didn’t, even though previous absences had.

We didn’t know for sure when their last day would be until Tuesday, so IOP seemed to end kind of abruptly, and I think before North felt quite ready. But it’s possible that after this four-and-a-half-month journey– of hospitalization, a long wait at home to get into a partial hospitalization program, the PHP, and then the IOP– any kind of end of intensive therapy would have seemed sudden.

There are upsides. North will have more time for schoolwork or extracurriculars or whatever they want to do now that they won’t be in therapy three to five afternoons a week and Beth will be logging a lot less time in the car driving to and fro.

And North won’t be working without a net. They still have their psychiatrist (Dr. C) and their therapist (A), both of whom they’ve known since they were twelve. We are considering going into family therapy and finding North a peer support group of some kind since they found that aspect of the PHP and IOP helpful. Beth and I were thinking when IOP was over, North would go back to school full-time, but they want to stay hybrid, so that’s what we’re going to do, at least for now.

Friday was busy. It started with a neurology appointment to discuss North’s worsening migraines and ways we can address them. The doctor was optimistic and exhaustive as he explained all the different medications and devices North can try. He also had a lot of lifestyle advice about food, hydration, exercise, and sleep. It made it seem like he was really committed to fixing the problem, which is what you want from a doctor, but it isn’t always that way, is it? Anyway, the upshot is he wants to keep North on the preventative that hasn’t been working, but at a higher dose until they’ve been on that dose for six weeks, and then if it still doesn’t work, there’s a plan for other medications they can try. And because the rescue medication they’ve been taking is very effective but can only be used twice a week, he prescribed a different one so they can alternate them and have relief more days of the week. They’re also getting a patch to put on their arm that’s supposed to block headache pain signals, but we don’t have that yet. (Since the appointment North has tried the new medication twice and oddly, it helps but only very briefly, and then the headache returns.)

From the doctor’s office we took North to school, but there was only a little over an hour left in the school day, and we were a half hour from home, so Beth and I set up shop in a nearby Starbucks and worked. Then we picked North up from school and headed to Columbia.

We decided to mark the end of IOP by taking North out for pizza and frozen yogurt. I worked in the library with Beth and had one last ramble around town, mainly in Symphony Woods, where I hadn’t been in a while. I took a lot of pictures of the painted picnic tables there. This one of a heron taking flight is my favorite. Herons always remind me of North because it was their symbol in preschool. The park was the site of the Christmas light display where Beth and I took a walk the day North was accepted to the PHP program three months earlier, though of course, those lights are long gone. I couldn’t help thinking of that day, though, and how relieved we were.

A little before 6:30 we went to fetch North. They were playing Scattergories with two other teens and a staff member. They answered one last question, said some goodbyes, and we left. They had a polished rock that says “Peace” on it they picked for a memento and a certificate for the IOP, like the one they got when they finished the PHP. We walked out of the facility for the last time and went to dinner.

Eating out felt like a bold plan because it involved eating inside a restaurant, which is something we still rarely do. But eating outside wasn’t feasible because it was dark, and the day was in the low 40s and damp. And takeout didn’t seem sufficiently celebratory because we get takeout pizza a couple times a month. So, we took the plunge. The restaurant, a combination pizza/Indian place, was large and mostly empty, so maybe not such a daring choice after all.

When we got home, we watched the first half of Loving. I’d originally picked it for Black History Month, but we didn’t get around to it in February.

Friday/Saturday: Bring the Boy Back Home

The other notable thing that happened on Friday, or rather very early Saturday morning, was that Noah came home for spring break. His bus was scheduled to arrive at 11:30 p.m. in— guess what suburban Maryland town? Yes, Columbia. So, after the movie, Beth drove up there and back for the second time that day and probably for the last time in the foreseeable future, as his bus back to school departs from Bethesda. Beth got him Taco Bell because he was hungry and brought him home around 12:20 a.m. I was in bed, and I woke up when they came in but just barely, so I didn’t see him until the next morning when I debriefed him while we both ate oatmeal.

I learned about the film he’s making for his senior capstone project. He’s working with a classmate, who wrote the script. It’s a fictionalized account of the suicide of a friend of the scriptwriter. They’re going to start filming in April. They don’t have all the actors they need yet but they have some, which is better than this time last year when Noah was on the verge of dropping his cinema production class because he couldn’t find any actors.

I asked about his classes and he’s enjoying Machine Learning (apparently the professor is disappointed that Noah’s a senior and can’t take his more advanced Machine Learning class) and he showed me some CGI he made in another film class. Things seem to be going well for him academically. He’s applied for summer internships in Los Angeles, but he hasn’t heard back from anywhere yet.

Later that morning Noah and I started reading Eric, from the Discworld series—this one’s partly a parody of Faust. He and I made tortellini soup for dinner—I’d texted him about a week earlier and given him a choice of three pasta-based soups and that’s what he chose. It felt deeply right to all sit down to dinner together.

Saturday: My Favorite Year

After dinner, the four of us went to North’s school to see the spring musical, My Favorite Year. In the program, the actors and crew wrote about their own favorite years. I don’t think Beth, North, or I will be counting North’s junior year of high school as our favorite year, but it was nice for them to be involved with the show and for all of us to be able to see the play together and see the costumes they worked on worn. North found out today that a song in which the main singer wears a skirt covered in patches that they made was nominated for best song by the Cappies. If the song wins, the actors will perform it at the Kennedy Center, and presumably the skirt will be there, too. Even though North couldn’t participate in crew until the last few weeks before opening night, when t-shirts were distributed during Tech Week, they were surprised to see their name printed on the back in the list of cast and crew. I was touched by that, too. Ranvita had a small role in the play and North had brought a bouquet for her, which they gave her when the play was over. It was a fun outing.

Sunday/Monday: Springtime of Life

Noah’s been home a few days now and we’ve started season 3 of His Dark Materials and season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He folded laundry and helped North with their computer science homework this afternoon. It’s nice to have him home, and looking ahead at the rest of the spring, there’s a lot to anticipate—having a more normal schedule, North’s birthday, which is less than two weeks away, our spring break college road trip in April, Noah’s and my birthdays in May, and his college graduation. I hope you’ve got a lot to look forward to this spring, too.

Here and There

Posted on February 15, 2023 by Steph

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

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

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

Snowfall (Here)

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

Swim Pass (Here)

Care Package (Here and There)

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

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

Lake Kittamaqundi Trail (There)

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

Home Repairs (Here)

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

Early Valentine’s Day Dates (Here)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Valentine’s Day (Here and There)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where They Are, Part 4

Posted on January 31, 2023 by Steph

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North went to school yesterday for the first time in a little over three months. (Well, the first time they went there to attend classes, I mean. We’ve been a couple times to watch Ranvita and other friends perform in the fall play and winter one acts.)

But to back up a little…

Thursday and Friday:

North’s last day in the partial hospitalization program was Thursday. They’ve transitioned to IOP, which stands for intensive outpatient program, at the same facility. It offers the same kinds of therapy that the PHP does, but three hours a day instead of six and a half. It meets in the late afternoon and early evening, so that cleared the way for North’s return to in-person school.

Their first day at IOP was Friday. They knew the other kids because some of them had been in PHP together, and on some days, there’s overlap between the two program schedules, so they’ve all been in group together. North is starting out attending five days a week, but they may cut back to fewer days later so they can be on costumes crew for the spring musical.

We decided a gradual return to in-person school was best, so for now North is continuing with online classes through IIS for astronomy, English, and world history in the mornings. Then they will attend statistics, computer science, and painting in person in the afternoons, and go to IOP straight from school.

The computer science class is the second half of the one they started to take in the fall, but apparently you can take the two halves out of order, and it fulfills a half of the tech requirement, so when their counselor suggested it, they decided to take it. The painting class is also the one they were taking first quarter. North completed some second quarter work independently and I think the teacher is going to waive some or all of the rest and let North start fresh with third quarter assignments. Over the past couple months, they completed this pen-and-ink drawing based on a photograph of Berkeley Springs, West Virginia for this class. I really like it.

Beth, North, and I went to Berkeley Springs for a weekend get-away around Valentine’s Day 2020, and as a result I have kind of a romanticized memory of that weekend, as the last hurray before everything changed so dramatically for us as a nation and as a family. I asked North if they have similar feelings about that weekend and if that’s why they chose Berkeley Springs for their cityscape. They paused, considering, and said that might be the case.

(North finished the cityscape two weekends ago when Beth was road tripping up to Ithaca with a bunch of Noah’s stuff that he couldn’t take with him on the bus. Left to our own devices, I read and cleaned, North crocheted and worked on the cityscape, and we came together to go to the farmers’ market, Starbucks, and watch a scary movie while cuddling on the couch.)

Thursday afternoon, after North’s last day of PHP, we had an appointment with Dr. C, their current psychiatrist, who’s filling in during their long-time psychiatrist’s maternity leave. North’s known Dr. C as long as they’ve known their regular psychiatrist because he led the trans kids’ support group they attended in seventh and eighth grade, and he has a good rapport with them. We talked about North’s transition back to school and other issues, including some medication changes and we all left feeling a little better than when we got there.

Weekend

As frustrating as the pool’s management is, I like that it’s convenient, being a less than a half-hour walk from my house and it’s on a few bus lines if I don’t feel like walking. It was nice to be back in the water and it wasn’t too crowded. Perhaps I will get back into my old routine of weekend swimming. It might help that the day after I swam, I finally heard back from the pool manager I’ve been emailing since November, and she said they would honor my old card after all. Now it still has to happen and I’m not counting on it, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Ranvita came over late Saturday afternoon and stayed for dinner. North tried to teach her to crochet, an effort that was hindered by the fact that North is right-handed while Ranvita is left-handed. After dinner they watched a movie together.

Sunday was a quiet day. Beth went ice skating, and we were considering going out for ice cream in the evening to mark the last night before North’s return to school, but they went to bed with a migraine a little after four and didn’t get up until almost nine-thirty, by which point Beth, who was worn out, had already gone to bed and I was in the living room reading, about to turn in myself.

Monday:

Monday would have been a big day even if North going back to school was all that happened, but in addition to that, we had 1) an appointment with two geneticists, 2) another with North’s school counselor, and 3) a family therapy session.

The first meeting was a screening for Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. North’s half-sibling from the donor’s side, Avery, has been diagnosed with it and EDS is associated with a lot of symptoms North experiences, such as chronic pain, especially in the joints, dislocations, and migraine. They were hoping for a diagnosis because it would tie a lot of things together under one overarching explanation, but the results of the interview and exam were inconclusive. After the appointment, North was disappointed. We are going to follow up with a cardiologist, however, because some forms of EDS are associated with heart problems. The doctors didn’t think it was likely North has this subtype of EDS, but they want to check for it, just to be cautious.

Soon after that was finished, we went to North’s school to meet with their counselor to iron out some details regarding their return to school. We got their second quarter grades and learned one of them (history) had not been turned in, probably because of miscommunication between the IIS history teacher and the teacher North will have for history this semester. None of us realized the counselor was going to want North to pick senior year classes in this meeting and that felt a bit rushed and maybe less considered that I would have liked, even though the counselor stressed we can make changes later. Anyway, after fulfilling graduation requirements, North had room in their schedule for art and chorus and a mythology class they’ve wanted to take for a while. I think it could be a fun year.

We left North at school, where they had lunch with Ranvita in the theater room and attended their three classes. When we picked them up to go to IOP, they didn’t have too much to say, but I did learn they are starting a winter landscape with acrylics in painting class.

Beth went to her coworking space, and I took a walk in the grounds of Merriweather Post Pavilion, a concert space. It was a mild afternoon—I wore a sweatshirt with no jacket—and the late afternoon light was pretty in the bare woods. By the time I returned to Beth’s office, with just a half hour until family therapy it seemed too late to start any new work project, so I blogged instead. Then we went to North’s facility where we met with a therapist for our weekly family therapy session, which we spent mainly processing the prior events of the day.

It was 7:20 by the time we got home, so I threw together a quick dinner of ravioli with vegetarian meatballs (a rare splurge on pasta for me) and then we played a couple rounds of Scattergories before bed.

Tuesday:

Because I was going to be in Columbia again during dinner-making time to attend the multi-family group, I got up a little earlier than usual and made a cabbage soup for dinner before the workers (more on this below) arrived for the day and took over the kitchen. But as it turned out, they were finished in that room by 9:30, so my early morning cooking session wasn’t necessary after all.

By nine a.m., North was on the couch attending an online astronomy lecture while crocheting. English started an hour later. Their online classes all meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays. When they were in PHP, they had to watch the videos after the fact, but now they can attend the ones that don’t conflict with their in-person classes as they happen. I hope this helps them participate and engage more with those classes, though as I mentioned, one of them is astronomy, which was their best class last quarter already.

North went to school again and when we picked them up, they mentioned their art teacher said their cityscape turned out well and asked if she could display it. We drove to Columbia again. I thought about walking at Merriweather Post Pavilion again, but I’d already walked in the morning, and it was cold and drizzly, so I took a short walk to get a warm cup of coffee and I brought it back to Beth’s office where I worked a little. She rented the office for January and now that she’s only there for a few hours a day it didn’t seem worth it to renew for February, so it was her last day there. She’s going to try working in the public library starting tomorrow.

We said goodbye to the little office at 5:20 and walked over to the facility where we had our first multi-family group since North started IOP. It was very much like multi-family at PHP, but with a somewhat different group of kids. Just this fact made it seem like we’re progressing through the steps toward something better.

Meanwhile…

While all this was going on, we had the roof and some structural damage in the kitchen fixed. Remember when the tree fell on our house last May? It’s taken that long to get our insurance and the contractor to agree on the scope and cost of repairs. The work took place indoors and outdoors and has been going on for a week and a half. For the past few days, it’s always supposed to be done the next day, in the way of home repairs.

There were three consecutive days when the kitchen was sealed off from the rest of the house with plastic sheeting to keep the dust from spreading. Because of the way our house is configured, this meant every time I needed to use the bathroom, I had to go outside, walk to the back of the house, open the back door, interrupt the workers, and make them move ladders, etc., so I could pass through the kitchen to get to the bathroom. I ended up routing my mid-morning walk to go by places with public restrooms and tried to limit myself to one other visit to the bathroom in the early afternoon but being cut off from the bathroom was kind of stressful for me.

The best part of having this work done, other than not having holes in the roof anymore and having functioning gutters for the first time in eight months at some point in the near future, is that the repairs to the kitchen walls required re-painting. We’ve lived in this house almost twenty-one years and for that whole time there’s been brown-on-tan sponge painting on the kitchen walls left from the previous owners. I never liked it.

Beth said she didn’t care what color the kitchen walls were, so I got to choose. I went with a golden shade of yellow. It was just what I had been envisioning for the kitchen for many years. North campaigned for lavender and I told them that would be very nice in their first apartment, but I had my heart set on yellow.

I like thinking of them in that hypothetical apartment, though, several years from now, maybe in a college town or a bohemian neighborhood of some city. I imagine my beautiful, talented youngest child happy there, drinking coffee (always iced, even in winter) while baking elaborate cakes, or making art, or maybe painting the kitchen walls lavender.

Winter One Acts

Posted on January 18, 2023 by Steph

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

Theater

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

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

Game Nights

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

Therapy

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

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

Anniversary

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

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

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

More Baking

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

Media Binges

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

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

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

Goodbye

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

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

All For The Love Of You

A Chronicle of Suburban Lesbian Family Life

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