Serial Celebrations

Posted on May 15, 2024 by Steph

Celebration #1: Birthday

“It’s a good thing you’re coming,” I said to North as we walked out the door Saturday morning. “Because I love you and I enjoy your company, but also because I might need your help.” The point of the outing was to claim my birthday reward at Starbucks, and I sometimes have trouble figuring out how to redeem stars and rewards on the app and one kid or the other has to help me.

This time it was clear what I needed to do, however, so I didn’t need help and soon North and I were enjoying our drinks and pastries. I got a latte and a cake pop. I would have gotten the birthday cake pop because I can be literal like that, but they had a new flavor I wanted to try (orange) so I went with that. North had a nibble and said they liked it better than the pineapple cake they got. I tried North’s berry-flavored bubble tea, and I thought it tasted like cotton candy.

I left North sitting outside Starbucks while I walked several blocks to the library to return The Scarlet Letter, which I had just read for book club, and then I returned. On our way home we dropped off some children’s books at a Little Free Library. I am still distributing the books the kids culled from their rooms back in March. The supply in the cardboard box in the living room is slowly dwindling. It felt like a very productive morning walk.

After lunch, Noah and I read The Interestings, and then we all enjoyed the strawberry cake with lemon frosting Beth made at my request. (I remembered the lemon frosting on North’s birthday cake and how good it was.) It was excellent as Beth’s cakes always are.

I opened a couple presents—two kinds of nut butter from my sister (pistachio and lemon-cashew-coconut) and an Oberlin hoodie from Beth. I’d been saying for about a year that when North chose a college, I would replace the rather worse-for-the-wear WVU hoodie I’d been wearing since North was in kindergarten with one from their new alma mater. (Many members of Beth’s family went to WVU, and it was a present from her mom.) Earlier in the week I’d opened a card from Beth’s mom informing me a tree was being planted in a national forrest in my name. The kids got me one big gift for my birthday and Mother’s Day combined, and I’d elected to open it the next day. My birthday is always near Mother’s Day and this year it was the day before, so my birthday was just the first act of the weekend festivities.

After presents Noah and I watched an episode of Angel and then we surrendered the television to North who needed to watch Thor Ragnarok for their mythology class. They’d missed movies in two classes while taking the AP English exam the week before and they had to complete assignments on both, so we’d all watched The Judge with them the night before. That one was for their law class. You know it’s almost the end of the year when the teachers start showing a lot of movies.

I talked to my mom on the phone, and she told me I had two gifts coming. She didn’t tell me what the first one was because she thought it would come soon, but the second one wasn’t going to arrive until late May. I had a pretty good idea she had pre-ordered the latest Stephen King because I’d asked for it. She confirmed my suspicion.

We went out to dinner at El Golfo. I had the spinach enchiladas, which is what I always get there, and Beth and I split a dish of chocolate mousse. They had a nice set up for people to take Mother’s Day photos. When Noah asked who would be in the picture, I said just Beth and me.

“Are you a mother? No, you are not,” I said, but North pointed out that without the kids we would not be mothers, so we took one without the offspring and one with them.

At home, we watched Grownish and then my sister called shortly before Beth and I went to bed. And the first celebration was a wrap.

Celebration #2: Mother’s Day

North asked us ahead of time if we’d like breakfast in bed for Mother’s Day and we decided to eat it at the table instead, but they did make us both breakfast to order. I had fried eggs, vegetarian sausage patties, strawberries, and Red Zinger tea. It was luxurious to have a meal cooked just for me.

North was going to spend the afternoon and evening at Maddie’s, so they asked if I’d like to watch Emily in Paris in the morning. It seemed a good idea since Noah and I had watched our show the day before. When Beth got back from grocery shopping, we opened our Mother’s Day presents from the kids. Beth got six dark chocolate bars in different flavors from the kids, and I got a new purple backpack. My old backpack, which I think I’ve had since I stopped carrying a diaper bag, is developing a hole in the bottom, so I’d asked for one. (The surprise was the color—I gave the kids several options.) I haven’t actually started using it because I have to clean out the old one and transfer all the things that I carry in it to the new one. It’s kind of a rat’s nest in there, so that will be a project.

The kids’ next project was to start prepping for dinner. I’d asked Noah if he could cook dinner, since Saturday is his night, but we’d gone out to dinner, so he had not cooked, and Sunday is Beth’s night, and it didn’t seem right for her to have to cook. He agreed and asked her what she’d like, as I had chosen the restaurant the night before. She requested the vegetarian crab cakes he’d made once before. (The main ingredients are chickpeas, artichokes, and hearts of palm blended and fried). North volunteered to help even though they wouldn’t be home to eat them, which was just as well because they don’t like them. As it turned out, both kids had evening plans, so Beth would fry the cakes herself and roast asparagus to go with them.

Once the dough was made and stowed in the fridge, and Noah and I had read a half a chapter of The Interestings, Beth and I left to take North to Maddie’s and Noah headed off to his weekly game night at a Panera in Rockville. I went with Beth and North because Beth and I were taking a walk in Brookside Gardens. While we were there, we saw a wedding party, many families on Mother’s Day outings, and group of geese with three adults and a half-dozen or so half-grown goslings.

We came home, relaxed a little, and then Beth finished preparing the not-crab cakes and we had what she deemed “a romantic dinner” for two, before snuggling on the couch to watch Abbott Elementary and The Big Door Prize. It was a nice end to a weekend in which I spent time with the whole family, and alone with my firstborn, my youngest, and with the woman who has been with me for every step of this motherhood journey.

Festive Friday

Posted on May 6, 2024 by Steph

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The night before Noah’s birthday North popped into his room to say good night and to wish him a happy birthday in advance, because they would not see each other on his actual birthday. North would be leaving for school before he got up. From there they would go to El’s house, from there to the prom, and from there to after-prom, and they’d be home after midnight.

North started reporting a few days before prom that their teachers kept saying they didn’t expect any of the seniors to show up at school on Friday and, surprisingly to me and Beth, there was similar sentiment on the parents’ Facebook page for North’s school, with people saying they didn’t see why prom had to be on a Friday and that they wouldn’t make their kids go to school that day. What are we not getting? Does it really take that long to get ready for prom? I wouldn’t know. I didn’t go to my prom and neither did Noah, but Beth went to hers and she seemed just as mystified. Anyway, we made North go to school, though they are angling to stay home on Senior Skip Day later this month, and we’ve said we’ll consider it.

Beth, Noah, and I are all home most weekdays, so we went about our usual business until two p.m. when we took a cake-and-presents break. The cake was chocolate with strawberry frosting, a family favorite. Beth had made it the night before. It was delicious as always. Noah opened cards with checks from both grandmothers, plus new headphones and a few books from Beth and me—Leigh Bardugo’s The Familiar, and two books from the Discworld series. Over the course of the day, he talked to my mom on the phone and his boss from his internship in Los Angeles last summer also called to wish him a happy birthday.

Several hours after opening presents we went out for pizza and gelato at Mamma Lucia, at his request, and then we came home and watched the first half of Tetris (we’d finish it the following evening). Beth said it would qualify as a movie North wouldn’t want to watch and when I told them the next day that he’d picked a movie about Tetris they didn’t look impressed. When I qualified that it was actually about the licensing of Tetris, the blank look on the face seemed to convey, “You just made it worse.” It’s more entertaining than it sounds, though.

Beth had an unexpected work crisis and had to work a little after the movie, but we weren’t up much past our bedtime. After I’d fallen asleep, though, I kept waking up, maybe because I knew North wasn’t home yet and except for Cappies’ shows, they don’t often stay out late so I’m not used to it. Then around 1:40 a.m. I could hear them in the hall outside my bedroom door impatiently trying to get Noah out of the bathroom so they could use it and go to bed. It reminded me of how the kids would often wake me arguing over bathroom access when they were little, except then it would have been several hours later, and it would be the beginning of their day and not at the end. But the upside was that I knew North was home safe.

The next morning I asked how the prom went and North said the first couple hours were fun, but it went on too long and it was too loud. Dinner was served buffet style but there wasn’t much for vegetarians, so they ended up eating rice, salad, and cheesecake. Luckily, they’d had pizza at El’s house before arriving at the prom. Apparently, even though North attended school neither of them needed even the few hours available to primp because they found time to watch Scream before leaving. Later North said that was more fun than prom, but they also liked bowling and eating funnel cake fries at after-prom.

Later Saturday North gave Noah a gadget to attach his camera to his camera strap (it was on his list), and we continued to eat the cake. By Sunday night we’d polished it off. So now our eldest is another year older and our youngest has passed another end-of-high-school milestone. In the month and a half since North turned eighteen there have been a few of those, more related to being a legal adult than finishing high school:

They voted in the Maryland primary.
They got a tattoo of a compass on their thigh.
They now call their own Lyfts and ride alone (unless it’s somewhere I need to go with them).
Depending on the appointment, they sometimes go into the doctor’s office without us.
They explored a dating app and have had three dates with someone they found there (Not El. North and El met at school and are not exclusive).

One thing eighteen year olds cannot do, however, is pet a baby goat at a school Earth Day celebration without parental permission. (This was a couple weeks back.) I signed the form, though it seemed kind of funny that I had to do it. Chances are, though, that was my last time signing a school permission form. And that in itself is a kind of milestone.

Petals and Parties

Posted on March 27, 2024 by Steph

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Tuesday: Blossom Party

The National Park Service and the Washington Post Capital Weather Gang each make a prediction for the peak bloom of the cherry blossoms every year. This year, the only day of overlap between the two predictions was North’s birthday, so we thought there was a good chance their birthday, a Saturday, would fall during peak bloom. They wanted to go see them on their birthday, after their birthday party the night before. It seemed like a good plan. But then the second week in March it was remarkably warm, over seventy degrees most days, and the blossoms reached peak bloom on the Sunday six days before North’s birthday.

The peak lasts just four to five days on average and North had already convinced me to let them stay home from school Tuesday because the juniors were taking the SAT that day and not much instruction was going to happen. So, afraid we’d miss the blooms if we waited until Saturday, I asked the kids if they’d like to come down to the Tidal Basin with me on Tuesday and they both said yes. (I tried to talk Beth into it, too, but she couldn’t take the time away from work.)

The timing was a little tricky. North had a dentist appointment in the city at 8:30 a.m. and Noah had a concert at 6:00 p.m., also in the city, so North preferred a morning visit, and Noah would have liked an afternoon one, but North also had a virtual therapy appointment at 4:00 p.m. so they needed to be back home for that, and we settled on morning. Then North invited a friend to join us and set the time to meet them at 10:45 at the Smithsonian Metro station. From there they’d go to the MLK Memorial, where Noah and I would meet them.

Beth took North to the dentist and after the appointment left them at a coffeeshop at near the Friendship Heights Metro, as they had some time to kill. Noah and I left the house at 9:35 and arrived at the Smithsonian stop at 10:25. I was thinking we’d meet North and El there instead of the memorial, but once we got above ground it was cold, in the low forties and very windy, and the zipper on my jacket was broken, so suddenly getting warm drinks seemed like a better idea than waiting for twenty minutes, so we went to Starbucks and then walked to the MLK Memorial, where North and El were waiting on a bench, surrounded by puffy pale pink petals.

We walked to the FDR Memorial and then North and El decided to stay there while Noah and I walked the perimeter of the Tidal Basin. We haven’t done the whole loop in a long time, as there was a narrow window between when North was old enough to walk that far (maybe age five) and before they developed mobility issues (around eleven). It was a nice walk. There were a lot of people, but the path wasn’t jam-packed. We saw ducks and geese on the water and the sky was partly blue. It was warmer and less windy among the trees than it had been on the streets walking from the Metro. And the trees were just perfect.

We paid our respects to Stumpy, the famous little cherry tree with a mostly hollow trunk that doesn’t look like it should be able to bloom but does every year. There’s a lesson there, I think. Sadly, Stumpy is among the over 150 trees that are slated to be cut down after the bloom is over this year because the seawall around the Tidal Basin needs to be rebuilt to prevent the frequent floods that endanger all the trees. I understand why it’s necessary, but it’s still sad. A lot of people must feel the same way because there were a lot more people than usual taking Stumpy’s picture.

We met back up with North and El and decided to have lunch at Panera. As we walked, the 12th graders talked about their college plans and compared notes on the cliques in the theater program and the Visual Arts Center (a magnet art program within North’s school that El attends). North was navigating with their phone, and it turned out the Panera they’d found was in the Ronald Reagan Building basement. We had to go through security that was tighter than some airport security—Noah and I had to remove our watches—and then the restaurant, which I thought would be in the food court, was off down a long, empty corridor, and when we finally found it Noah discovered he’d ordered ahead to the wrong Panera, so he peeled off to go get his food. He spent the rest of the afternoon at museums, killing time until his concert. He said later it was a fun day.

Meanwhile, because there were no seats at Panera, North, El and I walked (for the second time) past a big cybersecurity event in the atrium flanked by two menacing, two-story-tall robot statues, and we returned to the food court where we joined the many middle and high school tour groups in matching hoodies or windbreakers. I was tired and hungry, and it was good to eat my grilled cheese and soup. Then we splurged on ice cream before we got on the Metro and headed home.

Friday: Bowling Party

Friday morning North left for school with a container of rainbow-sprinkle blondies. The treats weren’t for their birthday, they were for El, who shares a birthday with North. (They couldn’t come to North’s party because they were having a party of their own the same night.) Our kitchen was a busy place for a few days there because in addition to normal meals and North making blondies Thursday afternoon, Beth started making North’s three-layer lavender cake with lemon frosting on Wednesday (making lavender-infused milk and lavender syrup) and continued with the different steps through Thursday (making the cake and frosting) and Friday (assembly and decoration). North asked for a cake with a lavender plant and a bee in the frosting. Didn’t it come out well?

We met North’s friends at 5:30 at Roscoe’s, where we picked up a bunch of pizzas and other food. We ate at the public picnic tables on Laurel Avenue, with North and their friends at one table and Beth, Noah, and me at another. It was a chilly, windy afternoon and Beth and I were not dressed warmly enough, so once we’d finished eating, we walked around the empty tables under the tent, frequently looping back to ours. I caught bits of the party conversation, which centered on summer plans, jobs, mutual acquaintances, classes, and the theater program at North’s school and Miles and Maddie’s school. Five out of the six kids have just finished a show at one of those schools, either as cast or crew, so they had stories to share with each other. They also talked a bit about college, as all the guests are juniors just beginning their college search and North’s at the end of theirs.

We ate cake next—the lemon frosting was so good it rivals the fresh strawberry frosting Beth often makes and the cake was nice and moist. North opened cards, including a hand-drawn one with bees and flowers that Marisa had made that Miles and Maddie signed, too. Marisa illustrated her own wrapping paper as well. North’s presents included a pair of crocheted sunflower earrings, a journal, and some contributions to their tattoo fund. When all the presents were opened, and North had read all the affectionate messages in the cards aloud, and the cake was eaten, I observed that the bowling alley was probably heated, and everyone gathered up their things and we left.

We went duckpin bowling. This form of bowling is popular in Maryland, and I remember taking Noah to a few birthday parties at these lanes when he was in elementary school (the little balls are great for kids) and then in high school he filmed a short documentary about a bowling league there. However, we are not big bowlers, and we hadn’t been there as a family since the summer North was four, on an outing they do not recall. We got another pizza and pitcher of soda that came free with the lane, and we also ordered fried pickles and tater tots. The kids made short work of the fried treats and ate most of the pizza, too. Everyone seemed to be having a good time and conversation was lively. After our two hours were up, the guests’ parents came to pick them up—Anastasia, who is the only one with a drivers’ license, and who had helped ferry guests to the bowling alley, joked that she didn’t think she’d have to wait long for her ride.

Marisa came home with us because she was sleeping over. Her older brother goes to St. Mary’s, so she and North talked about its pros and cons in the car. Beth and I went to bed soon after we got home, so I don’t know much about what they did, but I heard them making popcorn in the kitchen around one a.m. and North says they watched Bottoms. In the morning after a breakfast of bagels and fruit salad, Marisa’s dad came to get her, and the party was over. I couldn’t help but think in a gently melancholy way of all the birthday parties both kids have had in this house over the years—starting with Noah’s first birthday party—and how this was probably the last one.

Saturday: Blossom After-Party

But I didn’t have much time for nostalgic thoughts on North’s actual birthday. It was a very busy day and it started with a bang. North found out that morning that they got into Oberlin and with more aid than we expected. So now Oberlin is in the mix, much to everyone’s surprise, honestly. We will be headed to Ohio for an admitted students’ day the first week of April. Now North has heard from all six schools where they applied, and they got into five. (Only Mount Holyoke turned them down.)

Later that morning Beth and I went to an appliance store to look at induction stoves and we bought one. We’re doing a mini-kitchen renovation—we’re getting a new stove, new flooring, and a new back door. More on that in a later post perhaps.

In the early afternoon we left for our main outing of the day. We were returning to the Tidal Basin because North wanted to go on their actual birthday and because Beth hadn’t been yet. North wanted to bookend this trip with visits to Starbucks and Baskin-Robbins to collect free coffee and ice cream.

After a warm week caused the blossoms to pop early, we had a rather chilly week and that prolonged the bloom, so the timing wasn’t bad after all. It wasn’t easy getting there, though. There was a lot of traffic and we got diverted away from the road we were intending to take and had to drive over the bridge to Virginia. It was hard to get turned around back in the right direction and then we needed a bathroom break, so we stopped at National Airport, so the detour was a lengthy one.

When we finally got back to the Tidal Basin, we actually found a parking spot in one of the lots not too far from the blossoms and we walked there. There were more blossoms in the air and on the ground than there had been on Tuesday, but there were still plenty on the trees. We walked to the Jefferson Memorial and walked up the stairs to the statue. After that North wanted to rest on a bench, so the rest of us went to the FDR Memorial and then to where the food trucks and stage was. We watched some flamenco dancers and Noah got churros. It was a bit of a rushed visit because it was getting late, but any time I get to go to the Tidal Basin twice in a bloom period, I consider it a bonus.

On the way home, we stopped at Baskin Robbins, where everyone but me got ice cream—it was already six and I thought if I had some my blood sugar would not come down in time for dinner, even if we ate late. North opened some family presents we’d brought with us, a check from Beth’s mom, a pair of cherry blossom earrings, three skeins of lavender yarn, and a brown-sugar cinnamon syrup for coffee. North was pleased with everything.

Back at home Noah and I made a tater tot casserole, which was the birthday dinner North requested. Noah menu plans on Saturdays and he agreed to this dish, even though he doesn’t like vegetarian chicken or peas and he’s not even a big fan of tater tots and he ended up eating leftover pizza for dinner. The rest of us ate the casserole, which is quite good if not low carb—we made one corner of it only half-covered with tots for me. After dinner we ate leftover cake and started to watch See How They Run, which North chose, but we only had time for about half of it.

After the After Party: Sunday to Tuesday

It was just a coincidence that Beth and I undertook this nostalgia-inducing project the day after North turned eighteen, but North is in the process of clearing unwanted possessions out of their room as well as removing things they left behind in Noah’s room the last time that they switched bedrooms (in 2019), and there’s been a steady stream of dolls, stuffed animals, and books exiting both rooms.

On Sunday Beth and I sorted through the toys, and I did the books on Tuesday. I resisted the urge to keep very many toys. Other than a couple that belonged to me as a child, I only kept a rag doll that Noah was devoted to as a toddler. North is keeping a few stuffed animals, so I didn’t save any of theirs. Beth, who is less of a pack rat than me, said she was proud of me. It was a little harder to part with books, but I filled a cardboard box with kids’ books to give away, and only kept about a quarter of what North didn’t want.

We have everything sorted to go to Value Village, the fairy tree (a hollow tree near the playground where people leave trinkets), Little Free Libraries, and the art materials library (think a Little Free Library for art supplies). It will take a while to get rid of everything—I can only carry so much on my walks—but we are freeing up space in both rooms. Noah has a new bookcase he can fit in his room now that the toy box and doll crib are gone, and he’s agreed to house the Harry Potter books and the Series of Unfortunate Events books there. When the question of ultimate ownership of these tomes came up, I said whoever produces grandchildren first gets them. I try not to give the kids the impression I expect them to have kids of their own or that I am owed grandchildren. I don’t want to be that kind of mom, but after the momentous week we’ve had, I must admit the thought of reading those books again to a beloved child, however far in the future, is comforting.

You Across the Table

Posted on January 23, 2024 by Steph

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Cornbread and butterbeans and you across the table
From “Cornbread and Butterbeans” by the Carolina Chocolate Drops

Beth’s home, after nearly three weeks in Wheeling. Her brother has taken over caring for their mom. I think this was the longest we’ve been separated since I went to Spain for the fall semester of my junior year of college in 1987. We all missed her, but we got along okay. The kids pitched in with some extra chores, helping me grocery shop and shovel snow and we all spent a lot of time in Lyfts and buses going to and from extracurricular activities, stores, and medical appointments. On our anniversary, Beth sent a purple African violet to the house because we had potted violets at our commitment ceremony in 1992 instead of cut flowers. It was a sweet gesture.

Nothing as notable as the one-act performance or our anniversary happened in the second half of the time Beth was gone. The main thing she missed was seven inches of snow, after a nearly snowless winter last year. But it snowed in Wheeling, too, so she didn’t really miss it.

She took a lot of long, snowy walks in Wheeling Park, sometimes alone and sometimes with her high school friend Michelle or our college friend Stephanie, who lives in Morgantown and came to visit her.

In Takoma, the snow started with a dusting on MLK day before the big events Monday night into Tuesday morning (4.25 inches on our backyard table) and Thursday night into Friday (3 more inches). School was cancelled Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday. This means in the space of four days we blew through all our allotted snow days for the year plus one, which will have to be made up. I hope the district decides how to do so soon, because I’d like to know what the school calendar looks like next semester. I am so very tired of this whole, broken system for dealing with winter weather…but next year it won’t be my problem.

On Tuesday I divided the shoveling into three pieces. I assigned North the smallest stretch, I took the middle one, and Noah did the longest one. (We have a corner lot and a big back yard, so we have a lot of sidewalk to shovel.) After they finished shoveling, North made a snowman. It’s nice they don’t feel too old for that. On Friday, Noah shoveled the whole walk because there were indoor chores that I wanted North to do.

Thursday, the only day North had school, there was an afterschool read-through of Beauty and the Beast. They’re in the ensemble and they have a couple solo singing lines as a washerwoman. Since it’s a small part, they’re going to pitch in with costumes, too.

During this week and a half, North continued to bake, making a pan of brownies as a thank you for a friend who drove their phone back to our house after North left it in her car, and an apple crumb cake. We also continued to watch scary and/or violent movies and television shows, stuff Beth wouldn’t like—we all watched Us and The Terminator, the kids are watching a Korean zombie show, Noah and I finished the fourth and final season of The Strain (which we’ve been watching for years), the kids and I started American Horror Story, and Noah and I started Angel since we finished Buffy last month and I miss that universe. We also watched some tamer fare. We went to see Mean Girls at a theater in Silver Spring over MLK weekend (and to prepare we watched the original version at home).

Saturday I menu planned for the first week Beth would be back and made the cake for our belated anniversary celebration. It’s the cake we had at both our commitment ceremony and our legal wedding, a spice cake with a lemon glaze. Sunday the kids and I did the grocery shopping. I’d been going to the farmers’ market and co-op alone but taking them with me to the supermarket to have extra arms to carry groceries home on the bus (Noah) and for help locating items (North, who after Beth is the most familiar with the grocery store layout because they used to tag along on shopping trips with her until their early teens).

For dinner that night Noah and I made burrito bowls. It was quite the complicated endeavor, involving cooking dry black beans (which I hardly ever do any more), locating the rarely used rice cooker in the basement and figuring out how to use it, making a roasted poblano salsa for tofu sofritas, using a copycat recipe based on Chipotle’s sofritas Noah found online, and preparing many little bowls of different toppings. Beth got home a little after six, while we were still busy in the kitchen. When I heard the car, I hurried outside, slipping on the crocs I keep on the back stoop. The crocs weren’t quite up to the snow in the driveway, and we stood by the car hugging for a long time while snow melted into my socks.

We ate dinner and watched an episode of Mixedish. At the table Beth kept exclaiming how good it was to see us all. Then we had cake, and Beth said it tasted “like love.” I gave her a chocolate tasting kit that Suzanne featured in a Christmas gift post. She seemed delighted with it. In addition to a promise of new headphones (I lost a pair and broke another while she was gone), she gave me a card with rainbow stripes coming out of a heart in which she’d written:

Happy anniversary.

I will forever remember this one as the one where we were away from each other and I was full of longing for you and the life we have built together.

Love you will all my heart.

“What does it say?” North wanted to know after I’d read it, so I handed it to them, and then North gave it to Noah.

“I didn’t know it was going to be so public,” Beth protested, and now it’s even more public because I put it on the Internet. (Don’t worry. I did ask her if it was okay.)

Beth had stayed over at Michelle’s house the night before and they’d stayed up late talking, so she was exhausted and went to bed early. I got into bed to keep her company for a little while, then got up to finish the dishes and to write some of this.

Monday morning before she left for her walk, Beth suggested going away for a weekend to reconnect. I said it sounded like a good idea. We’re still thinking about where and when. That night I made almond flour cornbread and a butterbean stew with kalettes for dinner. I did this because Saturday while I was trying to menu plan and struggling to come up with ideas, I’d heard the Carolina Chocolate Drops song “Cornbread and Butterbeans” and I thought, “That sounds good.”

The first line of the song is “Cornbread and butterbeans and you across the table,” so I sang it to her and said, “Now I have all those things.”

She’s been home a couple days now, but I am still very glad to have her across the table.

Thankful

Posted on November 26, 2023 by Steph

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Before the Beach: Weekend to Tuesday

Three days before Thanksgiving, North got into the baking and pastry arts program at Johnson and Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island. This is currently their first-choice school, though they haven’t decided for sure and are keeping their options open until they hear from the rest of their schools.

When they got the notification, they were on their way home from Winter One Act auditions. North will be directing a one-act play in early January as their senior project. There was a flurry of excited texts between North, Beth, and me, but Beth had to wait a day to give North in-person congratulations because she was out of town. She’d taken a four-day trip to visit a friend in Morgantown and her mother, who was turning eighty, in Wheeling.

While Beth was gone, the rest of us watched two horror movies (A Quiet Place 2, and Lights Out), plus Noah and North started a tv series about Korean zombies, Noah attended a cast party for the Scooby Doo movie and North attended and reviewed a production of MacBeth for Cappies. Remembering all the kid-friendly dinners I used to make when the kids were little and Beth was travelling for work, I made dinners I knew would still be popular (vegetarian chicken, broccoli, and spinach fettucine with alfredo sauce one night, causing Noah to exclaim “Pasta!” because I hardly ever make it anymore, and tacos another night because that’s one of North’s favorite dinners.)

On Tuesday, North and I were busy in the kitchen. I made Beth’s birthday cake, chocolate with coffee frosting, which is the cake I most often make for her and which she’d requested this year. North made almond flour cornbread for Beth’s birthday eve dinner, and they also made pumpkin pudding because we had some leftover pumpkin puree from another project they wanted to use up.

Beth returned home Tuesday evening, later than she intended because car trouble kept her in Wheeling until late afternoon. We were all happy and a little keyed up to be re-united and because we were leaving again for the beach the following day for our annual Thanksgiving trip.

Birthday Eve: Wednesday

We arrived at the beach house around 5:15 p.m. the next day. Beth headed right back out to get some groceries, while I put away the groceries we’d brought, distributed linens to all the bedrooms, and made our bed.

We had canned chili with the cornbread for dinner. Because Beth’s birthday was on Thanksgiving this year, we’d decided to have her cake on Wednesday night to space out the festivities. We had it after dinner, but we saved the presents for the real day. We’d picked up a new numeral seven candle at a Dairy Queen on the drive to the beach because when I packed the candles from our (frequently re-used) stash, I noticed the wick on the seven looked broken. We all agreed the new one looked more like a one that a seven, and in fact when I put the photo on Facebook, someone commented “Happy 51^st” and Beth set the record straight and then I commented that she can pass for fifty-one.

After dinner, Beth and I took a walk on the boardwalk. I invited the kids to come with us, and North said, “It’s not going to be romantic?” but they didn’t come, and it was kind of romantic to be walking in the dark, just the two of us, listening to the sound of the waves crashing on the sand.

After our walk, we watched A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving and The Mayflower Voyagers, a re-telling of the Pilgrim story with Peanuts characters. This last one is kind of obscure and getting hard to find online, possibly because it’s a rather outdated, white-washed version of the story. Beth joked that “the woke mob” was conspiring to get rid of it, but we eventually found it.

Birthday/Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving was a pleasant, low-key day. I went for a solo walk on the beach in the morning and again with North after lunch. In between those walks, as soon as everyone was home and awake at the same time, Beth opened her presents. Even though she’d asked for a gift certificate for a skate shop so she could buy herself new ice skates, she seemed surprised that we’d all pitched in (with assists from my mother and sister) to get one big enough to cover the cost of the skates and not just contribute toward it. The kids and I also got her a high-end hot chocolate mix, some orange-chocolate bark, a box of chocolates, and two dark chocolate bars. (Beth is serious about chocolate.) She was very pleased with everything.

After the presents were opened, we all set to work making our main Thanksgiving dinner table decorations, turkeys made from apples, toothpicks, raisins, dried cranberries, and olives. I have been making these since I was a kid and along with a little glass turkey North bought for Beth’s birthday eight years ago and some gourds leftover from our pumpkin patch expedition, they graced our table another year. I am thankful for the continuity they represent—of family, love, and tradition.

The kids and I are reading The Golden Spoon—a murder mystery that takes place on the set of a baking competition based on The Great British Baking Show—together and I read to them for an hour in the afternoon. Late in the afternoon I laid down to rest and surprised myself by falling asleep almost at once and sleeping deeply for almost an hour. That felt luxurious.

Everyone was responsible for a cooking a dish or two for Thanksgiving dinner, so people were in and out of the kitchen all day—Beth made mashed potatoes and mushroom gravy, I did the Brussels sprouts, Noah assembled the stuffing, and North was responsible for the cranberry sauce, and basting the tofurkey roast. North also whipped cream for the pies. We had six little tarts— three pecan, two apple, and one pumpkin—mostly from the farmers’ market, to give us maximum flavor choices without buying three whole pies. The cream was surprisingly hard to find, we’d struck out at a few stores until it occurred to North that we could try ordering a cup full of heavy cream from the Starbucks around the corner from the house and it worked.

After dinner and dishes, we took a family walk on the boardwalk, my third visit to the beach or boardwalk that day, and then we initiated this year’s Christmas specials viewing with A Charlie Brown Christmas.

Black Friday

I was up early Friday morning, and when I looked at my weather app and saw the sun had only risen three minutes earlier, I decided to hurry down to the beach to see if I could catch the tail end of the sunrise. It took twenty-five minutes to get dressed and walk down there (the house was several long blocks from the beach) but when I got there, the sun was still fiery orange and there was a trail of molten gold running down the ocean and wet sand. It only lasted about five minutes, but I stayed another hour, walking and sitting and walking again, and there was still some pink lingering in the clouds when I left. I love the quality of early morning light on the beach in the late fall and early winter, the way there are shadows clearly delineated in each little depression in the sand.

I saw two dolphins making their way north and a surfer. It was a middle-aged man in a wetsuit, and he stood on the beach for a long time before he entered the water. I wondered if he was waiting for the right kind of wave or if he was trying to psych himself up to get in the cold water. Given how quickly he was in and out, I decided it was the latter, but as someone who has never been immersed in the ocean in Delaware in November (and never will be), I give him props for riding even one wave.

Back at the house, I had a small breakfast to tide me over until we went out to Egg. I am largely adjusted to having diabetes—it’s been almost two years and three months since I was diagnosed and I’ve figured out some hacks—but I still have moments of wishing I could eat things I probably shouldn’t and the pumpkin praline French toast at Egg spurs those feelings in me. I had frittata instead and watched sadly as someone at the next table ate what I really wanted.

Christmas shopping was next. When we tell people we go Christmas shopping in Rehoboth over Thanksgiving weekend, people always think we mean the outlets, but we shop downtown, which is busier than an average day, but never mobbed. It’s a very sane Black Friday shopping experience.

The kids and I hit BrowseAbout Books, the Christmas store, the tea and spice shop, Candy Kitchen, and other stores. Beth split off from us, so I don’t know where she went. I was relatively productive, and didn’t do any more shopping after lunch, opting instead for reading with the kids. In the mid-afternoon, we did our Christmas card photo shoot on the beach. On the way back to the car, even though it was cold, we picked up a pumpkin-cinnamon frozen custard and split it four ways. I was craving that flavor and I reasoned it was only going to get colder later in the day.

Our next event was the holiday sing-along and Christmas tree lighting in the early evening. As Beth was parking and the kids and I were approaching the bandstand where a chorus was singing “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas,” I commented, “It is,” gesturing at all the decorations on Rehoboth Avenue.

Once we’d met up with Beth, we moved through the crowd, relocating a few times, trying to find a space where more people were singing, and fewer people were having loud conversations that made it hard to hear the music. Beth said she thought more people used to sing at this event and I agreed. We all sang, though, “Frosty the Snowman,” “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “All I Want for Christmas,” etc. North even valiantly tried to sing “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas,” even though they don’t know many of the lyrics. (Neither do I.) Right before seven, the countdown began and then the tree lit up, its multicolored lights and big star joining the light of the moon in the night sky.

After it was over, Beth went to fetch the car while the rest of us went to Grotto to pick up the pizza, stromboli, and mozzarella sticks we’d ordered ahead of time. We all met up, drove home, and ate the food in front of the tv. That night we watched The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, Frosty the Snowman (the song got me in the mood), and Frosty Returns.

Small Business Saturday

The next morning after we checked out of the house, I did some solo shopping and took a short walk on the boardwalk and beach before we all met up for lunch. The day was cold and windy, and the beach was covered in seafoam. I saw a boy standing on the wet sand shoveling and at first, I thought he was shoveling foam. It was sand, but the foam was so deep, you could have shoveled it.

We tried a new (to us) restaurant that’s in the space where a Greene Turtle used to be. I used to eat at Greene Turtle more for the ocean view than for the food—and Beth and Noah refused to eat there—so we didn’t mind the change in ownership. Overall, it seems to be an improvement it terms of pleasing everyone, though North thought the pizza was too saucy. It was very festively decorated for Christmas, with lights, and presents suspended from the ceiling, elves sitting up on the beams, and a tree near the restrooms. But my favorite part was the Santa hats on the chair backs.

The kids and I went back to the beach after lunch so they could stand barefoot in twenty-three frigid waves. What can I say? It’s a goodbye-to-the-beach tradition. The number of waves is always the last two digits of the year. I don’t do it barefoot in the fall or winter, though. I wear rain boots. A little water went over the tops and my socks got damp and sandy, but I didn’t mind much. It just meant I got to take a little bit of the beach home with me.

Of Pageantry and Pumpkins

Posted on November 5, 2023 by Steph

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Prologue

The day after I last posted, North got their first college acceptance. It was to Aberystwyth University. That’s the one in Wales. We were not expecting to hear so soon and the date by which they have to commit or decline is at the end of January, by which point they will not have heard back from all their schools. But that’s a problem for another day. They are excited to have gotten in somewhere. Every now and then, apropos of nothing, they will announce, “I got into college!”

Meanwhile, we’ve been taking part in a lot of fun and seasonal activities, including a parade, pumpkin-carving, and two plays. This seems appropriate, as Halloween is all about spectacle. Or maybe it’s about death and little chocolate bars, I’m never sure.

Saturday: Parade & Play #1

The last Saturday of October is always the Takoma Park Halloween parade. Unfortunately, it’s also always an all-day tech rehearsal for the fall play at North’s school, so between a covid-cancelled parade in ninth grade, and tech rehearsals and other obstacles in subsequent years, North has not marched in the parade or competed in the costume contest since they were in eighth grade and went as a doll with its mouth sewn shut. Right before the parade, they were saying sadly that they had no idea the last time would be the last. Their brother competed every year the contest was held from the time he was a toddler until his senior year of high school, and they expected to do the same. Noah could have made a costume this year as he has time on his hands and the oldest age group is teen and adult and plenty of adults enter. But that’s not behavior Beth and I have modeled, so I guess I can’t complain.

The three of us who were not in tech rehearsal did attend the parade however, because it’s fun to watch. It was an unseasonably warm day (mid-eighties), so we stationed ourselves in a shady spot on with a convenient fence for leaning along Philadelphia Avenue and waited for the parade to start. It was about a half hour late in doing so, but that wasn’t a surprise. We used to see a ton of people we knew at this event, but it has dwindled over the years, and we only knew two kids, the younger sisters of a preschool classmate of North’s. The younger of the two was dressed as groceries. She had a paper grocery bag with the bottom cut out around her torso and a platform covered with food packages (a cauliflower-crust frozen pizza box being most prominent) on her head. It was a good costume. If I had been judging the contest (an empty nest goal for me) she would have been in the running.

I don’t think there were any standout, must-win-or-there-has-been-a-miscarriage-of-justice costumes this year. Some of my favorites included a girl in an elaborate, homemade peacock costume, another girl dressed as Maleficent with huge feathery black wings and curly horns, toddlers riding in wagons repurposed as a firetruck and the space shuttle, King Arthur dragging a papier-mâché stone on wheels with a sword stuck in it, and a tiny, adorable werewolf with nicely done face paint, gray fur, and a torn flannel shirt. A woman dressed as a scarecrow was walking the parade route on stilts. There were only two Barbies (one in the box and one in the pink cowgirl outfit), but a lot of skeletons, zombies, and fairies. There was also a well-executed box of French fries and a half dozen kids in the same inflatable costume that makes it look like an alien is carrying you.

At the end of the parade route, there was a local band (the Grandsons) playing while people explored an inflatable corn maze, played games, and waited to hear the results of the costume contest. Sometimes they draw this out by having each age group announced at intervals in between songs, but this year they made all the announcements during a single intermission.

It ended up being hard to tell who won because you couldn’t always see people coming up to claim their prizes from the judges as they weren’t up on a platform as they sometimes are. And though there was a big spiderweb background where the winners went to get their pictures taken, other people were using it, too, in between winners. I’m pretty sure Maleficent, the French fries, the space shuttle, cowgirl Barbie, and a different King Arthur-themed group won something, though, and exasperatingly, a Rubik’s Cube won most original in one of the age groups. (There is a Rubik’s Cube almost every year. It’s a classic, but not original.) I paid special attention to Scariest in Teen and Adult because that’s the prize North would have wanted to win. It went to a girl being swallowed by a gelatinous monster, which apparently comes from this fictional book. (I had to look it up later. I’d seen her in the community center when I ducked in to use the bathroom before prizes were announced and I’d wondered what she was.)

On the walk home we discussed Noah’s criteria for Most Original prizes (they should not be characters from a book or movie because someone else made them up and are therefore not original). I thought maybe characters were okay if execution was creative. After that I said Most Original should be homemade, though, and he insisted store-bought costumes should be disqualified in all categories— “You can’t enter a baking contest with something you got from a bakery!” he insisted, and I conceded that was a good point. Beth said she thought Cutest should be reserved for Four and Under and Five to Eight. None of us have ever been fans of that category, the kids always aimed for Scariest (North’s favorite), Most Original (Noah’s), or Funniest (good for both in a pinch). After a pause, Beth opined that “We probably take this more seriously than anyone in Takoma Park, including the staff of the Recreation Department,” who organize the event. She may be right.

That evening Beth, Noah, and I went to see a play, Scooby Doo and the Haunted Mansion, produced by several local families with teens (and one preteen) while North stayed home with a migraine. Noah had been hired to film it (and the dress rehearsal the night before) and then edit the footage. These families have been putting on a Halloween play for seven years, but this year was their big finale, as their kids are outgrowing it. We learned about this event in 2020 when, due to covid, they substituted a movie for the play (and screened it to a small, outdoor audience) and Noah helped Mike film and edit it.

Because that was the only other year we went, I didn’t quite realize how big the production would be, both in terms of set and audience. The impressive set, sprawled out across the lawn of a spacious corner lot, consisted of four rooms of the haunted house, plus the Scooby gang’s van, and a fortune teller’s house. The plot has to do with Fred inheriting a mansion that seems to be haunted by two ghosts and a werewolf. You will not be surprised to learn that all is not what it seems, and the kids and Scooby get to the bottom of it. It was good campy fun, with a lot of opportunities for the actors to ham it up. And yes, it does contain the line, “And I would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for you meddling kids!” which made the audience cheer. Speaking of the audience, it was standing room only on the sidewalk and street in front of the house. We brought camp chairs, but we would not have been able to see if we’d used them, so we stood.

Sunday to Monday: Pumpkins

We carved our pumpkins the next day. We had been holding off because we had a very warm week before Halloween, with highs in the mid-seventies to mid-eighties nearly every day, and if we’d carved the pumpkins the weekend we got them, they would have rotted. But with two days to go before Halloween, it seemed safe. We fired up the Halloween playlist, broke out the candy corn, and set to work. Beth carved the devil mask, I did the bat, Noah the cat from My Neighbor Totoro, and North the Cheshire cat. I think they turned out well. Monday morning, I roasted the pumpkin seeds from the jack-o-lanterns, netting a quart of seeds.

Tuesday: Pretending or Panhandling? (and another Pumpkin)

Over the weekend we were discussing the issue of towns that limit trick-or-treating to kids under a certain age, which can be as young as thirteen. Both my kids have gone trick-or-treating through high school, and if North had their way Noah would have gone with them this year, but he declined. North said they didn’t understand why people object to older trick-or-treaters and isn’t it better than teens going to parties and getting drunk or doing drugs?

I agree. I think it’s a good thing for kids to keep exercising their imaginations. (I admit, I do feel a little curmudgeonly when teens show up at my door in street clothes or with the barest attempt at a costume, but even so, I give out candy and keep my mouth shut because you don’t know about the kids’ abilities, or the circumstances of their lives and I would rather err on the side of generosity.) The theater director at North’s school must be of the same mind about teens trick-or-treating because Mr. S gave the cast and crew the evening off for Halloween. And what group of kids is more likely to want to dress up as something fanciful than theater kids? Anyway, rehearsal ended at 6:30 and Beth picked them up, so they were home by a little before 7:00.

About ten minutes before Beth left to fetch them, we all got busy putting candy in bowls and starting the fog machines. Our first trick-or-treaters arrived at 6:05, just as we were finishing our preparations. In addition to last-minute decorating, I was making a soup of evaporated milk, Swiss cheese, and rye breadcrumbs cooked in a pumpkin shell for dinner. (When you serve it, you scoop chunks of cooked pumpkin into it.) I often make this on or around Halloween, but North’s not a fan, so they had canned chili, which they ate ahead of the rest of us so they could start the time-consuming process of applying their makeup.

This year they went as a frozen person—not a character from Frozen, but a person who has been frozen—and it involved so much latex on their face that it took a half hour to apply. I think the eyelashes are the creepiest part. The costume was a kind of variation on the year they went as a drowned person. The frozen corpse was supposed to be their costume last year, but when they had to skip Halloween, I packed up all the materials and makeup we’d bought for it and put it away for this year, just in case. At the time, the unused costume made me terribly sad, so digging it out of the basement seemed like a redemption arc.

Speaking of costumes, we got a dispiriting number of people at the door in no costume at all, more than usual. But I gave candy to all mendicants, and everyone was polite and said, “Happy Halloween” or “Thank you,” even the toddler in the Cookie Monster costume who was so confused about what was going on that he tried to walk into the house when I opened the door. My favorite costume was probably the dolphin, even if it was store-bought. There were no elaborate homemade costumes. As always, a lot of people complimented our decorations. “You really step it up,” one preteen boy told us and another kid sad, “This is the best house so far.”

We had trick-or-treaters arriving until past nine-thirty. In between groups, we watched an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We are just past the midpoint of the last season and within striking distance of finishing, which I didn’t think we’d ever manage.

North got back home at nine with their loot and reported that a lot of people wanted to know how they did their frosty makeup. One fellow trick-or-treater told them they should be a makeup artist. (It took North an hour to get it off and their eyelashes were a little paler than usual the next day.) We did a little trading between North’s stash of candy and what we had left over from trick-or-treaters and then the kids stayed up to watch Censor. As Beth and I were going to bed, around 10:15, I said to Beth I couldn’t believe North was going to stay up late the only day of tech week they could have gone to bed early, but Beth said she understood— North had suffered through two rehearsals with a migraine to save their good meds, which they can only take twice a week, for Halloween, and they wanted to have fun. Plus, there was no school the next day.

Wednesday: Pupusas

The reason there was no school was because it was the day between first and second quarter. Knowing this, we scheduled a family therapy session in the morning. On the way home, Beth dropped North and me off at the Langley Park farmers’ market so we could get pupusas. This was a long-planned lunch date, as it was the first Wednesday North had off school this year. I thought it was a nice touch that it happened to the Day of the Dead. I wondered if there would be any acknowledgement of the holiday, as the market is largely patronized by Latino immigrants, but they tend to be Central American, rather than Mexican. We saw one child with skull face paint, but that was it.

They were giving out lottery tickets to win a basket of honey, pasta sauce, and other goodies from market vendors, but we didn’t win. A cold front has come in the day before and it was about 45 degrees, a little chilly to be eating on a bench in the shade, but it was still fun, and we picked up a latte (me) and a white hot chocolate (North) to warm us as we walked home. After we got home North took a pre-rehearsal nap, and Beth drove them to school mid-afternoon.

Thursday to Saturday: Pumpkin Again & Play #2

The next day was opening night for Lavender, the school play. North said it went well. On Friday, there was no show, but North had to attend a Cappies event at school. They were home in time for dinner, though. We had takeout pizza, watched the last half hour of Bros, which we had started a whole week earlier (North has been busy) and an episode of Mixedish.

We also had pumpkin gingerbread cupcakes with cream cheese filling and frosting for Noah’s half birthday. As half-birthday cupcakes are a tradition that we’ve observed for the kids but not the adults in the family, I always thought the kids would age out it and in fact, I’d decided that it would end after college. But Friday morning I was headed to the co-op anyway, it occurred to me it was Noah’s half birthday and as he is living in the house, it seemed odd not to buy cupcakes. So, I did. They were very good, and everyone appreciated the seasonal flavor.

On Saturday afternoon Noah and I made pumpkin ravioli from scratch. He has a pasta machine and ravioli cutting tools he hasn’t used in a while (the last time might have been three years ago, when he was home for covid). We ran into a couple of difficulties. Once we’d rolled the dough out to the middle thickness the machine can make it seemed so thin and fragile, we were afraid to change the setting to the thinnest one, so we used it as is. Because the dough was a little thicker than called for, we had leftover filling. But the biggest problem was that the dough stuck to the plates where we set the cut ravioli and when we tried to lift them, the bottoms of almost all of them tore. So, we decided to bake them rather than boil them, and they came out fine and we ate some of the leftover filling on the side. It felt like snatching culinary victory from the jaws of defeat.

After dinner, we drove to North’s school, where they had been since three o’clock, to see the play. It was written by an alumnus of the school, who only graduated last year. It takes place in a fictional European kingdom in medieval times and concerns an arranged marriage between two nobles, each of whom is hiding a same-sex relationship from the other (and everyone else). It was very well written and funny. The acting was great, and the costumes were sumptuous.

Long-time readers may remember that in middle school North was in a lot of plays, two school plays and quite a few at a local children’s theater that went out of business the summer they were thirteen. Other than drama camp performances, though, they haven’t acted in a play for over four years, so it was really good to see them up on stage again, playing a priestess, a servant, and a bear.

Their biggest scene was the first one in the play, in which they play the priestess who marries the reluctant bride and groom, joining them in “holy heterosexuality,” a line that got laughs. (They said this surprised them on opening night because they’d said the line so many times it no longer seemed funny to them.) Later they were in the background of a few scenes, either as the priestess or a kitchen servant. Finally, they were one of several actors in bear suits who chase a large group of characters through a forest in the climax.

We all enjoyed the play. During intermission, however, I embarrassed myself. In the restroom, a middle-aged woman in line told me how much she’d enjoyed North’s acting… and I had no idea who she was, so I couldn’t reciprocate with something about her child. (Unless it was a teacher, I was pretty sure it was the mother of one of North’s peers.) When I got back to my seat I scanned the program, racking my brain about whose mother she could be. I had three candidates, but the most mortifying possibility was that she was the mother of Ranvita, North’s ex-girlfriend who was playing a noblewoman in the play. (Ranvita and North broke up in May after over a year of dating.) Sure enough, after the play was over, I saw her in the lobby with Ranvita’s father, whom I did recognize. What can I say? You don’t see as much of your kids’ friends’ parents when they’re in high school, even if they’re dating. I hope she didn’t think I was holding a grudge about the breakup, because I absolutely am not.

The play runs through next weekend, and then North will get a little bit of a break until it’s time to start working on the Winter One Acts, one of which they will be directing, as their senior project. I can’t wait to see it.

July Harvest

Posted on July 23, 2023 by Steph

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

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

Weekend 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Week In Between

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

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

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

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

Weekend 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

We did not harvest:

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

What have you reaped this July?

Investigations and Celebrations

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Steph

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

Investigation #1: JWU Meeting

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

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

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

Investigation #2: Towson University Open House

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

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

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

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

Celebration #1: Birthday

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

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

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

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

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

Interlude: Before Mother’s Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

Celebration #2: Mother’s Day

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

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

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

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

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Posted on May 4, 2023 by Steph

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Boons for Their Birthday

Posted on March 26, 2023 by Steph

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

Before the Birthday: The Edge of Seventeen

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

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

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

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

“I think I do,” he said.

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

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

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

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

On the Birthday: At Seventeen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After the Birthday: When They Were Seventeen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beth agreed, “It’s not over-rated.”

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

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

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

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

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

All For The Love Of You

A Chronicle of Suburban Lesbian Family Life

Category Archives: Anniversaries, Birthdays and Half-Birthdays

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Festive Friday

Petals and Parties

You Across the Table

Thankful

Of Pageantry and Pumpkins

July Harvest

Investigations and Celebrations

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Boons for Their Birthday