About Steph

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

Where They Are, Part 2

Posted on November 17, 2022 by Steph

To cut to the chase, home is where North is now. After thirteen days on the adolescent psychiatric ward at Children’s, North came home a week ago today. We are trying to get them into a partial hospitalization program. This means a day program with psychiatric treatment that would last anywhere from two to six weeks. They’d be home evenings and weekends. We’re in various stages of the application process at three different facilities. They all have waitlists, but we’ve gotten as far as a phone screening completed at one and a phone screening completed, plus an in-person interview scheduled at another.

In the meanwhile, North’s not going to school. Beth and I are both working reduced hours to spend time with them. We’ve been playing Sleeping Queens and Clue and watching television and North and I continue to make our way through The Iliad. We’re up to Book 17. When we get through it, we’re going to start The Inferno. North is helping with housework and the still-in-progress project of taking Halloween decorations down. Plus, they’re working on a complicated paint-by-number mandala. Beth and/or I go on outings with them most days, either errands like grocery shopping or more recreational excursions.

Leaving the Hospital: Thursday

We found out North was being discharged Thursday afternoon and picked them up around six, after we’d finished one of the aforementioned phone screenings. I quit working and made dinner, a mushroom-white bean soup, early so it would be ready when we got home. North was appreciative of home cooking after two weeks of hospital food. That evening we watched Frankenweenie because in the hospital they’d been shown the first half hour of it as a group activity, and they wanted to know how it ended. It was deeply comforting to eat dinner around the same table and then eat white chocolate fangs leftover from Halloween and watch a movie.

Settling in at Home: Friday

Friday afternoon Beth and North dropped me off at Walgreens to get my flu vaccine and covid booster while they browsed at a nearby Asian market, where North got the kind of noodles they like. Back at home, after we finished a book of the Iliad, I read the last act of The Doll’s House to North. They’d read The Glass Menagerie and most of The Doll’s House in the hospital. North seemed to enjoy the play and cheered Nora in her decisions not to kill herself and to leave her awful husband. Fridays are usually movie nights, so after a dinner of homemade olive and mushroom pizza, we watched Rocky Horror Picture Show. It was North’s first time seeing it and I have to say they seemed a little skeptical of it. “So, the horror is gay people?” was their comment when it was over.

Faux Halloween: Saturday

North will be seeing their therapist, Andrew, twice a week until they get into a day program and Saturday morning was the first appointment since getting out of the hospital. That one was in person. Then we all had a virtual meeting with their psychiatrist, Dr. W, on Tuesday and North had a second (virtual) meeting with Andrew today. We’ll have an in-person family meeting with him on Saturday.

Saturday was also the day North designated as Faux Halloween. We watched The Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting in the afternoon, and It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown in the early evening, while eating Chipotle and more Halloween candy.

Then Zoë came over and we all left for North’s school, to see the closing night performance of Clue. It was a fun production, and as North was the co-costumes manager, we all admired the color-coded costumes and a reversable cummerbund that a character flipped over to indicate he’d been shot—the reverse side was bloodstained. Speaking of costumes, toward the end the play the same actor experienced a costume malfunction. His pants ripped and he had to use one hand to hold them up for the remainder of the play. He was such a pro, though, I really wasn’t sure if it was part of the play or not. He made it look like it was, but North says it wasn’t. After the play was over, Ranvita (who was on crew) found North and they had time for a hug, but North didn’t want to linger and talk to people. The actress who played Mrs. Peacock did stop them to say, “I missed you!” as we were on our way out. (North later said Mrs. Peacock’s costume was their favorite.)

Zoë came home with us and slept over. She and North watched Ma after Beth and I had gone to bed.

Starbucks Outing: Monday

“I know you’ve already been to Starbucks twice since you got home…” I started on Monday morning.

“But I want to go again,” North finished for me.

So, we walked to the Starbucks closest to our house. It’s about a fifteen-minute walk. North seemed happy to be outside and pointed out a lot of animals including a cat in the street who did not wish to socialize with us and a lot of birds. They noticed a blue jay in a tree, the iridescent colors of the starlings’ feathers in the shopping center parking lot, and the flock of pigeons taking off from telephone wires, swooping through the sky and returning to the same wire. I reminded them that they were four and we were outside the very same Starbucks watching birds swoop across the sky in formation and they told me: “Birds know what they’re doing, and people don’t.”

“I stand by that,” they said.

Cat-Related Outings: Wednesday and Thursday

On Wednesday Beth and North went to the county animal shelter to donate Xander’s food and treats and they got to visit with some cats. Beth said it was a little sad, but mostly nice. North said it was sad to leave without one young and vocal black cat in particular because they’d taken a fancy to him. The next day Beth and North had an even longer visit with the residents of a cat café in Annapolis. I didn’t go on either outing, partly so I could get some work done, but mostly because I’m just not ready. I don’t want to pet or play with cats who aren’t Xander yet.

That’s basically where we are. North has a chart on their door they use to keep us appraised of their mood. It’s nice to see it in green sometimes, but it’s okay that isn’t always. We’re in a kind of a limbo, doing the best we can, taking one day at a time.

Where They Are

Posted on November 5, 2022 by Steph

[Show as slideshow]

Wednesday evening Beth and I were on a Zoom call with North and North had just asked if I’d been writing about them on Facebook or my blog this week. I said no. They said not to post anything on Facebook, but as for the blog, “You can say where I am but not why.” So that’s what I will tell you.

Admission: 21 Hours

North is in an adolescent psychiatric ward and has been for eight days. On Thursday of last week during a routine quarterly visit with their psychiatrist, they said some things that caused Dr. W to recommend we go to the emergency room. She called ahead, approving North to be admitted, thinking this way we wouldn’t be waiting all night in the ER. We did get out of the ER in a relatively swift hour and a half, but instead of spending the night there, we spent it, and most of the next day, in the psychiatric screening area where patients wait to be admitted to the children’s or adolescent psych unit of the hospital or discharged home. We’ve actually been to this screening area before, about three years ago—I never blogged about it. That time, we decided to take North home in the middle of the night.

This time around, once we arrived in the ER, North stopped speaking, though they would communicate through gestures and writing. If you’ve been reading this blog a while you might remember when North stopped talking for six weeks in third grade. That time, they felt physically unable to speak above a whisper, though there was no organic cause and when it got better, there was no clear reason. This time is a little different as North can speak under some circumstances, but I’ll get back to that later.

It wasn’t clear why the admissions process took so long, as North had been pre-approved and there were beds available, but if you’ve spent much time in hospitals—and I hope you haven’t— you know how mysterious and excruciatingly slow everything can be.

The screening area, which we started to call the bardo, consisted of a hallway with a desk and chairs for staff and more chairs for patients and parents who were waiting, and five exam rooms and one restroom branching off the sides. Each exam room had one bed, some chairs, and a tv. There was a cutout in the door so staff in the hall could see inside. If you turned off the lights, the room was dim but not dark. North got an exam room right away and didn’t have to wait in the hall. After they changed into a hospital gown and we were briefly interviewed and a nurse had taken blood and they’d provided a urine sample and taken a covid test, North was able to sleep, but Beth and I sat in plastic chairs all night. You aren’t allowed to bring anything into the area, so we didn’t have our phones, or books, or anything to occupy ourselves and once North was asleep, we couldn’t even talk to each other because we didn’t want to wake them. It was a long night.

At one point after a shift change one of the staff who didn’t know that North is using catheters—yes, that’s still going on—saw them go to the bathroom holding one and asked me if we’d gotten it from a nurse, and I said yes. I wasn’t intentionally lying—I was exhausted and misremembered, but we’d brought them from home, and soon no fewer than four hospital staff were swarming around North and their illicit medical device. So, now we know how to get people’s attention in the hospital.

Kids were arriving and leaving all night and the next day, sometimes sent up to the inpatient unit, sometimes sent home. I left the screening area a few times, either to go the locker with our belongings so I could use my phone to scan the glucose monitor on my arm or in search of food, because while they feed the kids, they don’t feed the parents. When you leave and re-enter you must be screened, and it can take a while for security to arrive to do it, so I tried to keep my excursions to a minimum. By Friday afternoon I was starting to wonder if Beth or I should go home and get some sleep and then come back and relieve the other in case it was going to be another night, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to leave, and Beth wouldn’t either. As far as I could tell, North was the only kid there with two parents in attendance and at least half of them had no parents accompanying them.

For much of Friday we watched a lot of truly dreadful daytime television—one of those shows in which people are suing each other (not Judge Judy, but similar) a crime drama with bad writing and acting, and The Young and the Restless. I paced the length of the little room for over an hour and a half, which made Beth so nervous she went out into the hallway, but I kept at it for a while after she left because it was having the opposite effect on me. Finally, we found a channel that was playing nothing but consecutive episodes of Friends, Beth came back to the room, I promised not to pace anymore and climbed into North’s bed with them, and we all watched several episodes. I haven’t seen Friends since it was on the air, and I’m sure there must be some episodes that haven’t aged well (that’s certainly true of Buffy) but from the ones we saw it seems to have held up. It was just what we needed, distracting and funny and North seemed to like it. It even made them laugh a few times.

Finally, at four o’clock Friday afternoon, almost twenty-one hours after we’d arrived at the hospital, North was taken up to the inpatient unit. Beth and I went with them but weren’t allowed past the lobby. We stayed there for another hour and a half, mostly waiting for someone to come talk to us and filling out paperwork. And then we left our baby there, went home, ate, showered, and fell into bed at seven. I slept for eleven and a half hours.

The Home Front: Weekend Plus Halloween

The next day was Saturday, the day of the Halloween parade. North hadn’t been planning to attend anyway because it was the first day of tech week for the school play and if they’d been home, they would have been at rehearsal. Last year Beth and I went to the parade without North (who had the same conflict) just to watch because we love it. We hadn’t decided if we were going this year and I’d completely forgotten what day it was until Beth asked me, tentatively that morning if I wanted to go. I didn’t. It seemed impossibly sad. I went out on some errands that afternoon and I ended up near downtown Takoma shortly after the parade must have ended because there were a lot of kids in costume, including an unusual number of skeletons, wandering around. In the Co-op, a small Buzz Lightyear was in line in front of me and told me he got his balloon sword at the parade.

Halloween proper was sad, too. We did our civic duty—put out the rest of our massive stock of decorations, lit our jack-o-lanterns (which we’d finished the night before we took North to the hospital, all cats this year in Xander’s honor), and gave out candy. I found seeing the costumed kids at the door alternately cheering and unbearable. To distract myself, I started awarding them prizes, (unbeknownst to them) on Facebook. Here’s what it looked like:

6:08 p.m.

Steph thinks the best trick-or-treater in the 5:00 to 6:00 hour was the “unicorn witch,” even though she wouldn’t have known that’s what the tot was without the voluntarily offered clarification. But it made sense—she wore a unicorn headband and a long black dress.

7:22 p.m.

Best costume in the 6:00 to 7:00 hour: Flower in flowerpot. Second place, hot dog.

8:10 p.m.

7:00 to 8:00 hour. Elaborate homemade piñata costume. Second place, witch with cauldron for candy and stuffed cat familiar, for attention to detail and impressive use of the word “familiar.”

9:00 p.m.

8:00 to 9:00 hour: Marshmallow. And that’s a wrap. Blowing out the pumpkins and turning out all the lights.

When it was all over, I told Beth this year was sadder than the year North missed trick-or-treating because of the sixth-grade Outdoor Ed field trip. “Way sadder,” she agreed.

Hospitalization: Eight Days and Counting

Earlier in the day on Halloween I delivered some homework to North, copies of The Glass Menagerie and The Doll’s House and questions to answer about the plays. (They will have to do this in crayon, as no other writing implements are allowed.) We’ve been going to the hospital frequently to deliver clean clothes and other items, though frustratingly, sometimes it takes days for the items to make their way to North. It was a week before they had a hairbrush, even though they were allowed one. We even brought a second one, thinking maybe the first one got lost. The same day they got to brush their hair, they got Muffin, their stuffed monkey. This required special permission, so it made a little more sense.

When one or both of us go to the hospital, usually Beth drives, but when I brought the plays on Monday, I took public transportation and the hospital shuttle so she could get some work done and so I could see North through the glass of the lobby. Whenever you come into the unit, they bring your kid out to wave at you.

On Wednesday afternoon I got to visit with them for an hour in the classroom. I delivered some art homework and a note from Zoë and a crocheted bee she made for North, a Zobëë, she called it. At North’s request I brought the cards and tokens for Love Letter so we could play (they beat me 7-0) and the Iliad. I read the beginning of book 12 out loud. This isn’t even homework. North got interested in it after they read the Odyssey last year and they’ve been reading it on and off since last summer. Somewhere around book 7, I started reading it to them because they thought it might go faster that way. (After room inspection that night both the card game and the bee were confiscated.)

We’ve also had at least one phone or Zoom call every day they’ve been there. At first it was kind of ad hoc and it was hard to get through but once we got on the schedule for every weekday evening at seven, it’s been easier. It’s good to see them once a day. We can see their room, which has a view of the Capitol, the Howard university bell tower, and the reservoir, and a dark blue wall with white silhouettes of whales and sharks. They’ve been doing a lot of adult coloring book pages with the ever-present crayons, and they are taped to the wall, along with Zoë’s note. We can have these calls because North will speak to us when no one else is around.

We get a call from Dr. D, the main psychiatrist who is working with North, every weekday except Wednesdays, and one day we had a family meeting, which was a Zoom call with North, Dr. D, and a coordinator. In this call North communicated by writing and holding the paper up to the camera. This is what they’ve been doing in group and individual therapy as well, though they have been working on saying a couple words per session.

We’ll have another family meeting on Monday, which if Dr. D is right, might be near the end of North’s stay. No promises, but she says she’s cautiously hoping it will be “early next week.”

At Home: Five More Days

Meanwhile, Beth and I have been working in the day and watching A League of Their Own or Abbott Elementary at night, plus Licorice Pizza on Friday night. I was writing postcards to voters in Kentucky and Georgia until the mailing deadline passed and on Friday, independently of each other, Beth and I took our ballots to the drop-off box near the community center. Beth also took North’s because in Takoma Park, you are allowed to vote for municipal offices at age sixteen. It seemed a little sad they couldn’t have the satisfaction of dropping their very first ballot into the box themselves, but it was good they’d already completed, signed, and sealed it.

On Tuesday I had lunch with my friend Megan. We’ve been good friends since North and Megan’s daughter were in preschool together, so she knows pretty much all of North’s long backstory. It was nice to talk to someone who didn’t need a lot of explanation. In other self-care, Beth went kayaking this morning and we went to Brookside Gardens for a walk this afternoon.

We very much hope North will be coming home soon. They’ve asked us to leave up the Halloween decorations, so we have. I’ve even left the Halloween cats dish towel hanging from the oven door and my black cat, bat, and vampire-festooned pencils and Mummy eraser out on my desk. We’re planning a little Halloween do-over for our reunion. We’ll watch It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and eat Halloween candy we saved. I am looking forward to that.

October Outings

Posted on October 20, 2022 by Steph

[Show as slideshow]

Note: this blog post was already mostly written when Xander got sick, so the bulk of it of it takes place before the last one. Think of it as an artsy flashback…

We’re a family prone to traditions and sometimes that gives the years and months and weeks a pleasing, predictable rhythm. That’s why I was disappointed when a couple of the things we usually do in October either didn’t happen or we couldn’t attend, but despite this, we’ve had several nice outings recently.

Where We Didn’t/Won’t Go

Visitation Day

Most MCPS schools have a parent visitation day on Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples’ Day when you can come observe your kids’ classes. (It’s that day because the schools are in session and many parents have it off work as it’s a federal holiday.) We’ve gone at both elementary schools the kids attended, both middle schools, and Noah’s high school. Before this year, I would have said all MCPS schools host this event, but it turns out North’s school doesn’t. You’d think I’d know this as North is a junior, but their ninth-grade year was nearly all remote and last year there weren’t many events parents were invited to in the building, especially early in the year, so I wasn’t surprised when the date passed with no invitation.

But this year, since Back to School Night was in person again, I thought Visitation Day would be on as well, but there we no announcements, so we started to wonder. Trying to find out anything about it from the school was surprisingly difficult. When I called the main office the person who answered the phone didn’t know and transferred me to someone else’s voicemail, where I left a message that was never returned. When Beth emailed the principal, he never answered. When I asked North to ask their teachers, they forgot, although they seemed open to us coming, especially to their painting class. When I called the main office again, a different person who answered the phone didn’t seem to know what I was talking about but said there was nothing on the school calendar for that day. This seemed like a good indication the event wasn’t happening, but I’d posted something to the school’s Facebook page, just in case, and then in response, the mother of a senior told a story about how the last year before covid she’d gone to see just one class and her daughter’s teacher who was a veteran at the school had no idea why she was there. That made me think, okay, maybe this school has never done this, and it wasn’t a casualty of covid until another senior parent posted, no, visitation day did happen the last year before covid, so now I don’t know what to think about the past or the future, but it didn’t happen this year. I really liked getting a glimpse of my kids’ school lives, as you can probably guess from the fact that I pursued this so doggedly, but even so, I wasn’t going to show up uninvited.

Halloween Parade

The other thing that’s probably off the table for us, though we don’t know for sure yet, is the Halloween parade and costume contest. It’s happening, two days before Halloween, but North thinks it conflicts with tech week for the school play, so they won’t be able to compete, which is sad because over the years my kids have been enthusiastic participants in the parade and contest, which they have each won at least once. The same conflict stopped North from going last year, so I’m guessing it will also conflict next year which means North’s probably done with the costume contest, which is sad because we didn’t even know the last year was the last year. Beth and I have thought about volunteering to be judges, but I think I want to wait until North has graduated and there’s no chance that we’d be judging any of their peers, not that too many of them are still participating.

Where We Did Go

Gingerbread Sundae (Date #1)

This wasn’t an October outing per se, as we went the last day of September, but it was autumnal, so I’m including it. Around this time of year, I always get a craving for the gingerbread sundae at Mark’s, a restaurant in downtown Takoma. I like to have it just as it’s getting a little cool, but warm enough that ice cream still seems appealing. Last year I was newly diagnosed with diabetes and skipped it, but I have a better idea of what I can eat now, and ice cream is rich enough that the fat slows down the sugar and it usually doesn’t cause as big a spike as other desserts. I invited Beth to go on a mini date with me on a Friday afternoon and split a sundae and that’s what we did. The day was cooler than had been predicted when we’d arranged it, but she’d cleared her schedule, so we went anyway. We asked for a table outside, because we’re not eating inside restaurants, and we had the little alley next to Mark’s all to ourselves (as the day was not only cool but it looked like rain, though it held off long enough), so it was kind of romantic. They were out of the gingerbread syrup, but the combination of warm gingerbread and cold ice cream was still pleasing.

Family Movie Outing

Later that weekend, all three of us saw Don’t Worry, Darling. I enjoyed it, even though it’s the kind of movie that when you think about it later, it makes less sense than it seemed to while you were watching it. I can say Florence Pugh is quite good in it, the cinematography is striking, and it has an excellent soundtrack.

Mother and Child Pupusa Excursion

At the end of summer, I realized that North and I never went to the Langley Park farmers’ market for pupusas, which is something we usually do at least once in the summer, so I checked the school calendar for half days or days off on Wednesdays before the market closes for the season in late November. There was a half day in September, but North had to stay after school for the play. However, Yom Kippur fell on a Wednesday and there was no school that day, so we got pupusas for lunch and coffee and pumpkin pastries (a muffin for North and a slice of pumpkin loaf for me that I saved for later). North says the farmers’ market pupusas are better than restaurant ones and I speculated it’s because food often tastes better outside. North thinks it’s because they get the ratio of filling to dough just right.

White House Garden Tour (Date #2)

There’s a garden tour at the White House every spring and fall and Beth was offered tickets through her office. We’ve done this tour before, but not for eleven years, and I thought it would be fun, so Beth and I went. (North declined.) It’s a self-guided tour. There were framed photos of presidents and first ladies from the Carters to the Trumps planting trees in front of the trees themselves and you can see how they’ve grown. (President Carter’s Cedar of Lebanon is quite impressive now.)

There was a bottleneck at the kitchen garden so a staffer was hurrying people past it, which was too bad, because I would have liked to get a better look, but I saw herbs, peppers of different colors, sunflowers, and a bank of surprisingly tall marigolds. We’ve been to the White House to see the Christmas decorations (once in the Clinton administration), to tour the East Wing, take the Garden Tour, and attend the Easter Egg Roll (all in the Obama years), but this was the first time we’d been there during the Biden administration. It made me think I’d like to do the Christmas tour again sometime. On the way back to the Metro, we got coffee (me) and hot chocolate (Beth) and then we went to Value Village to get an orange shirt for North to wear at our annual pumpkin patch photo shoot later in the month.

Lunch (Date #3)

The other thing we usually do on Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples’ Day, besides visit the kids’ schools, is to go out to lunch. The upside was that we didn’t have to squeeze it between one school and the other as we often did in years past. We went to Busboys and Poets. Beth got a salad with vegan tuna, and I had cauliflower with aioli and vegan barbequed chicken. It was a pretty day, sunny and in the sixties so it was pleasant to eat outside, and we spent some time hanging out when we got home before I decided to get some housework and paying work done.

If you’re wondering if it’s normal for us to have three dates in a week and half, the answer is no, but we were on a roll. Sometimes that happens.

Play

This year North is participating in Cappies, an organization of student theater critics that sends students to review plays at area high schools and then grants awards at the end of the year. On Friday they attended their first show. A high school in McLean, Virginia was putting on The Man Who Came to Dinner. Beth was going, too, because it’s a long drive to McLean and it made more sense to stay than to go home and come back, and I thought if everyone else was going, I’d get in on the fun, too. We’d purchased the tickets before Xander got sick and once he did, I was leaning toward staying home with him, but then he deteriorated more quickly than we thought he would, and we had him euthanized the morning of the play. So, we were all heartsore, and I almost didn’t go, but I wanted to be together on such a sad night—although North would be seated with the other Cappies—so I went.

The host school feeds the Cappies dinner beforehand, but Beth and I needed dinner, so I heated up some leftover frozen pizza and wrapped it up in foil before we left in hopes that it would stay warm and it did, faintly. On the way we stopped at a Starbucks where North and I got Dragon Drinks while Beth went to a nearby grocery store to get marinated mushrooms, a salad, and Babybel cheese to supplement the pizza. We ate in the car in the school parking lot and Beth said we were tailgating. Meanwhile, North was dining inside the school. They’d expected something like pizza on paper plates, but they were served roasted chicken and Caesar salad on china, which would have been nice, except North doesn’t eat meat, so all they had for dinner was salad and mints.

The play is a madcap 1930s comedy about an imperious literary critic who breaks his hip while at dinner at a factory owner’s house and is bedridden there for weeks, and proceeds to take over the house, receive many colorful guests, and irritate his host, while befriending his children, older sister, and servants (and in some cases turning them against him). The main plot involves the critic’s scheming interference in his secretary’s love life. Beth missed part of the second act because she had to go watch a vote count for an Apple store in Oklahoma City that was voting to unionize—happily, the union won. When she came back all I was able to tell her about what she missed was, “There were shenanigans and machinations.” It’s that kind of play.

The production was well done. The set was gorgeous, and the actors did a great job. (As a costumes manager, North noted there were some impressively quick costume changes.)

It was over by ten, and because I didn’t realize there was a Cappies meeting after the show for the purpose of debriefing, I thought we’d be getting home at a reasonable time, but we had to wait in the school lobby until 11:15, when North was finally released. I was exhausted from the long, draining day and when we got home and Beth and I fell into bed, it was midnight. But North stayed up to write their review.

Pumpkin Patch Expedition

We took our annual pilgrimage to Northern Virginia to get pumpkins the next day. We had to do it when we’d scheduled it, because it’s a long outing and Beth’s going to be out of town this weekend, plus North had invited Ranvita. I wasn’t reluctant, though. I was still heavy-hearted—we all were—but in my experience, getting outside when I’m sad never hurts and sometimes helps.

We left mid-afternoon, picked up Ranvita, and drove to Potomac Vegetable Farms, where we’ve been getting our jack-o-lantern pumpkins since before the kids were born. The reason is the farm is owned by the family of a friend from college. As the suburbs encroach on it, though, it gets smaller and smaller. There used to be a cider press where you could watch cider made and farm animals to visit. They do still have live chickens for sale. Because they’re widening the highway in front of the farm, there’s less land between the road and the stand and the area where the pallets piled with pumpkins have been in previous years is gone. The pumpkins were right in front of the stand, but there were enough for us to peruse, make our selections, and pose for the traditional photos. Usually it’s just the kids, but this year we had North take one of us, too. We also bought decorative gourds, apples, cider, salsa, and a baking mix for North.

We texted some of the pictures we took (of piles of pumpkins and gourds) to Noah and asked him to guess where we were. It’s a game we play sometimes. This wasn’t a hard one, though, as he’d been to this farm almost every October from birth until he left for college (and once after that during his pandemic online school year). It was nice to include him a little, as I’ve found in the six days since Xander died that I miss Noah more, and Matthew, too. Even though it’s natural for kids to grow up and leave and cats to grow old and die—and with the kids it’s a good thing—part of me stubbornly wants it to be the six of us together again as it was for so long.

We got back in the car and resumed listening to and critiquing an Apple Music Halloween playlist. There were standards like “Thriller,” “I Put a Spell on You” (Nina Simone version), and “Season of the Witch,” but North objected to Justin Bieber’s “Ghost” because they say it’s about ghosting someone, not ghosts, and no one thought Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood” belonged on a Halloween playlist because it’s not really about blood.

There’s a vegetarian Chinese restaurant we like near the farm stand and because there’s a bit of a gap between the time the stand closes and when we want to eat dinner, we’ve gotten into the habit of taking a walk in Meadowlark Botanical Gardens. As always, since we’re there in mid-October, there were a lot of kids taking Homecoming pictures. While North and Ranvita (whose foot was in a boot from an accident at play rehearsal) were resting in a pagoda and Beth and I were walking down separate paths (as I had taken longer to decide on my food order and she left first), Beth saw a young lesbian couple hanging out and taking pictures with their straight friends and she said it warmed her heart that in many places at least these days, queer kids “get to be regular kids.” It’s one of the good things about our kids’ generation.

We picked up the food and took it to another park where we ate at a picnic table. We were there because of the community gardens there that North wanted to show Ranvita, so after we ate our sweet potato and avocado sushi, spring rolls, miso soup, seaweed salad, noodles, and seitan-snow pea stir-fry, we wandered through the different plots, admiring the fall vegetables and flowers.

North said they wished they were a plant person because it would fit their vibe, but they really weren’t. I asked what they’d do after the apocalypse if they couldn’t grow food, and they said they’d cook the food someone else grew. Then we all chose our post-apocalyptic jobs, and North decided in addition to cooking, they’d watch children. “I’m very domestic in the apocalypse,” they observed. For my part, I thought I could teach and if it was a vampire apocalypse, I’d have some useful knowledge because I used to teach horror fiction and I know more than the average person about vampires. I was imagining myself in a Van Helsing/Rupert Giles type role. It didn’t occur to me until later that given that I write a lot about herbs, I could be an herbalist and that might be useful in the absence of vampires.

Our next stop was frozen yogurt. We’ve developed this whole pumpkin-gathering trip agenda over the years and while it does change (as when we had to start dining outside and when our favorite dessert place went out of business), it keeps growing and growing. “The problem with our family,” Beth started at one point, explaining to Ranvita how once we do something more than once everyone wants to keep doing it, but North interrupted, saying firmly, “There is no problem with our family.”

Maybe there is and maybe there isn’t, but it was good to hear them say that. And the familiarity of the routine was comforting on a day when sadness ran just under the surface of our pleasures.

All The Very Best Cat Things

Posted on October 17, 2022 by Steph

[Show as slideshow]

On Wednesday morning I was leaving for a walk, and I texted Beth: “Xander came out with me and seems happy in the sun so I’m not putting him back inside. Could you check on him in a half hour or so? He’s currently in the front yard sidewalk.”

We’d been having a warm, sunny week after a long stretch of rain earlier in the month and I was thinking since it might be too chilly for sunbathing soon, I wanted him to enjoy this opportunity. I’m glad I left him out there because as it turned out, it would be his last time soaking up the sun.

That afternoon I was at my desk working and Beth was on a call when I heard him make loud and distressed noise. I went to see what was wrong and he was vomiting in the hall, which was nothing unusual. But when he was done, his breathing was labored. We’d noticed he’d been breathing more heavily recently, but this was different. Beth called our regular vet practice to see if they could see him that day and they said no, so we called the animal hospital and they said to bring him.

We drove to the hospital and sat in the waiting room for a while he was examined. A vet took us into an office to talk. She said he had a mass in his throat, probably cancer, that was making it hard for him to breathe. She speculated that when he vomited, it caused it to shift into a more obstructive position. We opted against surgery because of his age (nineteen and a half) and frailty. Xander used to be a very big cat, big in all the ways possible for a cat to be—big boned, muscular, plump, and fluffy. He was once capable of staring down small dogs. But he was down to less than half his peak weight and he’d lost three pounds in the past year alone.

The vet wanted to keep him on oxygen overnight and see if steroids would reduce inflammation enough so that he could breathe unassisted. She asked if we’d like to give a DNR order for him, which was startling, but we said yes. I couldn’t imagine someone doing CPR on his fragile body. I also learned in this visit that CPR rarely works on cats anyway.

By Thursday morning the steroids had worked well enough that he was breathing better, enough to come home for however much time he had left. He spent most of the day resting more or less comfortably, though we did notice he didn’t seem to want to put his head down and he’d doze half lying down, half sitting up. We suspected he couldn’t breathe well enough when his head was down. He drank and peed in the litterbox, but he didn’t eat all day, not even the cat treats he loved, and he hadn’t eaten for most of the day before either. We all spent a lot of time petting him and telling him what a good cat he was.

We let him sleep in our bed that night, between us. It was kind of like co-sleeping with a toddler because he couldn’t get comfortable and was quite restless. He was also behaving strangely. He kept going into the bathroom, hopping up a stool, and putting his paws in the toilet, which he’d never done before. If he was thirsty, his water dish in the kitchen was more accessible than that, but I wondered if he was getting confused and had forgotten where it was.

On Friday morning, we decided it was time. The vet from the animal hospital had referred us to a company that will come to your house and euthanize your pet. A vet came soon after we called. We all sat on the living room couch with Xander between me and North. We’d given North the choice to say their goodbyes and leave the room or stay and they chose to stay.

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

On Saturday a bouquet of roses and other flowers arrived. It was from some of Beth’s colleagues, who had often seen Xander in the background of Beth’s Zoom calls over the past two and a half years. He was a friendly cat who charmed anyone he encountered—North’s friends all loved him—and this was proof his charm extended to online appearances.

RIP Alexander Fionn
Circa February 14, 2003-October 14, 2022

Xander was a beautiful, good-natured cat who lived a long, happy life. In his later years, he went partially deaf and, in his determination to be heard, he just meowed louder and louder. When I posted an album of pictures of him on Facebook, mostly of him snuggling with various members of the family or sitting on diverse perches (a pile of clean, folded towels, my open laptop, an air conditioner), one of my friends commented that it looked like he’d done “all the very best cat things.” He really did. We all miss him terribly.

p.s. If you weren’t reading this blog in 2013, I recommend this post about the time Xander went missing for several days and where we found him. There’s a good twist at the end.

Oregon Equinox

Posted on September 25, 2022 by Steph

[Show as slideshow]

Two days ago, I got back from a week in Oregon, where I was staying at my mom’s house as she recovered from knee surgery. While I was gone, North had their own medical adventure.

Friday: Arrival

The alarm went off at 5:30 so I could catch an 8:30 flight. Medford is small airport, so it always takes two or three flights to get there. I was lucky to only have one layover, in Denver. As I mentioned earlier it was my first flight since covid. The last time was in February 2019, when Noah and I flew to Boston to tour Boston University.

The flights were uneventful. The most notable thing about the first one was that there was a passenger dressed as a jester, complete with the stick with ribbons on it (but no hat) and the most notable thing about the second flight was that I spilled half a can of seltzer all over myself. I also managed to read about a third of Stephen King’s latest, Fairy Tale, which was a nice way to pass the time. There was a tight connection between the two flights, but I made it and arrived in Medford early in the afternoon local time.

My sister Sara, who had been looking after my mom the previous week, picked me up at the airport and took me on a series of errands. We went to Home Depot for mulch because, though she lives in Davis, California now, she and her husband haven’t sold their Ashland house yet, and they’re trying to keep the property looking spruced up. We spread the mulch and she got the sprinklers watering the lawn and fruit trees and then we tried to go to Trader Joe’s, but it was closed because of a power outage.

We went to Mom’s house and socialized for a while. Sara had more errands to do and while she was gone, I took an hour-and-fifteen-minute nap—I’d been up since what would have been 2:30 a.m. in Oregon and I was exhausted. I woke around seven and I could have easily gone back to sleep for the night, but I needed to adjust to Pacific time, plus Sara had made pizza from a kit, so I got up and had dinner with Mom and Sara.

Starting when I was in my early teens, Mom, Sara, and I had pizza every Friday night. My mom was a single working mom, and she was in grad school to boot so she was busy. I’m surprised we didn’t eat takeout more than once a week honestly. The Friday night pizza tradition lived on after my mom married my stepfather and then in my adult family, but it’s been a long, long time (maybe almost forty years?) since it was just me, my sister, and my mother around the table eating pizza on a Friday night. It was nice, like old times, except completely different.

Sara showed me how to help Mom with her PT exercises and how to massage her leg and where things were in the house and then they watched a movie, but they started it at 9:30, and I was considering it an accomplishment to stay awake until ten, so I had a shower and went to bed.

Weekend: Settling In

The next morning, I woke a little after five, which was earlier than I would have liked, but not surprising. I stayed in bed until almost eight, first trying to get back to sleep, then looking at Facebook and blogs and texting with Noah. He’d sent me two dozen pictures he took at a wildlife sanctuary he’d visited with Ida, the other boarder at his house, and some of her friends. There were koalas, kangaroos, capybaras, an ostrich, a lemur, a red panda, a Komodo dragon, a crocodile, and other animals, and the photos were gorgeous. It made me happy he’s getting out and doing things besides going to class and hanging out at his house because he tends to be a homebody.

Sara got up around eight and once we’d both eaten breakfast and talked some she went grocery shopping for me and Mom before heading back to Davis. I went for a walk and got a latte and a small chocolate cookie from a nearby coffeeshop and picked up some things Mom needed from the drug store all the while admiring the mountains that ring Ashland. There’s one arid ridge and one covered with evergreen trees. I knew there were wild blackberry canes all over Ashland from previous visits, but I was surprised to learn they’re still producing edible (and quite tasty) berries in mid-September. I sampled them all week during my rambles.

Over the course of the day, I helped Mom with her exercises twice, massaged her leg, folded laundry, swept the leaves off her porch and driveway, and walked with her to her mailbox (which is in a bank of them a short block from her house). She also folded some laundry and said with satisfaction, “We’re getting things done today.”

It rained a little in the afternoon, which is not so common in Ashland until the fall, but it was almost fall. The equinox was my second to last day there. Fall did seem closer in Ashland than at home anyway. It was cool enough for long sleeves most days and a few vanguard trees were already turning red or orange. Mom and I settled down with our books in the living room and read while the dryer hummed, and rain ran down the windows that look out on her back patio. It was very cozy, and she even dozed in her chair for a bit.

I made chili for dinner, and we watched State of Play, which was the movie Mom and Sara had started but not finished the night before while I was in bed. (Mom wanted to see how it ended so we started it over from the beginning.) It’s a twisty journalistic thriller, good but not great. Because it takes place in D.C. I was occasionally forced to say things like “No one calls it the subway, it’s the Metro.”

Sunday was similar. I did little chores around the house, read, and took a longer walk. I wandered through a cemetery, walked along the railroad tracks, saw a community garden, and ended up near the same coffeehouse where I’d been the day before. This time I got chocolate ice cream with slivered almonds and whipped cream. I made a cream of mushroom soup and salad for dinner, and we watched the first episode of Ken Burns’ The U.S. and the Holocaust. I so seldom watch broadcast tv it felt strange to have to be ready at a specific time. Mom had been experimenting with different levels and timing of her painkillers, trying to balance pain relief and side effects, but as a result of skimping on it, she had some pretty bad pain that evening.

Monday to Thursday: A New Routine

Monday was the first morning I managed to sleep until a time that started with 6, which correlated to feeling rested for the first time, and that was convenient as I started working that day. There was no reason not to, as I had my laptop, a little office with a door that closes (which is more than I have at home) and enough time. Sara left an extra monitor for me, but I found I missed having a mouse. It also would have been nice to be able to figure out how to get my laptop to communicate with Mom’s printer because I am the sort of old school person who likes reading things on paper and marking them up with a pencil.

Monday morning while I was out on an errand to drop off an application for a handicapped parking permit at the DMV (a failed mission, as it turns out that location is closed due to staffing shortages), Mom went for twenty-five-minute walk with her walker alone. One the one hand, I was encouraged she was able to do it, but on the other I wished she’d waited for me to come home so I could accompany her, just in case.

Mom had a physical therapy appointment that day and the good news was her pain and mobility were improving and the swelling in her leg was completely gone. The bad news was she and the therapist thought she wasn’t getting enough flexion in her knee and that scar tissue might be the culprit. They decided to reduce the frequency of PT appointments until she can get a doctor’s opinion about whether she needs a manipulation (or worse, more surgery) so as to save some of the appointments her insurance covers for after further treatment, if needed.

That night I made a stir-fry for dinner, and we watched a PBS show called Animals with Cameras, which is just what it sounds like. We saw footage from cameras mounted on cheetahs’ heads, seals’ backs, and baboons’ necks. The point is to learn something about the animals’ behavior, sometimes just for the sake of science, but sometimes to learn how to possibly alter it (as with baboons who raid farmers’ squash fields and who are in danger of being shot if the scientists can’t get them to stop).

The days rolled on. I worked two or three hours a day and took walks, short ones with Mom, and longer ones alone. I got coffee or tea most days, sometimes at the coffeehouse, once at a Dutch Brothers kiosk in a parking lot because I understand that’s a quintessential Oregon experience, and sometimes at a Starbucks inside a supermarket because it was the closest coffee-selling establishment to Mom’s house. I made a homemade tomato sauce with garden tomatoes a neighbor brought by to eat on whole-wheat spaghetti Tuesday, burgers with side dish of cauliflower, broccoli and carrots with cheese sauce on Wednesday, and a curried zucchini soup Thursday night. We finished watching the Holocaust documentary series and watched some more Animals with Cameras. Whenever Mom introduced me to anyone (a friend from Peace Choir who came by, a neighbor we encountered on a walk, her housecleaner) she told the person I was her daughter who came “all the way from Maryland” to stay with her. She raved about my cooking, even though it seemed pretty run of the mill to me.

By the end of the week, Mom was walking much better, not using her walker at all and only using her cane on walks outside the house, but she was still concerned that if she did need a manipulation, it would set her recovery back.

Meanwhile, At Home

Things were more eventful… Beth and North got the new covid booster on Saturday, the day after I left, and North was tired and achy for days afterward. On Saturday they made a plum pie for the Takoma Park farmers’ market annual pie contest (held for the first time since covid), but by the next day they were feeling too unwell to attend, so Beth delivered it for them. It didn’t win but it was delicious—Beth bought and froze a slice for me so I could have it when I got home. North missed school Monday and Tuesday, mostly because of lower back pain. Then late Tuesday afternoon, North lost the ability to urinate.

If you’ve been reading this blog at least two years, you probably remember this affliction. We still have catheter supplies, but they had expired, I suppose because they can’t guarantee sterility beyond a certain point. Beth and North went to the emergency room, where they had an excruciatingly long wait to be seen. They had an ultrasound in the evening and an MRI the following morning to rule out physical causes. As expected, there was nothing. They arrived in the late afternoon, and it was the middle of the night before anyone would use a catheter to empty North’s bladder so they were quite uncomfortable.

Both Beth and North brought phone chargers to the hospital because this was not their first rodeo in the ER. At first, they couldn’t find an outlet but then North did so I was able to communicate with them throughout the evening and the next day. I felt a little guilty going to bed that night when I knew Beth was likely going to be up all night in the ER (and she was) but not as much as I would have in the past. We learned two years ago how to spell each other by taking turns on hospital nights and while I expected and hoped North would be at home when I got home three days later, I knew there was a small but non-zero chance that I’d be taking a turn sleeping (or not sleeping) in their hospital room at some point.

What I didn’t expect was that Beth and North would be in the ER, not admitted, from Tuesday afternoon until the wee hours of Thursday morning. Apparently, one of the doctors thought they could not be sent home with catheter supplies without retraining both Beth and North on the procedure and this could not happen unless they were admitted. And they could not be admitted because the hospital was over capacity. By the second night, I was starting to feel guilty I wasn’t there. North managed to get several hours sleep here and there but Beth didn’t sleep for forty-three hours, when they were finally trained (without being admitted after all) and sent home with supplies.

North slept most of Thursday and stayed home Friday as well. Beth made arrangements with the school for them to be able to use the nurse’s bathroom when they return next week.

Friday was North’s half-birthday. We always celebrate the kids’ half-birthday with cupcakes, and this year was no exception. Early in the week I asked North to save me one and they said I had to eat one on the right day, so I got an almond flour cupcake with rose frosting from the natural foods store near Mom’s house and sent North a picture of it, as proof I’d honored the day that they tipped closer to seventeen than sixteen. I’ve always enjoyed the fact that their birthdays and half-birthdays occur on or near the equinoxes as the Earth is making a similar transition.

Thursday to Friday: Departure

Thursday evening Sara returned to Ashland, with Dave and Lily-Mei. They were all attending a wedding on Saturday, so they were staying the weekend with Mom (who was also going). Sara drove me to the airport Friday morning. My flight was delayed by twenty minutes, then forty minutes, and finally an hour and twenty minutes, which was concerning because my layover in Denver was exactly that long.

There was plenty of time to observe my fellow travelers before we boarded the plane. I think the prize for most interesting went to the young man wearing a graphic t-shirt with a plague mask (but no mask for our current plague), a necklace with a plastic bird skull, leather bracelets with hardware, and knee-high leather boots with a spider design embossed on them. He was painting with watercolors in a tiny leather-bound book.

I had a window seat and the flight from Medford to Denver was beautiful, with many mountains and canyons. I didn’t read at all and just looked at the landscape unfold beneath me. As the plane approached Denver and then as we sat on the tarmac waiting for an open gate, various passengers with tight connections commiserated about their chances of making their flights. Mine was scheduled to take off about ten minutes after my seatmate’s, so I don’t know if she made her flight to Wisconsin, but I did make mine to Baltimore, even after getting turned around in the airport and having to figure out how to take a train from one concourse to another.

I wasn’t the only passenger with a late flight (or even the last one to arrive) and they held the plane for us. I got to the gate about ten or fifteen minutes after the plane was supposed to have taken off. Then there was a lot of confusion about seat assignments, with someone in my assigned seat and someone else in the next seat the flight attendant thought should be empty. I ended up seated between a woman in a Mennonite-style prayer cap and a man in a ball cap who was cursing and loudly protesting the delays and who later tried to order more than one alcoholic drink (you can only have one). Once the plane took off, he was calm and friendly, but I was nervous about him for a while.

We ended up sitting on the ground for an hour after I was seated because another passenger had to be removed from the plane under mysterious circumstances. Rumor was spreading through the plane that he was on the wrong plane—but how could that even happen? At any rate, he wasn’t belligerent, but he did appear impaired in some way, possibly sick, drunk, or on drugs. I saw him while the flight attendant was taking me all over the plane trying to find a seat for me and his seatmate piped up that she thought he was in the wrong seat. Another mystery—why would you even look at anyone else’s boarding pass—but she said she had.

But the happy ending was my second plane landed around 11:45 p.m. in Baltimore, only about thirty-five minutes late, and even though she was still dragging from having missed a whole night of sleep a few days earlier and I told her I could take a Lyft home, Beth was there to pick me up. Our family may have been scattered between Australia, Oregon, and Maryland on the day the light and dark were equal but being with Beth always helps me feel balanced.

2.5, or Mostly Normal: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 76

Posted on September 16, 2022 by Steph

[Show as slideshow]

At the end of the last school year, I stopped using the Coronavirus Chronicles subtitle—back today for a guest appearance—on my blog posts. I’d originally intended to retire it when the kids went back to full-time, in-person school at the beginning of that school year. I thought that milestone would make life feel normal, and it certainly made it feel more normal, but at the same time everything felt very precarious, like we could go back to remote school at any point. Ithaca had a week of online classes in January and the public schools here probably should have done the same around the same time as school was just a hot mess for a while there, with so many teachers out sick that a lot of North’s classes became unchaperoned study halls, and the school buses just didn’t come as often as not. I can’t remember how long this went on, but it feels like it was most of the month.

This year feels different, as friends of mine who teaches middle school recently commented. It seems to have taken a whole year back in the classroom for everyone, teachers and kids and parents, to regain their footing. That was why I stopped using the subtitle. I expect the kids will stay in school and I’m used to Beth working at home most days, so it didn’t feel as if covid was relevant to every post anymore.

But of course, covid isn’t over, people are still contracting it and dying of it every day. The Post stopped including the graphs with the covid case numbers and death toll on a daily basis sometime last spring. It’s weekly now, on Sundays. The death toll hit one million in May and as of last Sunday, it stood at 1,046,656. I heard on a science podcast this week that more than 400 Americans die of covid a day. That’s still a lot of people.

And I think more people I know have had it in the past year than the year and a half before that, though thankfully, they have mostly been mild cases. My mother had it in June. A lot of you have had it. Since we’ve hit the two-and-a-half-year mark of the pandemic, (a quarter of a decade!) I thought I’d look back at how covid has affected us since I last did a covid round up six months ago. But instead of chronologically, I’m going to do it thematically this time.

Mom Gets Covid

The only close family members who’ve had covid are my mother, Beth’s brother, and her sister-in-law—John and Abby had it early on. (A lot of my friends and members of my extended family have had it at one time or another.)

6/26

While we were gone, my mom called and left a message letting us know she had covid. She only found out because she was over at my sister’s house helping her pack for my sister’s family’s upcoming move and she casually mentioned that she wasn’t tasting things as well as usual and my sister immediately fetched a covid test she had on hand and sure enough it was positive.

My mom says she felt fine, but was isolating when we spoke. She just got back from a trip to Morocco and she’s not sure if she got it there or at home, but she had to test to get on the plane home and that test was negative. Maybe she got it on the flight or she had it before she flew but it was too soon to show up on the test. I’m glad her vaccines and booster did their job and kept her safe from serious illness, even though she caught it.

Covid Creates a Job Opportunity

6/13

Mike was filming a documentary and they were in a church recording someone giving a speech about climate change. Noah was filling in for a member of the crew who had covid.

Tests

I found it kind of strange Noah didn’t have to take a covid test to get on an international flight, since my mom did to fly to and from Morocco and North had to take one to go to camp, but requirements do vary quite a bit.

4/9

North came down with some kind of virus the middle of the second week and missed four days of school—the last two days of the third quarter and the first two days of the fourth quarter. They took a rapid covid test at home the first day they felt sick and it was negative. The next day we all went to the Silver Spring Civic Center for PCR tests. Beth’s and North’s came back negative and mine must have fallen through the cracks because I never heard back. I wasn’t particularly worried once we got North’s negative results, though, because they’re the one who comes into contact with the most people, so I didn’t pursue it. I’d had a sore throat and some congestion around the time North got sick but it never got more serious than that and Beth wasn’t sick at all.

8/13

She dropped North’s required covid test for sleepaway camp in the mail, and then she picked up the kids at the movies and me at the house and drove us to dinner at a make-your-own-bowl place out on the highway, and drove us all plus my mom to Sweet Frog for frozen yogurt and then home.

Shots

We’re vaccinated and double boosted as of April. We are going to get the bivalent booster soon.

4/9

Two days after we were tested Beth and I got our second booster shots.

Masks

This is the one that comes up the most often, even though it can seem trivial. We still wear masks at stores and on public transportation and North wears one at school and on the school bus. I still notice when people are wearing them or not and I’m often thinking about whether I need one in spaces that are outside but crowded, or semi-enclosed.

3/27

Noah going back to school after spring break: Later that morning Beth and I took Noah back to the same parking lot where we’d picked him up eight days earlier. He went into the mall to get some baked ziti for lunch, but he didn’t have time to eat it before the bus came and he’s very strict about not taking his mask off on the bus so I have no idea when he ate it, maybe at a stop along the way.

4/18

Leaving for our Midwestern road trip: Back to our travels: we hit the road around 10:30 and immediately turned around because a block or two from the house North and I realized we had not packed any masks. We were the only people wearing masks when we stopped at The Blue Goose Fruit Market and Bakery for treats and I was one of two masked customers when I went into Taco Bell to pick up our lunch order.

5/3

Watching Noah’s band concert online: I was actually thinking as I watched it was good the three masked percussionists were in the back row because they were behind, rather than in front of all those wind and brass instruments blowing air out toward the audience. (Audience members were asked to mask even though Ithaca’s been mask-optional since March, possibly for this reason.)

5/30

While berry picking: We’ve been to Butler’s to pick berries a couple times during the pandemic, but this was the first time they were running the wagons instead of having people drive out to the fields. We deliberated about masks. The wagons are open-sided and we generally don’t mask outside, but the benches can get crowded. Three out of four family opted to mask on the wagons and we were in the minority of riders, but not alone. North wore theirs in the field, too, but I think they may have just forgotten to take it off. (They’re so used to wearing one at school they sometimes leave it on for a while after they get off the bus.)

6/26

Looking back at the school year: They were sick several times in the winter and spring, once, in April, very sick with a high fever. That last time was probably due to the school going mask-optional in March.

A message from the director of North’s outdoor drama camp: In an email Tuesday night she said in case of rain they’d work under the gazebo, perhaps focusing on making costumes and props, and in case of severe weather, they’d retreat to her porch or go inside her house (with masks).

8/29

In Hershey Park: We got to Chocolate World a little before ten. I expected we’d be in a very small minority of people masking indoors and we were, but it was even fewer people than I would have guessed, almost no one, even in crowded spaces where you stand near the same people for a long time (for instance in the line for the factory ride).

9/3

When North went back to school in August: They say only about a quarter of kids are still masking and when I asked if that was enough for them not to feel self-conscious, they said yes.

9/11

A text from Noah, commenting on mask usage in Australia: Masks required on the domestic flight, lots of masks at the airport (about 50%) but very few at the mall

At Wolf Trap concert hall: The seats were near the back in a sparsely populated section and the pavilion is open on the sides we didn’t feel the need to put on our masks.

Covid as a Marker of Time

We are still experiencing first-time since covid events, as recently as this month.

3/27

First Cherry Blossoms at the Tidal Basin: The petals were perfect, puffy and white to pale pink. It was crowded, but not mobbed. We hadn’t been as a family since 2018 because three years ago Noah had too much homework and North had some injury– I packed a lunch and went alone that year—and then covid kept us away for two years—we went to the more spacious National Arboretum instead those years.

4/9

First Easter Care Package: I decided to send Noah a planned care package of Easter candy a little early, in hopes that a chocolate-hazelnut bunny, peanut butter eggs, mini eggs, and jelly beans would be cheering. I did not mail it in an Easter basket, for reasons of space, but I did pack the box with Easter grass. Noah was home last Easter and the one before because of covid so this was his first Easter-in-a-box from me.

6/13

First Pride: If North hadn’t had a birthday party to attend it might have been nice to go from the rally to the Pride parade and meet up with them there. Pride was cancelled the past two years because of covid, but the two years before that we went to the festival and I thought the parade would have been a nice change of pace.

9/11

First Back to School Night: On Thursday we went to Back to School Night at North’s school. It was the first year since before covid that this event was in person.

First Folk Festival: Sunday we attended the first Takoma Park Folk Festival to be held since before covid.

Today

Finally, I boarded my first airplane since before covid this morning to go visit my mom in Oregon. She had a knee replaced a couple weeks ago and her recovery has been difficult. My aunt and sister have both stayed with her already and I’m taking my turn. More on this visit in a future post…

Meanwhile, some traditions have not returned:

6/26

Drama camp cast party: Pre-covid, there was often a cast party at our local pizzeria, but we hadn’t hear anything about it until the middle of the rehearsal when North texted me about whether I wanted to go and I said yes and then almost immediately afterward, North texted back to say it wasn’t happening, so I packed a picnic, which is what Gretchen had suggested in an email to all the parents and what has happened the past couple years, but it turned out I was the only one to bring food.

Fingers crossed, I won’t add another covid post until March, when it’s been three years. Until then we’ll go on with our lives, vaccinated and occasionally masked, but mostly normal.

Lucky

Posted on September 11, 2022 by Steph

[Show as slideshow]

Labor Day Weekend

After Noah left, we had a three-day weekend. It was low-key, but nice. We all watched The Edge of Seventeen on Friday night, Beth went kayaking on Saturday morning, and on Saturday evening I listened to my friend Becky’s radio show on Takoma’s community radio station while making dinner. I almost skipped it because when Noah isn’t here, this show reminds me of our routine of cooking together and listening to it on Saturday nights and I wasn’t sure I was ready for that, but Becky and her co-host were giving away tickets to see Neko Case and Patty Griffin and I thought I might as well give it a try. There were four pairs of tickets and you had to send an email after they played a song by one of the artists. I kept trying, but I realized toward the end of the show I’d inserted an extra period in the email address, so I tried once more with the right address, and I won! The first three winners were announced on the air, but I didn’t find out until after the show was over. We were all watching Gilmore Girls and I got a message from Becky.

That same night Noah landed safely in Australia, got through customs, and boarded his third and final flight, from Sydney to the Gold Coast. We were relieved there was no issue with his visa or his medications. “What a night!” Beth said.

North hung out with Sol on Sunday afternoon and evening, first at the mall and then at our house. Beth and I went to the pool while the kids were at the mall. It was only the second time I’d been to an outdoor pool this summer, so I was glad to do it. Unlike the last time we went, the water temperature was pleasant. I swam fifteen laps—I would have done more if we’d had more time—and went down the water slide a couple times, which was fun and made me wonder why I don’t do that more often when I’m at a pool that has one.

On Labor Day, Beth was doing some straightening up in the basement and she gave me two boxes. One contained student papers, teaching materials, and dissertation research notes from 1997 to 2001. During this time, I was finishing my PhD at the University of Maryland, teaching there and at George Washington University. I had no idea I still had any of those papers. I thought I’d gotten rid of them long ago, but I guess a missed a box. I went through it cursorily just to make sure there was nothing in it I wanted, but not too carefully because spending too much time thinking about my academic past sometimes sucks me down into a shame spiral.

The other box was of mementos that spanned from childhood to my mid-twenties. Some were things I’d thought were lost, like my high school diploma and my senior year yearbook. There was also some artwork, mostly not done by me, including a portrait of me at age eleven, which my sister remembered was drawn by a stranger we met at the playground. And there were letters and a folder of printouts of email I’d exchanged with a work friend when I used to work at Project VOTE (a now defunct non-profit that registered low-income African Americans to vote) back in the early 90s. I read the email rather than the letters, because it was easier to read than handwriting and because it looked like about the right amount to read in an evening without going down a rabbit hole that would last longer than that. Reading it was a more emotional experience than I expected. I remembered David and I were close, but I’d forgotten how close. Working in that office was intense and when he left to take another job, it wasn’t the same and we drifted apart pretty quickly. This is the kind of moment in which you can feel sad about a faded friendship, or you can appreciate what it meant to you while you had it, and I managed to go with the latter for the most part.

We usually have a picnic in the back yard on Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and Labor Day, but it was raining, so we ate our veggie dogs, baked beans, deviled eggs, corn-on-the-cob, and watermelon on the porch instead. It was actually nice, to sit and watch the drizzle and hope it would bring cooler, less muggy weather.

Report from Australia

Meanwhile on the other side of the world… Noah arrived at his place, which is a boarding house. He has his own room and shares a kitchen, bathroom, and common areas with the landlady and another boarder, a Norwegian, but not the same Norwegian he’d been corresponding with earlier about sharing an apartment. This one is a young woman. Noah said the landlady is nice, that she took him to the mall so he could get some things he needed, and she took him on a tour of the university. There wasn’t a desk in his room, and he wanted one, so he bought one, which I guess he’ll leave for the next boarder.

His orientation started Tuesday with some online modules and continued in person on Wednesday through Friday. He said most of the international students are Americans or Norwegians. He’ll start classes on Monday. He sent me a picture of the gate of the university and said, “Good to know it’s real and I haven’t fallen for an elaborate scam.”

Here are some of his observations about Australia, from the first days he was there:

Light switches are backwards (up = off)
At the mall I went to the escalators were like airport conveyors but at an incline. The airport had stair-style escalators so it’s not universal
Masks required on the domestic flight, lots of masks at the airport (about 50%) but very few at the mall
Even as a non-driver, cars driving on the left is disorienting. Also, I assume that means the cultural standard is to walk on the left when possible
The spoons in this house are all very small or very large. But that’s probably just the house

An Unexpected Package

I was on the porch, reading an online trade magazine for work Wednesday afternoon when a UPS delivery person dropped off a small box. When I saw it had a pattern of Hershey’s kisses on it, I had a sudden inkling of what it might be.

Two days after we got back from Hershey Park, I realized I’d lost a coin purse containing my debit card, my ID, a SMARTrip (a bus and train pass), and a twenty-dollar bill. The last place I’d spent money was Chocolate World, right as we were leaving the park. I considered calling to see if there was a lost and found but I thought at such a big complex it would be a bureaucratic ordeal, so I didn’t do it. I cancelled the debit card and transferred the money on the SMARTrip to another card, but I hadn’t managed to order a new ID because of ongoing computer problems at the MVA (speaking of bureaucratic ordeals).

And, then as you have no doubt guessed by now, someone found the coin purse and turned it in, and the Customer Service department at Chocolate World mailed it back to me, free of charge. Nothing was missing, not even the cash. So, I didn’t need to wrangle with the MVA’s recalcitrant online system anymore, I had twenty dollars I thought I lost, plus a coin purse I rather like. Between winning concert tickets and this, I was feeling pretty lucky.

We also found out that same day that North’s application to be a theater reviewer for local high schools was successful, so they are going to be doing that. It should be fun, and they will get to go to a lot of plays throughout the DC metro area.

Back to School Night

On Thursday we went to Back to School Night at North’s school. It was the first year since before covid that this event was in person. Since North’s a junior, and we missed two years, this means it was our first time meeting their teachers at their high school and we had to learn our way around the building. (It was also our second to last Back to School Night ever I realized as we walked back to the car. That was a startling thought.)

Because North is not at our home high school there were fewer parents we knew than we knew at their elementary or middle school (or Noah’s high school), so I was surprised when Talia’s parents walked into the AP World History classroom. Talia went to preschool with North, played on a basketball team with them through most of elementary school, was on the costumes crew with them for the fall play last year, and her mom Megan is a good friend of mine. North hadn’t mentioned she was in the class. Chatting before the teacher’s presentation we learned Talia’s folks were going to the same concert we were the following night. (The presentation itself was the most detailed in terms of the curriculum. So far, it also seems to North’s hardest class.)

It was nice to get to see the teachers in person. North’s Astronomy teacher is fresh out of school and so young I wasn’t sure she was the teacher when I saw her standing in the classroom door. The AP Lit teacher wasn’t present because she’s eight months pregnant and was attending an infant CPR class. She made a video for parents to watch. The French teacher is quite energetic, and the math teacher seems enthusiastic about math and down to earth. The tech teacher basically said it was a gut class and there was no excuse not to get an A, if the kids made an effort. The painting teacher told us to let her know if our kids are interested in painting with oils, because it’s not part of the regular curriculum. (When we told North later, they said they are interested.)

I was glad to have gone, even though I had to miss book club (and we were reading Octavia Butler).

Concerts

The weekend was quite musical. Friday night we went to the Neko Case/Patty Griffin concert and Sunday we attended the first Takoma Park Folk Festival to be held since before covid.

Late Friday afternoon we said goodbye to North and Ranvita who were settling in for pizza and a movie (they watched Call Me By Your Name) and we drove to Virginia and picked up our own pizza and some mozzarella sticks for a picnic on the lawn of Wolf Trap. Beth had made a Caprese salad with a tomato and some basil from the garden to go with it. We also got some soft serve from the concessions stand.

The weather was really nice, just a perfect temperature (when we arrived) and not too humid. When the sun set, I actually wished I’d worn long sleeves and socks. I lay on the blanket and read a few chapters of Gwendy’s Final Task while we waited for the concert to start. I’d been texting with Megan to see if she and her husband Tom were on the lawn or in the pavilion. They had seats inside, but she said they were in line for merch, and they’d come visit us on their way inside. Then they ran into other friends, ran out of time, and we didn’t end up connecting.

While all this was going on, I happened to look at the tickets for the first time. I just wanted to see how much they cost (and it didn’t say, just “complimentary”) but then I noticed they had seat numbers on them. Despite what the radio station manager said, they weren’t lawn tickets after all. After some brief consideration—because it is nice on the lawn on a pretty night—we decided to move inside, where we’d have a better view. Also, I thought it might be a little warmer in there (and it was). The seats were near the back in a sparsely populated section and the pavilion is open on the sides we didn’t feel the need to put on our masks. Before the music started, I spotted our around-the-corner neighbor Chris and Beth went over to talk to her. Then Chris came to sit with us for a while during intermission and she and Beth talked shop—they both work in the labor movement—and about Chris’s daughter’s adjustment to middle school.

Patty Griffin came on first, but I’m not sure I’d say she was opening for Neko Case because their sets were almost equal in length. Both shows were great. I know more of Neko Case’s songs than Patty Griffin’s, but it’s easier to make out Griffin’s lyrics so I was following along a little better during her part of the show. There was a nearly full moon that night, so Griffin sang “250,000 Miles” and Case sang “I Wish I Was the Moon.” Patty Griffin had a song about Bluebeard I liked, and I was glad to hear Neko Case sing “Last Lion of Albion.” It was a very nice evening, and we got to bed by 11:45, which is quite late for us, but at least we didn’t turn into pumpkins, which may well have happened if we’d been out at midnight. It’s been so long I have no idea.

Two days later we were watching live music again at the Takoma Park Folk Festival, which was cancelled for two years running because of covid. It was raining in the morning, but the festival carried on with the performers under tents. When we arrived around one, the rain had stopped, and we spread our blanket on the wet grass under trees that occasionally dripped on us. Overall, it wasn’t as well attended as usual, probably because of the weather, but we had fun. We saw Ruthie and the Wranglers, some people from the Folklore Society of Greater Washington singing Celtic songs, and Holly Montgomery and I enjoyed them all.

North got a plate of noodles and a Thai iced tea when we first arrived and then between the second and third set, we got ice cream. As always, we saw a lot of people we knew, the mother of a preschool classmate of North’s, the younger sister of their best friend from elementary school who was working the information booth, and another elementary school friend and her mom, who were also volunteering. I would have liked to stay a little longer and hear some more international music, but North got a headache near the end of Holly Montgomery’s set so we left. Still, I was glad to be back on the familiar grounds of a local middle school listening to live music for the first time in years. When we saw Leila and her mom Shaneena, we talked about how this year life is really starting to feel normal. More than a recovered coin purse or free concert tickets, that may be the luckiest thing about right now.

The Next Chapter

Posted on September 3, 2022 by Steph

[Show as slideshow]

It was a big week around here. North started eleventh grade on Monday and Noah boarded the first of three planes that would take him to Queensland on Friday evening. As I write on Saturday morning, he’s on the second one, from Los Angeles to Sydney.

Back to School

Beth thought North would wear eyeliner on the first day of school because they’ve only been allowed to wear eye makeup since they turned sixteen last spring, and it was a big deal to them at the time, but they said they didn’t want to get up any earlier than they were already, plus they didn’t want to “set expectations too high” right off the bat. (It was Thursday before they wore any makeup to school.)

North didn’t have too much to report when they came home other than that their painting teacher was the only one to ask for students’ pronouns (the English teacher asked on a subsequent day) and based on a story about his glory days playing high school football, they think their AP World History teacher is going to be full of boring stories.

More information trickled out over the course of the week: They’ve switched from taking Spanish to French, and they can now say, “I prefer cats,” when asked if they like cats or dogs better. They had to research different kinds of computers based on buyer specifications for their tech class. AP World History started off with a geography unit and then moved on to the Song dynasty in China. Their AP Lit class is mostly seniors (because they chose to take it before AP Comp instead of the other way around). They had to pick three celestial objects to research for a poster in Astronomy and they went with dwarf planets, moons, and black holes. The fall play is going to be Clue. They’re auditioning for a part, and they’ve also applied to be costumes manager, so we’ll see which they end up doing. (If they get an ensemble part, they may do both.) They’ve also applied to be a play reviewer (for plays at other high schools). They say only about a quarter of kids are still masking and when I asked if that was enough for them not to feel self-conscious, they said yes.

To a Land Down Under

Meanwhile, Noah continued to tie up loose ends for his trip. He got the letter he needed to take meds into Australia on Monday, four days before his departure. (Speaking of letters from doctors, the letter North needed to take their meds to camp arrived a few days after they got back from camp. I’m glad it wasn’t the other way around because I think customs would be less likely to bend the rules than North’s camp.) Beth got him some Australian cash. The bills are made of flexible plastic and feel strange in your hand if you’re used to paper money. He got his hair cut on Wednesday and he wasn’t happy with it because it was shorter than he wanted. Independently of each other, Beth and I both said it wasn’t as bad as the shortest haircut he ever had (in eighth grade). Apparently, that’s the benchmark.

Between Tuesday and Thursday, in different combinations of people, we got halfway through season 5 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (our revised goal for the summer), finished season 6 of Blackish and season 2 of The Strain. Any show that anyone was watching in a group that did not include Noah was put on hold while we made progress though shows he was watching. He and I finished reading Sourcery (from the Discworld series) on Friday morning. It was the eighth novel we read this summer, all of them fantasy, science fiction, fantasy-adjacent (Terry Pratchett), or science fiction-adjacent (Cory Doctorow). My favorites were all three books in The Magicians trilogy, but I enjoyed everything we read. To finish Sourcery in five days, we had to read for about an hour a half a day, instead of our usual forty-five minutes to an hour, so it was a bit of a rush, but we both wanted to finish one more book.

On Thursday, Noah’s last night at home, we went out for ice cream again and he chose Ben and Jerry’s. The kids split a brownie sundae. At the patio table Beth quizzed North for their geography quiz the next day. After we got home, Noah and I watched The Strain and North read aloud from the almanac desk calendar we read from at bedtime, Noah started printing his boarding pass and other official documents.

Noah had a late afternoon flight. North had wanted to come to the airport, and we considered picking them up from their bus stop or directly from school, but in the end, we decided it would be cutting it too close, so they settled for waking him up to say goodbye (with his consent) at 6:30 when they left for school.

We read the last sixty-odd pages of Sourcery. I did one last load of laundry with his clothes in it, and he folded it. Beth and I worked, and Noah finished packing. He wanted to know if when we took his by-the-gate, back-to-school photo for college departures if we included luggage or not, so I checked my blog photo folder and the answer was there one with and one without (and no gate photo for sophomore year, because he spent that year at home). I asked how he’d prefer it and he said with, so around 2:15 we piled his luggage around him at the front gate and took his picture with it before we put it in the car. Ten minutes later we were on our way to the airport.

As Noah was checking his baggage at the international counter, the clerk wanted to see his visa and then commented that the paper Noah produced wasn’t a visa, but a letter stating a visa had been approved. Sounding doubtful, he said he’d see if that was good enough, typed on his computer, asked some questions, and after an uncomfortably long silence, told him to start loading his bags on the scale. So, that was a little nerve-wracking.

Beth and I watched Noah go through the security line, load his things on the conveyor belt, and go through the body scanner, and then he was walking away from us with his carry-ons, headed for another continent. I only teared up a little in the car on the way home. Saying goodbye at the beginning of a new school year is still hard, but it’s gotten easier each time we’ve done it. Or maybe it hasn’t sunk in yet.

Friday also marked one year since my last period, so I am officially postmenopausal. When my mom hit this milestone (also at age fifty-five), my sister told her she was a crone now and she was not pleased to hear it, though Sara just meant she had entered the age of wisdom. In the maiden/mother/crone progression, though, I feel mother is still the most relevant stage for me, as I have a kid at home, at least for a couple more years.

As if watching my eldest embark on a fourteen-time-zone journey and reaching menopause on the same day wasn’t enough, it was also the one-year anniversary of my diabetes diagnosis. My most recent bloodwork (done a couple weeks ago) was good. My 1Ac (a measure of average blood sugar over the past three months) was a smidge higher than the last test, in February, but still in the lower half of the prediabetic range. That doesn’t mean I don’t have diabetes. It just means that with medication and dietary changes, my blood sugar is the same as an unmedicated prediabetic. My nurse practitioner seemed pleased and said I should keep doing whatever I’m doing.

So, the kids and I have all started a new chapter. I’m glad North continues to be active in theater and the GSA and is taking some challenging classes. Somehow junior sounds a lot older than sophomore, doesn’t it? Suddenly we’re in the second half of high school. And Noah has jumped forward, too, launched into an international adventure and his last year of college. I am proud of both of them and I am eager to see how the year unfolds for all of us.

Perfect Week

Posted on August 30, 2022 by Steph

[Show as slideshow]

North had one week between camp and the start of the school year. They didn’t have any babysitting jobs or social engagements, though they did go to school on Thursday evening to staff a table for the GSA at the picnic to welcome incoming ninth graders and other new students. North is going to have a leadership role in the GSA this year and building membership is one of the organization’s goals. They said it was a success. They talked to a lot of people, got ten signups, and talked to a faculty member about the campaign to replace the annual powderpuff football game with something less sexist.

Creek Walk

On Wednesday afternoon, the kids and I went on a creek walk, which we do almost every summer, usually near the end. Occasionally these outings end in mishap, as when I fell and hurt my knee six years ago (it has never been quite right since then) or when Noah got fifteen bee stings last summer, which is why Beth urged us to “Be careful!” when we left shortly before three. We promised we would be.

We walked Starbucks for refreshments and then we made our way to the creek. It was quite pleasant. No one got hurt and it was nice to be in the water on a warm day. We found some deep places, where North submerged themselves almost completely by sitting on the creek bed and we walked further than I thought they’d want to, all the way to the bridge closest to our house. We would have gone under to arrive at our side of the street—it’s always kind of cool to be under the street, or I think it is—but North spied a man under the bridge who seemed to be relieving himself, so we gave him some privacy and backtracked until we came to a place that was clear enough of underbrush to get out onto the path and walk home that way. Walking in the creek always makes me nostalgic for when the kids were younger and used to pretend there were trolls under the footbridge where we typically start. Even if that sort of imaginative embellishment is in the past, I’m glad neither of them feels too old for this activity.

Hershey Park

Friday afternoon Beth and I quit work early and we all piled into the car to drive to Hershey Park for one last, quick trip of the summer. We arrived in time to check into our hotel and spend a couple hours in the park. We got pizza for dinner, rode a few rides, and everyone but me got desserts, either ice cream or in North’s case a chocolate-covered frozen banana. (I would have ice cream the next day, when I was able to space it apart from other carbs.) We got two rooms so the kids could have their own space and we could have ours. We also had a king-sized bed and a fancy shower that didn’t have a curtain or wall because it was big enough to have its own entryway. It was deluxe.

We said goodnight to the kids and told them to be ready to leave the hotel at 9:30 the next morning. The park doesn’t open until eleven, so we thought we’d do the factory tour ride at Chocolate World beforehand because it opens earlier. Beth and I went down to the hotel breakfast bar around eight, but there wasn’t a single thing I could eat, at least not in the morning when my metabolism is very reactive. The vegetarian fare was all muffins, waffles, flavored yogurt, and a couple unappealing looking apples. Beth got a little container of vanilla yogurt and some juice. We’d decided to go to a nearby grocery store in search of food, but there was a Starbucks in the parking lot so I was able to get a latte, kale and mushroom egg bites, and some string cheese, which I supplemented with some mixed nuts I’d brought with me, while Beth picked up a few items for herself at the grocery store.

We got to Chocolate World a little before ten. I expected we’d be in a very small minority of people masking indoors and we were, but it was even fewer people than I would have guessed, almost no one, even in crowded spaces where you stand near the same people for a long time (for instance in the line for the factory ride).

Shortly before eleven we left Chocolate World and got a wheelchair for North from customer service. They used one when they went to Hershey Park on a camp field trip earlier in the month and wanted one because it would be a long day of walking. They also had a pass for expedited entry on some rides, which hadn’t expired yet. We were able to accompany them and avoid the lines. The way it works is you can enter your first ride of the day without a wait and then the ride attendant writes on the pass how long you have to wait before entering another ride. It’s based on the average wait time for that ride. As North said, “you wait after instead of before.” It saves you from having to stand in line if that’s difficult for you and it also saves some time because you can use your wait time for getting to the next ride or eating or going to the bathroom.

So there were some advantages to using the chair and the pass, but also some disadvantages. It was work pushing it uphill (Beth, Noah, and I took turns) and we often had to split up and leave someone behind to watch the chair. We only did this later in the day because of what happened while the kids and I were riding the smaller of the two flume rides. We left the chair at the bottom of a staircase, and three teenage boys stole it. Beth, who was waiting outside the ride, actually saw them leave with it, and she wondered if it could be North’s, but she wasn’t sure, so she didn’t confront them. It wasn’t until we got off the ride and found it missing that we all realized what had happened. Beth texted security and they tracked down the culprits and returned the chair before our kids had even returned from their next ride.

It was a busy day. We made a list of rides we wanted to do in the morning but as the day progressed, we had to keep paring it down. I was sorry that we skipped the mine ride because it’s one Beth will do. She is the least adventurous of us at amusement parks and as of this summer I am the second least. When North was at Hershey Park during camp, they rode the Candymonium, the newest and biggest coaster in the park, which at 210 feet, is just a little taller than the biggest coaster I’ve ever ridden, the Magnum at Cedar Point. (I have not been on that coaster since I was twenty-two, for the record.) Given the fact that Noah rode the Great Bear, his first big coaster, on a band field trip in middle school makes me think that being with peers and not your parents makes you more daring when it comes to amusement park rides (and other things of course, for good and for ill).

North tried the Great Bear this year for the first time, Noah rode the Candymonium with North, and the two of them also did the bigger of the two flume rides for the first time. As the kids pointed out, it’s because they keep adding rides that we can’t find time for all our favorites in one evening and one day anymore. The kids and I also rode the Wild Mouse, the Comet, the smaller of the three wooden coasters in the park, and the Sooper Dooper Looper, the smallest looping coaster. It has just one loop, but it was one of the first looping coasters ever built, so it has historic significance. These rides are at the very edge of my own comfort zone. (After some consideration the day before about whether I didn’t want to be the kind of person who wears my tie-dyed Sooper Dooper Looper t-shirt while riding the Sooper Dooper Looper or whether that’s exactly the kind of person I wanted to be, I went with the latter.) We all rode the swings and the Ferris Wheel, which is Beth’s favorite. She took the picture of the park from up there.

We also went to the waterpark, but the lines were so long we gave up on doing a waterslide or the lazy river, but the wave pool had no line or just a short one when different members of our party arrived. It was nice to get wet, though, because by late afternoon we were all hot and tired. Beth and I took turns watching the wheelchair so everyone could go into the pool.

As we left the park, North took one last ride on the Candymonium while Beth returned the wheelchair and Noah and I did some shopping at Chocolate World. We were intending to eat dinner there, but the place we usually eat—it has several vegetable side dishes you can use to make a meal—was closed and the only option was pizza. Neither Beth nor I wanted pizza two nights in a row, so we went to Panera before hitting the road for home.

There wasn’t much traffic, so we were home by 10:15, which was good because Beth and I are usually in bed by ten and because Noah had scheduled a call about another place to live in Australia at eleven. If you’re thinking, wait, I thought he found somewhere to live, that fell through. This one is a room in a house where the owner also lives, a ten to twenty-minute walk to campus. He was offered the place on the phone and accepted, but he hasn’t paid the deposit yet, so I’m still a little nervous about it. Meanwhile he has an AirBnB booked for his first week and we’re not cancelling it quite yet, just in case.

Last Night of Summer Break

Sunday evening, after we enjoyed a nice summery dinner of barbequed tofu, fried okra, corn on the cob, and sliced tomatoes that Beth cooked, we went to Sweet Frog. We’ve always taken the kids out for ice cream (or occasionally frozen yogurt) on the night before school starts. It’s something my mom used to do for me and my sister and the tradition continues.

I finished first, having taken a relatively small amount of soft serve from the dispenser. I got up and walked up and down the block because I was short on steps, and when I returned Beth got up and did something similar because she was short on activity minutes. When she returned, she showed us that her Apple watch told her she’d had “a perfect week.” I’m not sure North would agree that a week brought their summer break to an end was a perfect one, plus we weren’t at the beach, but we were all together after a week split up into three groups and on the cusp of a longer separation from Noah, and we got to enjoy natural and not so natural amusements, so I’d say it was pretty near perfect.

Home Again, Home Again

Posted on August 22, 2022 by Steph

[Show as slideshow]

The week after our beach trip North was at camp and Beth was staying at her mom’s house in Wheeling while attending a convention in Pittsburgh, so Noah and I were on our own.

Beth and North left on Sunday morning. I was tired because I hadn’t slept well and a little melancholy to have gone from a group of eight to two in the space of twenty-four hours. But I managed to occupy myself. I went to the farmers’ market, tended to load after load of trip laundry (there were four total), and spent a long time reading the Sunday paper. Noah and I read A Desolation Called Peace and watched The Strain, as we did almost every day. (Later in the week we also watched Midsommar and The Babadook.)

Monday I got back to work, outlining some web copy for a supplement company, and took advantage of the cool weather to weed the Black-Eyed Susan patch in our front yard, making a bouquet with the flowers I pulled up accidentally. The weather was relatively cool from the weekend through Thursday, which was a welcome relief from the two weeks of miserably hot and humid weather we had before leaving for the beach.

Heatwave flashbacks: One day in late July Beth and I went to the pool but after just ten laps in the tepid water, I gave up on exercise and decided to sit in the shade in my damp bathing suit and read instead. Another day I found myself exhausted by a thirty-minute walk, which is on the short side for me. We found refuge from the heat in various ways. Beth and North went camping one weekend in the Catoctin mountains and the kids and I went to see Nope in an air-conditioned theater.

Sometimes I have a hard time knowing what to cook when Beth’s out of town, but we brought a lot of vegetables back from the beach, because we were driving and had a cooler while everyone else was flying, and some of these vegetables were nearing the end of their useful life, so I focused on those. I made tomato-dill soup on Monday with two going-soft tomatoes and dill from a plant that went wild while we were gone, a veggie stir-fry on Tuesday, and an assortment of raw and steamed vegetables with Sara and Dave’s peanut sauce on Wednesday. We had abundant leftovers of all those meals—apparently I don’t know how to cook for two– so we ate some of those on Thursday and we got pizza on Friday and ate still more leftovers on Saturday.

Meanwhile, Noah was occupied with finding an apartment and other matters he needed to attend to before he leaves for Australia in a week and a half. There have been a lot of bureaucratic difficulties he’s had to navigate this summer, more than I remember having to deal with when I studied abroad in college. Here are a few:

Class registration opened the last week in July but he couldn’t get the online system to recognize that he had a valid visa (even though he did) so it was a week and a half before he got registered. Luckily, none of the classes he wanted were full when he finally broke through the impasse.
That same week in July he located and submitted an application for an apartment, which was supposed to be binding, and that potential commitment stopped him from looking for another place for a long time but he didn’t hear back and he didn’t hear back, so he started looking again last week. He interviewed for two apartments (one in a location convenient to campus, the other less so). These interviews took place on the phone at crazy tines (ten p.m. and midnight respectively) because of the fourteen-hour time difference. On a message board he also found two other international students, one from Germany and one from Norway, who are also looking for housing in the same city. They agreed to look for a place they could share while also pursuing individual leads. Then the German got into campus housing off the waitlist (a list Noah is also on) so I was glad to hear there is movement on that list, because a dorm room would be simpler, since he will only be there for three and a half months and the minimum rental period seems to be six months. Then on Sunday morning he told me that the upshot of his midnight interview the night before was that he was offered the less conveniently located apartment with five days to decide while he waits to hear back about the more conveniently located one (or to see if he gets a dorm room off the waitlist). So nothing is nailed down yet, but we all feel a lot better about his housing prospects.
Finally, still he needs to get a letter from his psychiatrist stating he has a prescription for his ADHD meds in order to be allowed to bring his existing supply with him. He also needed to figure out how to get those prescriptions renewed in a foreign country, which will involve securing an appointment with a psychiatrist there. He’s researching all this on his own, which really drives home that he’s an adult now.

Finally late Sunday afternoon, a week after they’d left, Beth and North returned. That morning I went to the farmers’ market again to get peaches and in the afternoon I made a cobbler to welcome them home. I adjusted my usual recipe, subbing almond flour for half of the whole-wheat to reduce carbs. It didn’t come out the way I hoped, but everyone ate it when I told them they didn’t have to, so I guess it wasn’t too bad. When Beth and North went camping in July I welcomed them home with an (almost) no-sugar blackberry cheesecake. I don’t bake as much as I used to, partly because North bakes so much and partly because of my diabetes, but I do like to celebrate our reunions with dessert, especially in the summer, when there’s such a bounty of fruit. That night for dinner, Noah and I also made whole-wheat spaghetti with cherry tomatoes, basil, and fresh mozzarella. It was nice to eat a meal all together.

North was full of stories about camp. The sixteen- and seventeen-year-old kids are in a different group than the regular campers. They go on a lot of field trips—to visit a museum about Amish culture, do goat yoga (which North says is “cheering”), go Hershey Park (where North rode the biggest coaster in the park) and an escape room complex (where the group managed to escape from both rooms they tried) and go shopping at a mall (North came home with a lot of earrings). But they also participated in leadership seminars where they learned skills such as how to facilitate a meeting. They also did normal camp things like attending the all-camp campfire, swimming, and making a tie-dye pillowcase.

Beth spent her time away working first at her mom’s house in Wheeling and then at the Netroots Nation convention in Pittsburgh, but she found time to hang out with an old friend, too. (She took the sunset picture in Wheeling.)

Finally, I have good news and very sad news. For everyone who had well wishes for my cousin’s daughter Annabelle, thank you. She came off the ventilator a week ago today and is home and well. But my mom’s boyfriend Jon, who was also hospitalized while we were at the beach and was supposed to be released last Tuesday, took a turn for the worse and by Wednesday he was in the ICU with a bacterial infection, viral encephalitis, and kidney failure. The doctors said he almost certainly wasn’t going to make it, so on Thursday evening, following his wishes and those of his adult children, he was moved to hospice care at home. He died early Friday morning, surrounded by his kids. My sister, brother-in-law, and niece (who moved to Davis, California last month) all traveled to Ashland to be with my mom for a few days to comfort her.

I never met Jon, but I know a little about him. He was well read, loved opera, and played the tuba. He was married twice and had two children, two stepchildren, and two grandchildren. He lived down the street from my mother and they had dinner together every night, plus breakfast on Sundays. They traveled together often, everything from a trip to the Olympic peninsula to an African safari. They were considering Mexico or Costa Rica as their next destination. My mom will miss his companionship terribly, but she said they had “four wonderful years together.” That’s no small thing.

All For The Love Of You

A Chronicle of Suburban Lesbian Family Life

Author Archives: Steph

About Steph

Where They Are, Part 2

Where They Are

October Outings

All The Very Best Cat Things

Oregon Equinox

2.5, or Mostly Normal: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 76

Lucky

The Next Chapter

Perfect Week

Home Again, Home Again