About Steph

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Rock Around the Clock, Part 4

Posted on August 1, 2023 by Steph

Beth and I went to see Willie Nelson on Friday night, as an anniversary gift to each other. It’s actually called the Outlaw Music Festival, because there are several opening acts (different ones at each stop on the tour) and one of them went on as long as Nelson’s set. Beth and I had thought perhaps the concert started at 5:30 because Willie Nelson is ninety years old and wants to get to bed at a decent hour, but it was almost ten before he even went on, so apparently, we like to go to bed earlier than ninety-year-old musicians.

Even though it kept us up late, the concert was a lot of fun. I was familiar with two of the opening acts (Kathleen Edwards and Nathaniel Rateliff) but only a little, so I was interested to hear more of their music. We were on the lawn for the first two acts. It was a hot day—the car thermometer read 100 degrees as we drove out to Columbia to Merriweather Post Pavilion—and we couldn’t get a spot in the shade, but it quickly clouded over and cooled, and it wasn’t too uncomfortable as we sat in our chairs and ate the pizza that we’d bought at the concession stand.

We were eyeing the sky nervously though because thunderstorms were predicted. Sure enough, just as the third act was starting, lightning lit up the sky and a hard rain started to fall, and to our surprise, the pavilion was opened to everyone with lawn tickets. I don’t know what they do when it storms on nights with sold-out shows, but it was nice to be able to sit somewhere dry, well, mostly dry. We were in the second to last row and the rain was blowing in diagonal sheets, so we got misted with it. Shortly before eight, the rain let up and the food stands re-opened and we got frozen custard (me) and an ice cream sandwich in the shape of the pavilion (Beth). She said it looked like a coffin and it did.

Finally, Nelson came on. His band was small. He was seated next to his late-in-life son Micah (who was also the first act) and he had three musicians behind him. Beth especially liked the harmonica player. Nelson looks good for a man of his age, and he sounds good, too. He sang many hits: “Whiskey River,” “Bloody Mary Morning,” “I Never Cared for You” “Mama, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground,” and of course, “On the Road Again.” The audience often sang along. It was very nostalgic for both me and Beth because both of our fathers were Willie Nelson fans, though unlike him, neither of them made it out of his sixties. I told Beth later that along with Sinead O’Connor’s death at fifty-six (our exact age!) that same week, it really made me think about how you never know how much time you have left. We could die tomorrow, or we could live into our nineties.

So, that thought brings me to the real focus on this post—the ordinary moments of day-to-day life, however long it lasts. Every five years I do a day-in-the-life post. Up to now it’s always been in early July, but this year we were traveling in early July, and we weren’t in our usual routine, so I shifted it to the last day of July instead. I always think these entries are impossibly boring when I’m writing them, but when I go back and read them five, ten, or fifteen years later, I’m struck by how much of what’s ordinary shifts slowly over time. Consider that when I wrote the first one, Potty Training was one of the categories and when I wrote the last one, College Search was one of them. (If I’d written about today instead of yesterday, I would have touched on that, as North’s filling out the Common App today. And having said that, I guess I’ll use that tag on this one, too.)

Anyway, here’s what happened yesterday:

6 a.m.

This is when Beth’s alarm usually goes off, but I didn’t hear it so she must have woken and gotten up earlier than this. She was headed to the office. Since convention, she’s been in the office more often, at least two days a week and sometimes as many as four. Anyway, I was asleep and so was North…

7 a.m.

…as we both were an hour later. This isn’t unusual for North, but it is for me. Staying up late on Friday night seemed to have shifted my sleep schedule. I slept late Saturday and Sunday and then once I got caught up on the sleep I’d lost, I started having trouble getting to sleep at bedtime, thus perpetuating the cycle.

8 a.m.

I was awake, but still in bed, scrolling through Facebook, thinking I should get up but instead watching things like a video my friend Joyce posted—a parody documentary about a nineteenth-century revolt by the Teletubbies against their British colonial overlords (it was as delightfully weird as it sounds)—or a medley video of songs popular in 1993. I have no good excuse for this behavior.

9 a.m.

Finally up, I was making breakfast of Greek yogurt, peanut butter, blackberries, and a sprinkling of granola. North got up soon after and I took advantage of the fact that I was getting a late start on laundry to strip their bed. Because they sleep late in the summer and I like to get laundry going early in the day, it had been longer than I want to say since I’d washed their sheets.

10 a.m.

I was still at the dining room table, reading blogs, possibly yours. North was there, too, eating watermelon and an egg, cheese, and vegetarian Canadian bacon sandwich on a bagel for breakfast.

11 a.m.

Having (partially) weeded the Black-Eyed Susan patch in the front yard and hung up laundry in the back yard, I was getting ready to leave for my morning walk, more than an hour later than usual. North was starting to make chocolate cheesecake with a chocolate sandwich cookie crust and a cookie dough topping.

Noon

Recently back from my walk, I was in the kitchen making a glass of iced coffee to take to the porch with the Style section of the newspaper, and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 for my daily half hour of reading. (Reading every day is close to a religious observance for me, as is the walk.) North was still working on their complicated dessert and complaining about the difficulty of getting lumps of flour out of the cookie dough. I sampled the chocolate cheesecake layer, which was very good.

1 p.m.

I’d just done a little sweeping, dusting, and straightening up in my bedroom and the hall outside it. North and I were both in the kitchen. They were putting the finishing touches on their desert, making room in the fridge for it to set, and then doing the dishes from this project, while I unloaded and reloaded the dishwasher with breakfast dishes and fixed myself some lunch (leftover gumbo Beth made the night before with some extra vegetarian sausage added).

2 p.m.

Finally tackling some paid work, I was finishing a 500-word blog post about milk thistle for liver health I’d started writing the previous week. It was more technical and slow-going than I originally thought it would be but fortified with another glass of iced coffee and the Eurythmics, I managed to pound out the rest of it and I was pleased with the final product. I was too in the zone to notice what North was doing.

3 p.m.

After getting up to get some steps, I was about to switch over a 1,000-word blog post for the same company, this one an overview of how the liver works. I chose Beck to begin the outlining and research phase of this project. North was in the basement riding the exercise bike.

4 p.m.

I was taking a break to take the laundry off the line so North could fold it and wondering in a mildly despairing way if I could really come up with 1,000 words about the liver. North was at the dining room table eating a snack of vegetarian sausage and drinking raspberry seltzer.

5 p.m.

I was still working on the liver blog post and listening to Counting Crows. North had finished folding the laundry and was lying on my bed among the piles of clothes, looking at their phone.

6 p.m.

I was standing on a stool peering into a high shelf in a kitchen cabinet and moving boxes of food around when North came out of their room, and I asked if they thought we had any nori. I was glad to see them because they were out of the headache danger zone. If they don’t have one by early evening, they aren’t getting one. I wanted the nori to add to the miso soup I was making for dinner. I’d intended it to be a simple meal of frozen dumplings and miso soup with grated carrots and tofu, but I kept thinking of things to add to the soup—scallions, dried mushrooms, strips of nori. Beth called it a “loaded miso soup” when I served it. For a semi-improvised meal, I thought it came out well.

7 p.m.

Beth had come home, and we were all sitting around the table, nearly finished with dinner, discussing our evening entertainment options. We settled on one episode of The Gilmore Girls (for all of us) and one episode of Ginny and Georgia (for me and North). When we do this, North calls it a G and G and G and G.

8 p.m.

We were all watching the Gilmore Girls, season 5, episode 12. My goal of finishing season 5 before North goes back to school in less than four weeks is looking kind of iffy, especially with Noah coming home soon, which will shift our television dynamic, but that’s okay. I knew it was a stretch. I had just checked my blood sugar and was disappointed that I’d gone high enough on the dumplings that dessert was out of the question, and I’d have to wait until the next day to try the cheesecake. (When I did the next afternoon, it was worth the wait.)

9 p.m.

North and I were close to the end of Ginny and Georgia, season 2, episode 7.

10 p.m.

I was freshly showered and in bed with Beth, but not yet asleep. We talked a little about her day at work and office politics before sleeping. I fell asleep more easily than the night before and slept until a more normal time the next morning, when I got up and greeted August, a month which will include Noah’s return to the East coast, a possible visit to the Montgomery County fair, a week at sleepaway camp for North, a few days at the beach, and the beginning of North’s senior year of high school.

Obviously, spending the day with a rising high school senior is different than spending the day with a toddler and a rising second grader, or two school-age kids, or a tween and a teen. I’m much less busy taking kids to day camp or hosting play dates than I was then. Summer days without Noah still seem odd. I feel his absence every day, more so than during the school year, but I’m also happy he had the opportunity to do the work he loves for two months in Los Angeles and San Diego and that he’s visiting with extended family in Davis now. (My sister reports they’ve been to a swimming hole and a trivia night, they went to see Barbie, and are having a game night at her house tonight.)

We’ve been through a lot in the last five years: the Trump presidency, a global pandemic (which is why Beth still works from home more often than not), the deaths of two cats, a diabetes diagnosis for me, and multiple health issues for North. Although North’s had migraines since they were four years old, until this year they didn’t force us to make two plans for every evening in our heads (one in which North is down for the count and one in which they aren’t). I fervently hope this pattern changes, because a migraine two nights out of every three is quite disruptive to their life.

But there are some constants: we still watch television together and garden and I still carve time out of the day to read, I dry laundry on the line at least once a week, and Beth and I talk in bed most nights before we drop off to sleep.

It’s entirely possible when I do this next, it will be a record of an empty nest summer day. Or maybe like their brother, North will land at home for a bit the summer after college. Either way, if I’m still blogging, you’ll find out.

July Harvest

Posted on July 23, 2023 by Steph

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Beth got home from her travels two days after North and I did. In her absence we did a small grocery run just to tide us over and got gelato one day and Starbucks the other. I watered the thirsty garden, which had not thrived in our absence, but had not died either. It has recovered somewhat. The herbs are all doing pretty well, particularly the basil; the cherry tomatoes are producing fruit, but slowly; the kale is fine; the lettuce was starting to bolt (so I harvested it all); the zinnias and sunflowers are healthy-looking but growing more slowly than the neighbors’; and the cucumbers are struggling. There’s only one of five that’s flowering and may produce cukes, but I give it about a 50/50 chance because it’s very small for late July.

I also mowed the front and side lawn, dealt with a maggot infestation in the compost bucket, and weeded along the fence on the sidewalk side. That’s what I was doing when Beth showed up in the front yard Friday afternoon, luggage in hand, and kissed me over the fence. It was good to see her. That night we ate homemade pizza all around the same table and played Love Letters.

Weekend 1

Saturday was Beth’s and my anniversary—the summer one. This one marked thirty-six years since our first date, back when we were impossibly young, two years younger than Noah is now and three years older than North. It was a low-key observation. We didn’t exchange presents, just cards, because we’re going to see Willie Nelson at Merriweather Post Pavilion on Friday as our presents to each other.

That morning we had an all-family check-in with North’s individual therapist and then dropped North off at Brookside Gardens, where they were meeting Sol and some of their friends for a walk in the botanical garden, followed by a late lunch at IHOP. Beth and I had a chance to catch up at home until it was time to pick them up. We all had dinner out at Cielo Rojo, followed by more gelato at Dolci Gelati. I had the mushroom and bean enchiladas, and half a scoop of red velvet with half of scoop of almond praline, all of which I recommend if you’re local.

On Sunday we went berry-picking at Butler’s Orchard. We got almost five pounds of blueberries and five pounds of blackberries. We quit a little short of filling the blueberry bucket because it was a muggy day, and we didn’t want North to overheat in the compression suit they were wearing under their clothes. The good news about the suit is that North says after wearing it for a few weeks, it has reduced their back pain.

Beth and I independently of each other sent Noah photos (she of the tractor that pulls the wagon of berry pickers to the field and me of the sign you see when you leave that wishes you “a berry good day”) and asked him to guess where we were. This is a game we play when we’re apart. Just as when we were there picking strawberries right after he left in late May, we were missing him. But unlike then, we know when we’ll see him next. His internship ends at the end of this week and then he’s spending a week with my mom and sister in Davis, and then he’s coming home to conduct his job search from here.

As always, in the berry fields we listened to parents instruct their children only to pick ripe berries and fondly remembered when we were the ones saying that to our little ones. My favorite iteration was “Remember to only pick the blue ones. That’s why they’re called blueberries.” North repeated back to me when we started to pick blackberries, “Remember to only pick the black ones,” they said. “That’s why they’re called blackberries.”

We visited the snack bar where North got a pretzel, and the farm market where we got pasta, cheeses, peaches, nectarines, a slushy, various baked goods, and caramels. At home I froze about half the berries and made a blueberry kuchen. The crust burned around the edges and on the bottom, which was surprising as I’ve been using the same recipe once a summer for more than twenty years. Nevertheless, it was a berry good day.

The Week In Between

Monday Beth and I were back at work. (I had not worked the previous Thursday or Friday because I was badly jet-lagged, Sara didn’t send any work, and I didn’t particularly want to work on any of the low-priority tasks I had on my list.) Beth, who usually works at home, had to go into the office four days out of five last week, so that was odd, not to have her around.

I wasn’t around either on Tuesday because I had jury duty. I took my laptop, three sections of the Post, and a book with me, but I hardly needed any of it because I was called to voir dire almost immediately. Whenever I have jury duty, I think it would be interesting to serve someday (I did get on a jury for a drug case once in the 90s and it was interesting) but not this time because it never seems to be a convenient time. When I learned this trial was for a child sex abuse case, my stomach dropped a little. It sounded like it would be wrenching.

During questioning, I didn’t deliberately try to get off the jury with my answers, but I wasn’t chosen. I don’t remember this from previous times I’ve had jury duty so maybe different judges do things differently, but this time you got to hear which attorney struck you. I was eliminated by the defense. By one o’clock I was free to go. I had lunch at a Chinese place and made the long journey home on the Metro, going almost from one end of the red line to the other, and arriving home after three-thirty.

I worked a little when I got home, but not much, as the day had been surprisingly tiring. Part of it might have been traveling in the heat. We had an unusually cool June and then we were gone for almost the first two weeks of July, so when we got back to typically hot, muggy D.C. area weather, there was no easing into it and the first week at home was kind of a shock.

Weekend 2

The next weekend we had two family outings. We saw Barbie on Saturday afternoon and went to Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens on Sunday morning. Beth and North went to Silver Spring ahead of me, North to go to therapy and Beth to go to the Silver Spring farmers’ market. The two of them had lunch at Cava, and I was supposed to meet them in the theater lobby. But I missed my bus running back into the house for my headphones and then I took a less familiar bus route and went too far, so I got there almost fifteen minutes late. They’d gone into the theater, where I met them, but the previews were far from over, so it didn’t matter.

I had read quite mixed reviews of the movie ahead of time, but I really enjoyed it. Beth has been very stressed at work and we have both been feeling a little heavy-hearted for reasons I’m not going to get into, and Oppenheimer seemed out of the question, though we did consider it, as well as Elemental and Joy Ride. Something kind of light-hearted and fun but not without substance turned out to be just right.

Sunday morning, we went to see the lotuses and water lilies at Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens. The lilies are in bloom from late spring to early fall, but the lotuses have a much shorter bloom period. Each individual flower lasts five days before it falls off leaving a seed pod behind—they look just like those weird pods from Teletubbies—and there’s only two or three weeks a year you can see them blooming. The lily and lotus festival had just ended the day before, but there were plenty of flowers left.

We haven’t been to see the lotus flowers for thirteen years and I almost didn’t suggest it for the same reason I often don’t when I think to go—it’s hot and the bloom period often coincides with blueberry season and if we only have the stamina for one outdoor activity, the one in which you bring home many pounds of berries seems preferable. But I did suggest it and I’m glad we went because it’s lovely. We also saw some tiny turtles in the water and two Great White Herons in the water and a tree, plus a red-winged blackbird, and we heard some frogs croaking, and apparently from what the people ahead of us said, just missed seeing a muskrat.

We’ve been home now almost as long as we were gone. Our harvest includes:

Cherry tomatoes, lettuce, kale, basil, chives, and mint from the garden
Thirty-six years of togetherness
Tickets to see Willie Nelson
Two buckets of berries
Partial pain relief for North
An almost completed internship
The opportunity to serve the people of Montgomery County just by showing up if not serving on a jury—that’s what they tell you anyway when you’re excused

We did not harvest:

The experience of serving on this particular jury
Any water lilies or lotuses because that would be wrong

What have you reaped this July?

Oregon Adventures, Part 2: Ocean, River, and Bays

Posted on July 15, 2023 by Steph

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Thursday

Mom’s sister Peggy, Peggy’s husband Darryl, their daughter Emily, and Emily’s seventeen-year-old son Josiah arrived Thursday afternoon. After they settled into their guest house and got Peggy and Darryl’s dog situated at the kennel, we met up for dinner at a causal restaurant in Bandon. We needed three tables pushed together for our group. Conversation was lively and featured many stories about the middle generation’s comparatively lax seventies-and-eighties childhoods and a surprising number of accounts of personal injuries, including a recent horrific experience Dave had getting both his contacts stuck to his eyes. (This misadventure led to Sara and Dave spending half the night in the ER, instead of going out for an anniversary dinner.)

Friday: Pacific Ocean, Coquille River

Friday morning, Peggy and Emily met up with Sara, Dave, Lily-Mei, and me to go to Circles in the Sand yet again. It was the last day of this month it was happening, and Emily really wanted to see it. As I told Sara, I would never turn down an opportunity to go to this gorgeous beach. Darryl was feeling ill, so he didn’t come. His symptoms (fatigue and body aches) seemed like they could be covid, but Peggy got him a test and it was negative.

There was a new labyrinth that day. Because the tide was low but coming in, we showed Peggy and Emily the places where you can see sea stars and sea anemones before the water covered them back up, and then we walked the labyrinth. Emily was supposed to meet a friend who was travelling in the area, and they didn’t find each other until after we’d finished, so they talked a while and then I showed Peggy, Emily, her friend, and her friend’s kid the sea caves, but we couldn’t go inside any of them because there were too many people inside them already.

The original plan for the day was for Emily and Josiah to join Sara’s family, me, and North at a swimming hole on the Coquille River, but it was an hour away and Josiah (having come from Idaho) was tired of being in the car and had homework for the Japanese class he’s taking in summer school and then Emily decided to stay in Bandon with him, so it was just the five of us.

We arrived later than we thought we would, just before three, had a picnic lunch, and then we made our way down to the river. It was a scenic spot surrounded by evergreen trees. The river was winding, pebbly, clear, and cold. In the deep spot where people were swimming, there was a ladder you could descend into the water and a diving board, but I chose to enter the water by wading in gradually from a shallower area. I did jump off the diving board later, though. After swimming, we camped out in chairs and towels on both sides of the river, reading and relaxing. (I was reading True Grit, which my book club was going to discuss the day after our return.) It was a pleasant afternoon and Sara, who loves rivers and swimming holes, was happy to have another one in her repertoire.

On the way home we stopped at A&W for milkshakes (Dave and Lily-Mei), a root beer float (North), and some vanilla soft-serve (me). Sara was saving her appetite for dinner because she and Dave were going out for an anniversary make-up dinner (this time with no ER visit). We also picked up a pizza, because North, Lily-Mei and I were going to have pizza at home while Mom and Peggy’s family went out for seafood.

On returning home, we learned from Mom (who had gotten home earlier than we expected) that Peggy and Darryl’s anxious, high-strung dog got kicked out of the kennel, so they had to keep her on the porch of their no-pets-allowed house (after consulting with the owner) and in her crate in their car overnight.

Mom watched a movie Lily-Mei had chosen with us as we ate our pizza. It was a documentary about men who own cats, called Cat Daddies. North had issues with the premise of the movie, that it was unusual for men to own cats and was exasperated for much of it.

Saturday: Coquille River, Pacific Ocean

The main group activities for the day were a crabbing expedition and a family cookout at Peggy and Darryl’s place. North and I did not care to crab, so Sara dropped us off in downtown Bandon where we visited a café and a candy store. From there we walked to a river beach on the other side of the lighthouse we’d visited a few days earlier. North wanted to rest on their towel and read their book, but I wanted to explore, so I left them there for almost two hours, while I rambled about.

I followed the river beach to an ocean beach, but I got there a rather perilous way, walking over a wide expanse of very slippery seaweed-covered rocks. I fell once and banged my left knee. It was only a glancing blow, but it hurt enough that I didn’t even notice that I had a bruise forming on my right palm and my left foot was bleeding in two places until later. It was all worth it, though, because I came out onto Bandon South Jetty Park, a beach very similar to Face Rock, with sea stars and anemones in the rock formations, and a large table rock covered with cormorants, and seal sunning itself on a rock in the ocean.

I decided to walk back to North via the road instead of the beach to avoid further injury, but it curved away from the beach unexpectedly and for a while I thought it wouldn’t go back, but it did, and I was reunited with my child. Mom and Peggy picked us up and filled us in about the crabbing trip. The group did catch some crabs, but they were all female or too small and had to be thrown back. Also, Peggy had found a dog-sitter to take the dog. (It was a better situation for the dog and she was happier there.)

Back at the house, I had a bath in Sara and Dave’s luxuriously deep tub while North and Mom peeled and chopped nine cups of apples from Mom’s apple trees for apple crisp for dinner that night. Then Mom took a nap while North finished the crisp and then North had a turn in the bathtub. They went to bed with a headache a little after five. I read a little and then Mom and I made a salad to take over to Peggy and Darryl’s.

We had a cookout in the big and well-appointed back yard of Peggy and Darryl’s rental house. Lily-Mei played croquet and other lawn games with various partners and Darryl manned the grill. We all ate burgers and hot dogs, sautéed mushrooms, baked beans, potato salad, green salad, and of course, North’s apple crisp. Everyone raved about it, and it was a little sad they didn’t get to hear that until later. I talked to Emily and her brother Blake, who was the last to join the party, mostly about the kids, and to Darryl, about poetry. I learned that Blake also gets migraines and that he takes the same medication that works for North.

Sunday: Sunset Bay

Our big outing on Sunday was to Shore Acres State Park botanical garden and Sunset Bay. Dave, who needed some alone time, stayed behind to do some work on the house, but everyone else went, so we were a party of ten. (I don’t think all eleven of us were ever in the same place at the same time.)

Mostly what was in bloom in the botanical garden was roses, which were abundant. We compared the scents of different varieties (e.g., one I thought smelled like rose-scented soap, one North thought smelled like lemon balm). We also examined the herb garden and saw dahlias and even some azaleas that had a few blooms left on them. In the gift shop, Lily-Mei got a night light made of translucent colored stone, flattened a penny in a machine, and got a passport for her collection of flattened pennies. Mom got a decorative frog for her garden.

We had a picnic lunch at the tables at Sunset Bay and then got our chairs and towels set up on the beach. Blake and Josiah went exploring and apparently climbed partway up the cliffs. Sara and I did some more sedate rambling through rocks and tide pools where we saw many little crabs.

Sara, Lily-Mei, North, and I waded in the water to varying depths. In Sara’s family they have a tradition of dunking all the way into as many bodies of water as they can in a summer. When you’ve done that you “own” that body of water and they keep a running tally. Sara and Lily-Mei own the Pacific now. North and I do not, as that water is quite cold, even in a protected cove like Sunset Bay. I did get almost up to my waist in the water, though, as did North. North and I went back to our towels and read while Sara and Lily-Mei made sandcastles.

Back in Bandon, we had dinner at Peggy and Darryl’s back yard again. Everyone was there except Blake, who had hit the road. Lily-Mei jumped rope, first with Sara turning one end of the rope while Lily-Mei held the other. Then when Sara got tired, Lily-Mei figured out how to turn it with her one hand and her opposite foot. It was something else and I’d just been thinking how I hadn’t seen her use her foot as much as she used to when she was younger.

Darryl made a mild vegetarian chili, a spicy meat-based one, and had meat and spice to add so you could customize. After dinner, we had a birthday cake for my mom. Her birthday wasn’t for nine days, but she’s turning eighty and we had a lot of relatives gathered so it seemed like the thing to do.

After everyone sang “Happy Birthday” and ate cake, Darryl, Dave, and Lily-Mei built a fire. It had been misting while we ate so there was disagreement about whether a fire could be built, but they did it and as I was wishing I’d put on another layer over my long-sleeved tee, it was nice to sit around its warmth. Some people made S’mores, but I abstained as I’d already had one dessert. We said goodbye to Peggy’s family that night, as they were leaving the next morning.

Monday: Pacific Ocean

Sara and her family left for a camping trip the following afternoon, leaving Mom, North, and me in their house with the cats for the rest of our stay. (A cat sitter was coming to watch Shadow after that.) They were busy packing all morning and were still at it when Mom, North, and I left to go to Seven Devils Beach around 1:45, so we said our sad goodbyes. Suddenly, our party of eleven had shrunk to three.

When we got to the beach parking lot, I marveled at how few cars there were. There are just so many majestic beaches around Bandon that this marginally less stunning one only rated several cars on a Monday afternoon in July. It took us a while to find the path down to the beach, as it was partly obscured by grass, but it was near a pebbly creek that ran into the ocean. Mom and Sara got settled with their books and I took off to explore. I walked for an hour and fifteen minutes, with the goal of reaching some big rocks in the far distance. The beach was almost completely deserted. Along the way I saw and photographed kelp in different shapes, crabs living and dead, and interesting patterns blown into sand or eroded from rock.

When I got back to Mom and North, North was ready to go and I had hoped to stay another hour and half, so we compromised on forty-five minutes. I’d had enough of walking, and I could read my book elsewhere, so after a snack of cherries and pistachios and some conversation, I spent the rest of my time wading the in water. It was cold but not much colder than Sunset Bay. I waded in about hallway up my thighs. The waves looked tempting, but I couldn’t quite push myself to dive into them. We’d actually chosen this beach because it has bigger waves than the others and Mom likes to watch big waves, if not swim in them.

At home Mom and I walked down to the dock and read for a little while by the riverside. Then we made a dinner of devilled eggs, baked potatoes with cheese and fake bacon, broccoli, and salad. We watched Spoiler Alert, which North chose. It’s a dramedy about a gay male couple, one of whom gets cancer. You find that out at the very beginning, thus the title, and the rest is flashbacks. It’s good, in case you’re interested.

Tuesday: Pacific Ocean

We spent the next morning at the house and then set out in the afternoon to visit a thrift store because Mom needs a granny dress. She’s joined a singing group called the Raging Grannies and she needs a costume, but the store didn’t have anything appropriate. From the thrift store we went out for ice cream at Face Rock creamery (our third visit to this establishment), and then we dropped North back at the house because we were going to the beach, and they’d reached their limit of interest in beaches too cold for swimming. I had not, however, and neither had Mom. We went back to Seven Devils State Park, and she set up her chair close to the ocean, the better to watch the waves. Since I’d gone south the day before, I went north. I saw many waterfalls and rockfalls near the base of the cliff, a lot of driftwood (including whole tree trunks with roots), a big black bird with an orange beak that might have been a California condor, and the ribcage and spine of a large animal that might have been a seal. The vertebrae were almost as big as my fists.

We went back to the creamery for dinner—mac-and-cheese for Mom and North and a quesadilla for me—plus tomato soup and potato chips. I bought North their second ice cream of the day (huckleberry cheesecake), because it was the last day of vacation.

Wednesday: Coos Bay

In the morning Mom, North, and I packed up the house and Mom drove us to the airport. Mom was on her way to Ashland to visit friends for several days before she’d meet up with the campers and drive back to Davis. North and I were flying back East. On the way to the airport, we stopped at a Dutch Bros drive-through, satisfying North’s desire to try this iconic West Coast coffee chain.

As we sat in the tiny Southwest Oregon Regional Airport waiting to board our first flight (to Denver) I looked out the window at a narrow body of water, probably an inlet of Coos Bay, and behind it a ridge covered with evergreens. No matter where you look in this part of Oregon, it’s like a postcard.

We boarded our plane and then another and then a taxi and in the wee hours of Thursday morning arrived home, where two nights and one day later, Beth would return from Wheeling, where she’d flown from Saint Louis to pick up her car and pay another brief visit to her family, and we’d all be united again, after almost two weeks apart.

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

Posted on July 8, 2023 by Steph

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Saturday: Planes

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

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

Sunday-Monday: Cars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tuesday-Thursday: Boats

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Summertime, Part 2

Posted on July 2, 2023 by Steph

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North had a busy first two weeks of summer break. They volunteered at an outdoor, nature-and-art-based day camp at their old preschool the first week. The camp is for five-to-ten-year olds (mostly alumni of the school) and North had attended it as a camper. On Thursday night they said a week at camp goes a lot more quickly than a week at school. They didn’t know it at the time, but the week was over for them. The next day the school experienced sewer issues and rather than cancel, the director decided to take the kids on a hike. The junior counselors were allowed to bow out if they wanted to, and North did.

The next week North travelled to North Carolina to attend a career exploration program at Johnson and Wales’s Charlotte campus. They spent two days and three nights there, baking in the mornings and going on field trips (to a bowling alley and an amusement park) in the afternoons. They flew there alone, finding their way to campus and back to the airport. It was a much higher degree of difficulty solo travel experience than I had when I flew alone for the first time the summer I was seventeen (and was dropped off and picked up at the airport). The whole week I kept thinking about how both kids were off in the world, doing what they want to do in their adult lives. It was a like a preview of the empty nest.

On Tuesday, the second night they were gone, Beth and I had a date night at MotorKat, a newish restaurant in Takoma we hadn’t tried yet. We ate out on the patio, which was strung with rainbow-stripped pennants for Pride. We got salads, a spring onion-tofu pancake with smoked mushrooms, and cauliflower skewers. If you’re local, the pancake is really good. As we were finishing our entrees, it started to drizzle, then rain harder. One by one, people abandoned their tables and moved inside. We did, too, but we were the last ones to give up on outdoor dining. When the second-to-last couple went inside, one of them said, “We salute you!” We got a new table inside because we wanted dessert. Beth got a trifle, and I got chocolate crème brule, and both were excellent.

We were back at home on the living room couch watching a module of an online parenting course we’re taking as part of family therapy when we heard a loud bang outside. A transformer had blown, which is not actually that unusual. What was unusual was that we still had power. Even more unusual, the transformer was on fire and raining sparks down on a couple of our trees and our fence. Beth said later it looked like fireworks.

If everything hadn’t been soaked from the rain, I think the trees in our side yard would have caught fire. Police and firefighters arrived and blocked off the street for a while. Apparently, they don’t put out electrical fires, though, so they just watched it until it started to taper off and then left. We would have felt better about it if they’d waited until it was completely out, but it did go out eventually and a couple days later the power company came, cleaned up the debris and repaired it. The only sign left is the melted gray plastic stuck to some of the leaves of the trees.

On Thursday afternoon, North came home happy and bearing two galettes (one mushroom-cream cheese and one almond cream-berry) and a bag of scones (chocolate chip and cheese). They were excellent. It was nice to sit around the table all together and sample them before they went to bed with a headache.

We went to pick up their orthotics the next day. They have a compression body suit, inserts for their shoes, and knee braces. Well, one brace. It turned out they got two left ones so they can only wear one. We’re all hoping these devices help them stand and walk with less pain, but it’s too soon to tell. And we can’t get the right knee brace for a couple weeks because all three of us are embarked on new travels–Beth to Wheeling and St. Louis and North and me to Davis, California and the Oregon coast. More on that later…

Summertime

Posted on June 17, 2023 by Steph

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One of these mornings
You’re gonna rise up singing
Yes, you’ll spread your wings
And you’ll take to the sky

From “Summertime,” (Porgy and Bess), by George Gershwin

End of School

It’s officially summer break now. School came to a slow, drawn-out end this year. North’s online classes finished a week before the in-person ones did and by the last week of in-person classes only one (Statistics) was actually conducting any educational activities and that class only on Monday. Yesterday, the last day of school, was a half day, and it didn’t seem worth Beth driving them to school for three shortened classes in which not much was going to happen, so they didn’t go.

The year ended on a high note, though. North was pleased to get straight As in their fourth quarter classes, especially Statistics because that was their most difficult class and they had to work for it. In their favorite class, painting, the last assignment of the year was a free choice project. They made a collage of tiny paintings based on photographs of things they’ve baked in recent years—chocolate-marshmallow muffins, an orange cake with candied orange slices on top, chocolate-peppermint cookies, a Black Forest cake, and banana pudding bars. They painted them on polaroid film and strung them across a piece of cardboard on golden wire with little white lights on it. The background is overlapping hand-lettered recipes for the baked goods. It’s very cool.

Speaking of art, North’s cherry blossom painting was displayed at an art show at a local mall last month. We missed it because we were out of town for Noah’s graduation. I was kind of bummed about that.

Even before school ended, we engaged in several summery activities:

Summery Activity #1: Dodging Wildfire Smoke

In one way, summer came early. The wildfire smoke from Canada drifted all the way down to our area about a week and a half ago. This isn’t something we normally experience though I know many of you in Western states and provinces live with it for much of the summer every year, and now it’s starting before it’s even really summer. We only had poor air quality for two days but what I hadn’t realized about living with smoke is how many decisions in entails. When is it bad enough to shut the windows, to mask, to refrain from hanging laundry outside, doing yard work, or sitting on the porch? I guess when it’s a fact of daily life, you develop a system. My sister, who lived in Oregon for many years, told me what her cutoffs were for all these activities, based on the Air Quality Index.

Summery Activity #2: Swimming, Swimming in the Swimming Pool

North and I went swimming two weekends in a row at the Long Branch outdoor pool because the Piney Branch indoor pool where I usually swim laps on Saturdays has been closed for lifeguard training. It’s reminded me how pleasant it is to swim outside. What deters me is that there are fewer dedicated lap lanes and kids are more likely to intrude on them. Also, it’s slightly less conveniently located.

But it’s been nice having North come along, except for one thing and it’s not a little thing. They’ve been harassed by the same two boys both times we went. The second time a lifeguard noticed and made them leave North alone. Because it had happened the week before, I’d been glancing up from my laps every now and then to see if anyone was bothering them, but I missed it when it happened. Apparently, the boys sang a song to them, which when North looked up the lyrics on their phone in the car on the way home caused them to exclaim, “This is a very sexual song… (reading a little further) …Eww!”

Summery Activity #3: Going to Pride

The weekend before school ended was Pride, both in Takoma and in D.C. North went to the D.C. Pride festival with Sol last year and they decided to do it again. They wanted a ride to the Metro, so we decided we’d all swing by Takoma’s much smaller Pride festival before dropping them off. We visited some booths and picked up pins and temporary tattoos. North spun a wheel to learn a trans fact at a trans booth and learned the pronoun “hir” was coined by a writer for the Sacramento Bee in the 1920s, “so it’s not new,” a person staffing the booth informed us.

The farmers’ market was in progress nearby, so we walked through it even though Beth had been shopping at the Silver Spring farmers’ market the day before. We ended up with the first local sweet cherries of the year and two little basil plants to replace a bigger one a squirrel destroyed by digging up its pot and snapping its stem. While we were in downtown Takoma, North got a cold brew and Beth and I got gelato. I went with cherry, to be seasonal. It was very satisfying.

A few hours later North called for ride home from the Metro. They’d amassed a lot of tchotchkes, including heart-shaped stickers with the colors of various Pride flags they’ve used to decorate their walker, a couple rainbow rubber bracelets, Mardi Gras beads, and some 3D printed animals. They said they had fun.

End of School Activity: Cappies Gala

The next day was the Cappies Gala at the Kennedy Center. North has been writing reviews of plays at DC area high schools all year. All the critics who reviewed at least five shows were eligible for vote on the nominees for the award ceremony and they’d voted. North only had two tickets and as Beth had driven North to most of the plays they reviewed, and she could drive other kids, she was the obvious choice to attend.

When I asked how it was, what Beth and North both said first (in separate conversations) was that it was very loud. Apparently, the audience screamed for every nominee and kept it up for three hours. Beth’s ears were still ringing when she woke up the next morning.

Perusing the program, I learned there were awards for: marketing, props, costumes, hair and makeup, choreography, special effects, sound, orchestra, lighting, sets, stage crew, stage management, ensembles, dancers, various kinds of actors (in male roles, female roles, featured, supporting, in a musical, in a play, comic, etc.), vocalists of various kinds, critics, best play, and best musical. There were performances from different shows interspersed between the awards. Beth says the vocalist who sang “I Hate Men,” from Kiss Me Kate was very talented and the scene from Dracula was quite creepy. There was a brief quote from North’s review of Eurydice in the program.

An actor from North’s school won for Vocalist in a Male Role, apparently the first time someone from the school had won a Cappie since 2009. He’d been the lead in My Favorite Year this spring.

Cappies has been a good experience for North. They’re thinking of doing it again next year and if they do, the theater director told them they might be lead critic for their school.

End of School Celebration

Thursday afternoon North came home from school, finished with eleventh grade. They folded laundry, rode the exercise bike, made a tofu and broccoli stir-fry for dinner, watched an episode of Gilmore Girls with us, and took a bath.

The next day they mostly took it easy, and I knocked off work early so we could go to the movies. We took the bus to Silver Spring, North started the festivities with a chai, and we saw North’s friend Norma, who came over to chat while they were drinking it. (Silver Spring was hopping that day. Later in the expedition we saw Zoë.)

Then we went to see The Blackening. We decided on this film because North wanted to see it and Beth doesn’t like horror, so she wouldn’t be missing anything. It was fun. I liked the way it played with horror movie tropes (especially, but not entirely, racialized ones). There was some commentary, too, about the social and personal cost of trying to determine who or what is Blackest. That was the point of the movie, but I think I missed a few African American in-jokes because a few times the (about half Black) audience was laughing and I had no idea why. I didn’t mind that, though. That’s what makes something an in-joke.

When the movie was over, we met Beth at Matchbox and had pizza on their patio. It was a pretty evening to eat outside, warm but not hot or humid, and predicted rain did not materialize. From there we went to Ben and Jerry’s (where we saw Zoë) and then home with a detour back to Ben and Jerry’s when I realized I’d left my backpack hanging off a chair—much to my relief no one stole it.

At home we watched the first hour of Sister Act. I’d nominated this for family movie night in hopes that we’d watch it before North reviewed Sister Act for Cappies, but that happened in April. Based on what we’ve watched so far, North says the plot is about the same in the musical.

Dispatch from Los Angeles

Noah’s internship seems to be going well. It’s at a production company that makes documentary films. He’s been on a couple shoots I know about so far. One was interviewing a lawyer who specializes in the Americans with Disability Act. The last one was in San Diego at the Lacrosse World Games where they filmed an indigenous lacrosse team.

The company is very small operation—a filmmaker plus an intern (currently Noah) on the smaller shoots, and temporary crews hired on an as needed basis for bigger shoots. The filmmaker told him he was used to interns being “slower and less capable” than he is, which is an oddly backwards way to give someone a compliment, but there you go. The filmmaker also went out of his way to secure extra funding so Noah could come along on an out-of-town shoot.

The timing of the shoot means Noah won’t be able to come up to Davis while North and I are there visiting my mom and my sister’s family in early July, which I’d been hoping he could do. I’m sad about that, but also happy that he has this opportunity. Some of his peers from Ithaca who came to L.A. haven’t been able to find internships yet—the writers’ strike has made it very difficult—so I’m glad he did.

When he’s not working, he’s been exploring his environs and socializing. He attended a few plays at an experimental theater festival in Hollywood and he went to a birthday party for another Ithaca student, someone he knew from his IT job at school.

Noah’s summer is underway, and North’s is beginning. Next week they’re volunteering at a day camp at their old preschool and the week after that, they’re headed to the Johnson and Wales University campus in Charlotte, North Carolina, to participate in a two-day culinary program for high school students. It should give them an idea what it’s like to work in a culinary lab.

Both kids are spreading their wings and taking to the sky for trips long and short. I am very proud of both of them.

May Harvest

Posted on May 31, 2023 by Steph

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Because we were out of town the weekend of Noah’s graduation and Beth was also gone the weekend before that, we had a lot of chores and errands to do over Memorial Day weekend, but we also found time for fun.

Beth did yardwork, took North out for driving practice and to Value Village to look for clothes to wear at the upcoming Cappies Gala at the Kennedy Center, kayaked, set up Noah’s big television (on loan to us) in the living room, and organized her office (aka Noah’s room, which is now full of his boxes she needed to re-arrange so she can work in there). I mowed the lawn, swam, cleaned the bathroom, did laundry, and cleared out my mail drawer.

On Sunday we went strawberry picking. “I feel like someone is missing in this car,” I said as we pulled into the dirt road that leads to Butler’s Orchard. We’ve been to Butler’s in various configurations to get Christmas trees or to visit the farm market, but we’ve never been berry picking when it wasn’t all four of us because Noah was home for the summer all through college. I sent him photos from the fields and asked him to guess where we were so he could be included. (It wasn’t much of a challenge.)

There are always a lot of parents with small kids picking berries and we amused ourselves by listening to their parents’ instructions:

“If you hold it like this, the berries won’t spill, and we can take them home.”

“Las fresas rojas son las fresas más dulces.”

“Get out of the road!”

It was all so familiar and also so far away. It’s been a long time since any of us needed reminding to hold the basket steady, pick only red berries, and stay out of traffic. We filled our cartons quickly. The berries were so juicy our fingers were stained red when we finished. We may have sampled a few berries (and if we did, they were divine).

We wandered over to the snack bar, but we’d reserved a late afternoon picking slot and by the time we were done, it had closed for the day. North wanted to go look at the farm animals, so we did, but they declined to go down the giant slides.

At the farm market we got apricots, local cheese, granola, salad dressing, and treats—a strawberry roll for me, a strawberry slushy and a caramel for North, and a brownie for Beth. We also picked up some lotion and soap that Beth’s mom likes.

As we left, Beth said, “Another successful trip to Butler’s.”

We always have a backyard picnic on Memorial Day and again, it felt strange to do it without Noah, though less so than berry-picking, as we’ve had a few Labor Day picnics without him already. North was saving their good pain meds for an event at school the next day, so I offered to make it a picnic lunch instead of a picnic dinner in case they got a migraine in the afternoon (which is when they always start). But a little before noon, while I was just starting the shortcake dough, North emerged from their room saying they felt sick to their stomach. They didn’t think they’d want a big lunch, so I went back to the dinner plan, and then they got a migraine in the late afternoon.

So that’s how it came to be just Beth and me for dinner, and because it was a rainy day, we ate our vegetarian hot dogs, baked beans, devilled eggs, new potatoes, and watermelon on the porch instead of the back yard. We used a little side table Noah brought home from school. It used to be on the balcony of his apartment.

One of the potatoes was home-grown. I’d planted a wrinkly, sprouted potato in a big pot back in mid-March and I dug it up on Memorial Day in hopes there would be a few and we could have them for our picnic. There was only one, but I was still kind of excited to see it because we’ve never grown potatoes before. We had also new potatoes from the grocery store, so I just mixed ours in with the rest. It had a different color skin, so I could tell it apart. It was a very respectable little potato, with a nice, creamy texture.

On Tuesday evening North was inducted into the International Thespian Society. The ceremony was held in the courtyard of their school. First there was cake and socializing. There was music playing from shows the school has put on in recent years and kids kept breaking out into song.

Then Mr. S, the theater director, called each student being inducted to light a small candle from a big one (“the candle of Thespis”) and set it to float in tub of water. He would say something about their theater work, announce how many stars they had earned, and invite them to say a few words. Some kids shared memories of theater and of course there were some inside jokes. North had two stars, for their work as “a costumes whiz” and for their Cappies’ reviews. After all the students had lit candles, Mr. S explained that the candles were like the theater because of their ephemeral beauty, which has to be appreciated in the moment. It was really lovely. Eventually, North will get a certificate and a pin, but they haven’t arrived yet.

While we were waiting for the ceremony to start, I was texting with Noah. He had his orientation earlier in the day, he officially accepted the internship, and he started today. So, our harvest for the last four days of May comes to:

Three quarts of strawberries
One new potato
One award, two stars
One internship

On to summer!

The Grad Who’s Going Places

Posted on May 28, 2023 by Steph

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Friday: Senior Splash and Arrival

Okay, settle in. This is a long one.

We hit the road for Ithaca on Friday morning. It had been another busy week, with our first session with a new family therapist (on Tuesday) and an appointment to have North measured for orthotics for their feet, knee braces, and a compression suit for their torso (on Thursday). The most interesting part of that appointment for me was watching the technician scan North’s feet with a camera and create a 3-D image of them on his computer screen. Everything should be ready for North to try on for adjustments the last week in June.

At 1:30 p.m., a little after we passed Harrisburg, Noah and the rest of the class of ’23 waded into the Dillingham Fountains for Senior Splash, an Ithaca tradition. It was live streamed for about an hour, but when I tried to watch it on my phone, I couldn’t get the video to start. Asked about it later, Noah said 1) yes, the water was cold (the event had been postponed two days because on Wednesday the high was 50 degrees—on Friday it was in the low 70s); 2) no, you did not have to prove you were a senior to get in the water, it was on the honor system; and 3) yes, it was fun. He received a t-shirt and a towel as mementos.

At four p.m., as we were driving through the Tioga mountains near the Pennsylvania-New York border, I was concentrating on sending Noah good thoughts because he had another interview for a video editing internship for a production company. Or I thought he did. Turns out it was postponed until Tuesday.

We got to our Airbnb around six and were delighted to find a pair of geese and their five fuzzy goslings in a little pond behind it. (Later a heron would join them.) We ordered pizza, and then went to pick Noah up from his apartment and the pizza up from Franco’s. When Noah came out of his building, I launched myself at him and gave him such an enthusiastic hug that he laughed. We went upstairs briefly so I could see his place, which I knew looked almost exactly like his junior year apartment—it was in the same complex—but I wanted to see it anyway.

I have two strong memories of Franco’s that washed over me when we walked inside the pizzeria. We ate there in April of 2019 when we visited Ithaca for Admitted Students’ Day and Noah was trying to decide between Ithaca, RIT, and Boston University. North was in Colombia on foreign exchange trip, and I remember messaging with their host mom while we waited for the pizza. The second memory was in July 2020 when we came to collect Noah’s belongings from the dorm room he couldn’t return to after spring break, because covid cut that school year short. Back then, Franco’s was operating on a takeout-only basis, and there was a crowd on the sidewalk, waiting, trying to stay as distanced from each other as possible. As we waited, a passerby yelled to all those assembled, “Best pizza in Ithaca!”

I don’t know if it is, as I haven’t tried all the options (and Noah did not offer an opinion when asked), but it’s good, and we enjoyed it before settling in to watch a couple episodes of Blackish, having decided it was kind of late to start a movie (me) and the screen of the Airbnb’s television was too small to do justice to a movie (Noah).

Saturday: Iconic Ithaca

On Saturday we tried to hit as many of our favorite places in Ithaca as we could. We had breakfast at Ithaca Bakery (second breakfast for me and Beth as we were up hours before the kids). While we were there, we picked up Noah’s graduation cake, and I thought nostalgically about the fact that I’ve ordered cupcakes from this bakery every semester he’s been on campus for his half-birthdays and birthdays. Beth bought some of the rosemary-salt bagels she likes there. I got a latte and an almond croissant, and they were both very good.

Next, we went grocery shopping at Wegman’s, where we’ve often bought groceries to stock his apartment kitchens. This time we were getting supplies for his post-graduation picnic.

Lunch was at Moosewood, at Noah’s request. We ate outside, under the famous striped awning. We’ve eaten at Moosewood a couple times before, starting with his first prospective visit in August 2018, though the last time we tried to go (when we were dropping him off for his junior year) it closed suddenly due to a staff member getting covid and our reservations were cancelled. North hadn’t been with us on either of our previous visits, so it was their first time, and they were happy to finally visit the iconic restaurant associated with several cookbooks I’ve been cooking from their whole life. They got a black bean burger and said it was really good. We all shared a cheese board, and I had a bowl of cream of pea soup and an iced ginger tea. At lunch, Noah opened his graduation present from us, a new camera lens.

We walked partway down the Taughannock trail after lunch, but we didn’t make it all the way to the main falls. It was pleasant to walk in the woods and along the dry half of the pocked stone riverbed. Noah took the opportunity to try out his new lens. It was drizzling when we started the walk and raining a little harder by the end. We had two umbrellas between us and shared them.

We went to Purity Ice Cream (another favorite place) after our hike and then Beth left me and North at the house so she and Noah could take a chair from his apartment (the only furniture in the place that was his and which was too big to bring home) to drop it off for donation. North and I both went to bed, as they had a headache, and I was sleepy because I hadn’t slept well for two nights in a row. When Beth and Noah got home, he made baked ziti for dinner because he’d bought the ingredients and never got around to making it for himself. We were expecting Beth’s mom, her aunt Carole, and Carole’s granddaughter Holly to arrive late that evening and Noah said it was nice to make a full recipe and not have to scale it down for solo dining.

After dinner Beth, Noah, and I went to the Commencement Eve concert and fireworks show. It was in the arena where Commencement would be held the next day and where we’d seen presentations and eaten catered meals when Noah was a prospective and checked him in during orientation his freshman year. Everywhere we turned all weekend, we were awash in memories.

The concert featured a choir, a wind ensemble, a jazz ensemble, a trumpet troupe, and a dance group. The groups were on different parts of the stage and the lights would go on the left, center, or right, depending which band was playing, leaving the rest of the stage dark. This meant there was no moving on and off stage, which streamlined the event considerably. The musicians also performed the songs seamlessly, with no breaks. This gave the event a very propulsive feel. The audience was instructed to hold its applause until the end and for the first few songs it did, as there really was no time to applaud. But eventually people started applauding over the beginning of each new song, because that’s how people are. Anyway, the musicians (all music majors) were very talented. It was a great concert and I say this as someone who has been to a lot of band concerts. The fireworks display was fun, too, even though it was damp and chilly out.

We dropped Noah off at his apartment and when we got back to the house, YaYa, Carole, and Holly had just arrived, after a long drive from West Virginia. They tucked into the baked ziti and after some conversation, we went to bed.

Sunday: Commencement

Commencement was the next morning, or I should say the next morning and afternoon, because it lasted three and half hours. It was nice, but probably very much like any commencement you’ve been to before. Before it started, quotes from students and their photos flashed by on a screen. (We never saw Noah’s and found out later he had not submitted either.)

The keynote speaker, an alumnus from the class of 1980 who works as a theater producer, was reasonably entertaining and gave pretty good advice that boiled down to—take risks, be kind, and enjoy the ride. Another alum, a civil rights activist, received an honorary degree. The student speaker was bubbly. The last hour and a half consisted of the reading of the names, almost one thousand two hundred of them. The graduates were called to the stage in the order they had taken their seats, not alphabetically or by school, so there was no way to know when your kid’s name was going to come up unless you could see the graduates’ seating area and I could not. Noah was near the end and eventually he started texting Beth to let her know how far he was from going onstage.

And then it was over, the graduates moved their tassels from one side to the other, confetti came streaming down from the ceiling, and mortarboards flew into the air. (That was when I cried a little.) Noah kept his mortarboard, and I was glad he did because I wanted to get pictures of him in full regalia afterward. He had cords for graduating summa cum laude, for the Communications honor society, and for working for ICTV. We walked around campus and took pictures in front of the Park School of Communications and the fountain where just two days before, he’d taken a dip.

By the time we got back to the house and reconnected with Carole and Holly, who had been exploring Ithaca while the rest of us were at graduation, it was mid-afternoon. We had a picnic lunch at a little park by a pond nearby. North had made pasta salad, Beth made a tofu salad, and we had cheese and crackers and chips, berries, watermelon, and mango. It was a feast. There was also cake. I’d been torn between surprising Noah with it or letting him choose the flavors and I let him choose. It was chocolate with cream cheese frosting and chocolate ganache between the four layers and it was excellent. Holly, who works at a bakery, raved about it.

After the picnic, we all drove around to see Taughannock Falls from the upper overlook and Buttermilk Falls. Everyone but YaYa and Carole walked along a short bit of the wooded trail there.

People ate various leftovers for dinner and YaYa, Carole, and Holly gave Noah cards, money, and a class of ’23 mug. Then Beth, and Holly, and the kids went out for ice cream again. I stayed home and while they were gone, I started to feel ill with a stomachache and dizziness. I’m still not sure what was wrong but based on the graph on my glucose monitor app, I think I might have been having a blood sugar crash. I am not particularly sensitive to my spikes and drops—I usually have no idea they’re happening until I see them later on the graph—but if that’s what it was, I now know two pieces of cake in one day might not be a good idea, even if the second one is very small.

Even though I didn’t feel well, I stayed up because I knew we were all going to watch Noah’s senior project when everyone got back. It’s a film about suicide, called It’s Not Your Fault, based on the experiences of one of the other filmmakers. Julius was the co-director, editor, and screenwriter, and also acted in it. His close friend from high school killed himself during their sophomore year of college. Noah was the other director, lead editor, producer, and the software developer. It’s an interactive movie, sort of like a choose-your-own adventure book. There are two places where you decide what action the characters will take, so there are various paths through it, but they all lead to the same ending. When Noah and I were discussing this earlier in the semester and I said that sounded kind of nihilistic, but he said the point of that was to stress that the character who did not prevent his friend’s death was not to blame, and then I understood.

Monday: Departure #1

In the morning I packed up the rental house kitchen while Noah and Beth packed up his apartment. The house’s checkout time was an hour earlier than his apartment checkout time, so when we were ready to leave, the rest of us headed out to his building so the West Virginia contingent could say their goodbyes and Beth and I could help Noah carry things down from his third-floor apartment and pack them into the car. Despite the fact that Beth had been to Ithaca the previous weekend to take home some of his belongings, he still had a lot of stuff and when it was all spread out on the sidewalk behind the nearly full car it looked kind of hopeless. We considered our options: should buy some packing materials and mail things home, find a place to donate things, throw things away?

Beth and Noah set to work opening bins that weren’t completely full and packing things into them and into the little crevices between boxes, performing some minor miracles and nearly eliminating the pile. I filled up half the legroom in the passenger seat and Noah and I put things on our seats to carry in our laps. He took his wastebasket to the lobby of the building where other people were leaving abandoned items. In the end all we had to throw out was a pair of worn-out sneakers and food, a couple grocery bags worth. I felt acutely guilty for the waste, but there didn’t seem to be any other option.

Beth and I had packed lunches with food from the rental house and we got Chipotle for the kids. We picnicked at Buttermilk Falls. Noah took some final pictures of the falls, and we got in the stuffed car and left Ithaca. I remarked that considering I never lived in Ithaca, only visited a half dozen times over the course of five years, I was surprisingly sad not to have a reason to return. Beth said she was, too. The only one of us who has lived in Ithaca did not comment, but he did seem a little wistful at the falls. It’s a really fun place to visit, full of natural beauty and good food. But perhaps I will be falling in love with another college town soon.

It was nine-thirty when we got home, after another picnic meal of Indian takeout eaten near a lake in York, PA. We did only the most necessary unpacking (perishable food), glanced at the mail, and fell into bed.

Tuesday: Home

Noah had not quite two days at home, and the first one was busy. He had two interviews, one in the early afternoon and one in the evening. Beth, North, and I went to family therapy in the morning before he was up, and we returned right before the first one started.

After the first interview, Noah and I read Serpentine, a short story by Phillip Pullman that takes place in between the His Dark Materials trilogy and the Books of Dust trilogy. I bought it for his birthday, thinking it would be good for a couple days, which might be all the time we had if we didn’t have time to read in Ithaca (and we didn’t), but it was even shorter than I realized. It only took about a half hour to read. It was enjoyable, though.

Also that afternoon, the kids and I cleaned the porch. This is an annual tradition involving a hose, buckets of soapy water, a push broom, and rags. We do it in May or June around the time the pollen has stopped falling and mixing with a year’s worth of dirt into a grimy mess on the floors and walls of the porch. This activity tends to end in some kind of water play, so we all wear bathing suits to do it. Before North got home from school, Noah and I carried all the furniture and ladders and everything else we store on the porch to the front yard, and I started to wipe them down with damp rags.

When North got home Noah stationed himself next to the porch with a hose and buckets that he kept refilling with clean and soapy water, while North used the broom to push water over the floor and I scrubbed the porch walls with rags. The kids did a really good job. The porch looks great. When Noah sprayed North with the hose, I realized I didn’t have my phone to document this and I went back inside to get it and then had them recreate the scene, telling them, “Make it look spontaneous.”

That night we had tofu-vegetable bowls with chow mein noodles for dinner because it’s a family favorite. At dinner Noah thought to mention that he thought the internship from his first interview of the day was his if he wanted it. It’s unpaid, but he’s willing to do that for the experience, especially now with jobs in film so scarce.

After Noah’s second interview he said even if he got that one, he thought he’d prefer the first one, so he’s going to accept it. It’s not all nailed down yet, but even so, it’s a relief that he (probably) has a position. Later that evening Beth, Noah, and I watched one episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, because it wouldn’t be a proper visit from Noah without that. (Just thirty-eight episodes to go.)

Wednesday-Thursday: Departure #2

I took Tuesday and Wednesday off work because Noah’s visit was so short, but he spent most of Wednesday unpacking and repacking his things, so I actually ended up working a little that day. While Beth was driving North to school in the morning, he got a robocall asking if he’d like to be switched to a direct flight because his was overbooked, but he wanted to check with Beth to see if she could get him to the airport earlier than planned and by the time he found out, the airline had given the direct flight to some other lucky traveler.

We left for the airport at three. He wanted to get there really early and it ended up being a good idea because we ran into several snags: there was unexpected traffic on the way to the airport; one of his suitcases was overweight and he had to get out of line and shift things from the heavier to the lighter bag to get them both under fifty-two pounds, saving $100 in the process; and he forgot to take his iPad out of his backpack while he was going through security and got called aside for a long time. Beth and I were watching from the other side of the cordon and wondering what on Earth was happening.

Finally, he got on his plane and while he was in the air, he was informed his connecting flight from Detroit to Los Angeles had been cancelled. So, with some coaching from Beth, he learned some high-level flying skills, like how to get one’s luggage back mid-itinerary when it’s not on the carousel. The airline put him up in hotel, so he didn’t have to sleep in the airport. It was more than twenty-four hours from the time he left DCA until he got to LAX.

But he arrived and Friday and Saturday he got settled into his apartment, which he’s sharing with three other Ithaca students. He’s been shopping for food, shoes, and housewares. He’s going to attend a watch party for the series finale of Succession with some other Ithaca folks tonight. He was supposed to attend an orientation for Ithaca students and grads in Los Angeles on Thursday, but he got switched to another one that will meet next Tuesday.

While he was flying, Noah took a picture of the ad on his seatback suggesting that an airline gift card would be a good gift for “The Grad Who’s Going Places,” and texted it to Beth. She texted back “That’s you!” and it is. In less than nine months he’s gone to Australia for a semester, then home for a month, back to New York for his final semester, and now he’s in California to begin seeking his fortune. He doesn’t have a return ticket because we don’t know where he’s going next or when, but I can’t wait to find out.

Investigations and Celebrations

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Steph

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

Investigation #1: JWU Meeting

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

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

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

Investigation #2: Towson University Open House

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

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

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

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

Celebration #1: Birthday

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

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

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

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

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

Interlude: Before Mother’s Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

Celebration #2: Mother’s Day

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

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

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

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

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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.

All For The Love Of You

A Chronicle of Suburban Lesbian Family Life

Author Archives: Steph

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