Category Archives: Anniversaries, Birthdays and Half-Birthdays

Thankful

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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 51st” 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

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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

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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:

  1. Cherry tomatoes, lettuce, kale, basil, chives, and mint from the garden
  2. Thirty-six years of togetherness
  3. Tickets to see Willie Nelson
  4. Two buckets of berries
  5. Partial pain relief for North
  6. An almost completed internship
  7. 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:

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

What have you reaped this July?

Investigations and Celebrations

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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.

22

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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

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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.

Winter One Acts

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

Theater

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

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

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

Game Nights

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

Therapy

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

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

Anniversary

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

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

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

More Baking

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

Media Binges

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

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

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

Goodbye

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

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

Oregon Equinox

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

Friday: Arrival

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weekend: Settling In

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday to Thursday: A New Routine

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meanwhile, At Home

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thursday to Friday: Departure

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everything That Came After

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We’ve been home from the beach now for almost two weeks and while I can’t say we’ve had as much fun as we did there, life here is not devoid of fun. Here’s what we’ve been up to recently:

Week 1

The weekend we got back, the kids and I watched the last two episodes of Stranger Things. Noah refused to watch it at the beach because he considered the resolution on the television there subpar and as a student of media, he takes the visual elements of entertainment seriously, at least for some shows. It was worth the wait. I mean, that last episode… Wow. Now we just have to wait another two to three years for the next season.

That Sunday, North and Ranvita had a picnic dinner/stargazing date. North made a peach-blueberry galette for the picnic (and we got to eat the leftovers). North and Ranvita been dating for several months now, but I only just received permission to mention that. I also learned recently in a very interesting conversation that in between North’s sixth-grade boyfriend Xavier and Ranvita, there have been three other romantic relationships I didn’t know about at the time. Beth and I had guessed one of them was an unrequited crush (“because she seemed to make you so unhappy,” I said when North told me and North said “She did make me unhappy.”) The other two just flew under our radar, including a relationship that lasted more than a year and a half, without us realizing the girl in question was more than a friend. They’re still friends, as it ended amicably.

The next Monday was 7/11, so Noah partook of a free Slurpee from 7-Eleven. He had to go alone, though, because I wouldn’t have minded the walk, but didn’t want the sugar, and North wouldn’t have minded the sugar but didn’t want the walk.

That Friday it was the thirty-fifth anniversary of Beth’s and my first date, which we celebrate in addition to our wedding anniversary. I’d spent the week we were at the beach thinking about what to get her and I considered several options but when she told me she’d been to the bookstore to see if they still had t-shirts that say “Let Summer Begin” to replace a favorite of hers that’s getting a hole and that she hadn’t seen one in her size on the rack, I decided to go back and enquire if there were any in storage. The answer was no, but since Beth’s had this shirt for years and they’re still carrying it, it seemed possible they might restock before we go to the beach again in August, so I got her a gift certificate she can use if they do and for something else if they don’t. In a funny coincidence, she got me a t-shirt, too. I’d mentioned back in June that I don’t have enough gay t-shirts so she got me a purple one with the rooster that’s the symbol of Takoma Park, surrounded by the colors of the progress pride flag, arranged into a color wheel-type design.

We went out for pizza that night, sans kids. (They had Little Caesar’s delivered to the house.) We got a caprese salad, a vegetarian sausage and mushroom pizza, and gelato and ate it at a table tucked into in the alley next to the restaurant. I had two pieces of pizza and considering how my glucose monitor runs low, I probably went out range on that plus the gelato, but it was considered decision. I decided I wanted to just have what I wanted and except for a lemonade (I couldn’t quite go there), I did just that. I have no regrets.

While we were out, North was at their first babysitting job of the summer, for a two-month old baby girl. They sat for her again yesterday—it’s looking like it might be a semi-regular thing. North seems quite smitten with the baby—“so cute!”—and happy to have a source of income.

The other thing that happened that day was that Beth bought Noah’s airline ticket to Queensland, Australia. He’s leaving the Friday before Labor Day. He still needs to find housing and register for classes, but that step made it seem much more real that he’s actually doing this. I am happy for him to have this adventure, as he’s wanted to do it for a long time and it was delayed a year by the pandemic.

Week 2

Sunday we went blueberry and blackberry picking. I wasn’t sure we’d go because it’s unusual for us to go berry picking twice in a year and we’d gone to pick strawberries in May. I’m glad we did, though, because it’s a fun family outing and we came home with two quarts of blackberries and five pounds of blueberries, plus produce, egg noodles, cheese, and treats from the farm market. I froze half the blackberries and most of the blueberries and we are working our way through the rest. I made the blueberry kuchen I make every year after berry picking on Monday night, substituting almond flour for half the flour and coconut sugar for half the sugar. It turned out a little more cakey than usual, but it was still good.

Tuesday I voted in the Maryland primary. It was the first time in a long while that I voted in person on Election Day but I didn’t get my research done in time to vote early and I didn’t get around to requesting a ballot to drop in a box, as Beth and Noah did. It was a really long ballot, with twenty-one offices to consider and for some offices you could vote for multiple people.

There was an advantage to going in person, though. It’s nice to see other voters and the poll workers and the people campaigning outside the polling place; it’s like watching the wheels of democracy turning. I told North that even though voting in the primary is more work than voting in the general (because there are actual decisions to make), it’s also more fun because the choices are generally good, and while I want the candidates I voted for to win, it will be fine if they don’t, so there’s less stress than in a general election when there’s more at stake. I anticipate the midterms, with control of both the House and the Senate in question, will be kind of agonizing.

North had applied to be a poll worker, but never heard back. I told them that at least at my polling place it looked like they weren’t short-staffed, so there probably wasn’t much need for new workers. They went to the movies with Ranvita that day instead.

On Wednesday North started the lengthy process of making focaccia (it requires multiple rises over two days) and babysat again, while Beth, Noah, and I finished season 4 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Originally I was hoping to finish two seasons this summer, but that’s looking unrealistic at our current pace, so now my goal is reaching the midpoint of season 5.

Today we ate the focaccia at dinner, with a Caprese salad. The focaccia was outstanding and it was nice to have a cold dinner, as we’re in the midst of a heat wave that’s only supposed to get worse. We might get into the triple digits on Sunday and we’re currently trying decide if that’s too hot to go to the pool, which we haven’t done all summer. (Will it be mobbed? Will the water be gross and warm? Or will it be the only thing worth doing on a day like that?) And that brings us up to date.

On our anniversary, I wrote on Facebook:

Steph Lovelady kissed a girl for the first time 35 years ago today and this morning talked with a roofer about repairs to the roof of the house where she has lived with said girl (plus kids and cats) for the past twenty years and tonight went out to dinner with her to celebrate the kiss and everything that came after.

Some of what came after is fun, like picking berries with our young adult and nearly adult children and gaining insight into their lives, and some is mundane, like talking to roofers about home repairs, but it’s all part of the life we’ve built together, day by day, over three and half decades.

Mothers’ Days: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 72

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Mother’s Day

We have a bunch of family holidays in a row the first couple weeks of May, first Noah’s birthday, then Mother’s Day, then my birthday. (Well, that was the order this year. Sometimes my birthday is before or on Mother’s Day.) Just like Noah’s birthday, it was my first Mother’s Day and my first birthday without him since before he existed. Mother’s Day could have been sad, but it wasn’t. I think I’d burned through my emotion about being separated from him on these days earlier in the week.

Noah sent gifts and asked North to wrap them and he texted me and Beth his Mother’s Day greetings, so he did his filial duty. I did, too, calling my mom, and chatting for over an hour. We talked about her recent trip to Idaho for her sister’s funeral and her upcoming trip to Morocco. (I’d sent her a collection of single-serve bags of nuts, dried fruit, and other mostly healthy treats for the trip. She seemed pleased with them.)

For the most part it was a regular Sunday. Beth went grocery shopping in the morning and in the afternoon she and North attended a painting class they’re taking together. That week they were working on paintings of found objects and Beth’s painting was of a collection of objects she found while weeding our fence line, including a rubber bat from Halloween and a metal numeral seven from when we replaced our house numbers on the porch years ago. This is one of my favorites of all her artwork from this class.

While Beth and North were out of the house I read a big chunk of my book club book. For a book we’re only spending one meeting on, it’s on the long side and I didn’t start it as soon as I should have so I was glad to knock out ninety pages of it in one sitting. That would have been an almost unheard of luxury a decade ago.

It was mid-afternoon before the three of us were all awake and in the house and not hurrying to put groceries away (me) or leave the house (Beth and North) so that’s when Beth and I opened presents. From North I got a cord for my reading glasses, the kind you wear around your neck, the idea being maybe I won’t lose them so often. From Noah I got a book. I asked for it because although I thought I’d already read it, I don’t own it and now that the trilogy’s complete, I wanted to start fresh. (However, when I read the whole novella in one gulp the following evening, I realized I hadn’t read it after all.) Beth got a chocolate bar and lavender soap from North and an iPad case from Noah. The gifts were nice and it’s also nice that the kids mainly handle Mother’s Day gift buying on their own now, with a small nudge from each mom on behalf of the other.

After we opened gifts, I had a little nap. In what you may be recognizing by now as a motif, as I was getting into bed I was thinking how as a mother of younger kids I would either have to time this to coincide with child’s nap or co-ordinate with Beth, but now I can just lie down on a weekend afternoon when I want. (Well, I did time it so I wouldn’t miss any of my Fitbit’s hourly step goals, so maybe I’m not as free as I thought.)

Beth made dinner, which she often does on Mother’s Day because Sunday is her cooking night. That she should do this has never seemed quite right to me, but if we’d gotten takeout she probably would have paid, so it’s hard to fete her that way, especially since I cook four to five nights a week and don’t really want to take on an extra shift on Mother’s Day either. That’s one the tricky parts of Mother’s Day for lesbian moms. Anyway, she made a nice dinner, a spicy tomato soup with vegetarian chicken and watercress, served with aged Gouda, a Spanish cheese, and crackers she made from almond flour and homemade cashew flour and I did the dishes. After dinner, we watched an episode of Severance.

So much reflection on how different the holiday is now that the kids are grown or close to it, reminded me of this Mother’s Day blog post from 2009.  Here’s the most relevant paragraph:

I feel like we haven’t really gotten the hang of Mother’s Day despite eight years of practice. The first one we didn’t expect to celebrate as mothers because Noah arrived three weeks before his late May due date. We were so overwhelmed with new motherhood we agreed to just let the day go uncelebrated. There have been years when we went out for a meal or arranged to each give the other a scheduled break, time to read or leave the house unaccompanied or take an uninterrupted bath, but other years we just seem too busy to work it in. This year was like that. While my Facebook friends were posting upbeat Mother’s Day messages I posted a cranky one about how lesbian moms and straight single moms should be issued a “Dad for the Day” to co-ordinate a day of rest for them.

After that outburst on my part Beth gave me a day off for my birthday, right after Mother’s Day. I guess she saw the writing on the wall and realized I needed it. I was a stay-at-home mom with one in elementary school and one in preschool then, so it was much appreciated.

Birthday

Back in the present, I turned fifty-five three days after Mother’s Day. Beth was going to be out of town for most of the day because she was driving up to Ithaca on a four-day trip to get Noah. His advanced cinema production class was having a showcase on Thursday and if she showed up earlier than she’d originally planned, she’d have the opportunity to see it. She was hesitant about leaving me on my birthday, and Noah was apologetic about it too, but I told her to go, we didn’t want North to miss three days of school so someone needed to stay and there was no point in both of us missing the showcase. Plus if she went I might have some idea how it went, whereas if she didn’t, Noah would probably tell me it was “good” or “fine.”

Beth was staying home until lunchtime so she could work a half day and we decided to have breakfast out at Takoma Beverage Company. Before we ate I opened my presents from her, the second two books in the Cairo Trilogy (we recently read the first one in my book club). I had a latte and poached eggs, but I also splurged on a waffle with sweetened, lemon-infused whipped cream, fresh berries and blueberry compote, and maple syrup. It was like a diabetic fever dream. I almost didn’t check my sensor until after the data for that meal expired, but I faced the music and it wasn’t bad at all, probably because between walking home from the restaurant and working in the yard I was on my feet for almost two and a half hours straight after breakfast. (Also, in addition to the protein I paired it with at the restaurant, I had vegetarian sausage before we left home as an extra precaution.)

Anyway, what I was doing in the yard was planting daffodil bulbs, which I realize you’re supposed to do in the fall, but I had bucket full of them a neighbor had discarded with the greens still attached, and presumably still photosynthesizing, plus more Beth dug up from our back yard a year ago and I’d forgotten to relocate in the fall and might forget again if I didn’t get them in the ground now. I’m not sure how many of the ones that were out of the ground for so long are still alive, but almost half of them put out little exploratory leaves this spring even with no roots in the ground, so I think some of them should flower next year. I made a nice long row of them along the front and side fence, over the course of three days.

After lunch Beth hit the road and I did a little work on web copy for a greens powder and a sugar-free dark chocolate bar. Then I read a few chapters of The Picture of Dorian Gray, which I’d started reading before all my birthday books arrived because North is reading it for their English class and that put me in the mood for it. In my birthday stack I now had the books Beth gave me and two more my mother sent—Piranesi and Sometimes You Have to Lie, which is a biography of Louise Fitzhugh, author of Harriet the Spy.

When North got home from school, I opened their present, a jar of hazelnut-pistachio butter. I’d asked for interesting nut butters and I think that qualifies. I also opened Noah’s gift, which he’d entrusted to North. It was Gwendy’s Magic Feather, the sequel to the book he’d gotten me for Mother’s Day, which I’d already finished. North and I split a slice of lemon cake I’d picked up at the co-op because even though I wasn’t having my official birthday cake until Noah got home, I wanted a little cake on the actual day, too. That ended up having a bigger impact that the waffle, but it was a special occasion.

Noah texted me a little after six to tell me he’d finished his last assignment for the semester. Over the space of two days he’d taken an exam, given two oral presentations, and finished his film. Now all he had to do was attend the film showcase on Thursday, go to his last IT work shift on Friday, and pack up his apartment before hitting the road with Beth on Saturday. His text made his return seem closer.

A few days earlier North had volunteered to make dinner on my birthday, even though it wasn’t their night to cook, and asked what I wanted. What I really wanted was fettucine alfredo, but I thought about it and decided the sauce would be good enough, so I had a vegetarian chicken cutlet with homemade alfredo sauce and roasted asparagus. (North made pasta and broccoli for their own meal because they don’t care for asparagus. When it was time to eat they stuck a candle in the cutlet and lit it.)

My sister and niece called after dinner to sing me “Happy Birthday” and when the dishes were done, North and I watched the first half of The Omen. Watching a horror movie was their idea, but they let me choose, so I continue to expose them to the horror of my youth, not that I watched The Omen in 1976, as I was only nine then, but it’s set in a time I remember. Perhaps we’ll work our way up to The Exorcist.

Mother and Child Reunion

Beth and Noah arrived home three days later. In the interim, North and I finished The Omen on Thursday and went to see a presentation of four student-directed one acts at their school on Friday because several of their friends were acting in them. This event was originally scheduled for January, but after-school activities were cancelled because of omicron for a while and even though they resumed months ago for some reason it only got rescheduled last week.

The plays were for the most part impressively well written and well-acted. Because two of North’s preschool classmates go to their school (after attending different elementary and middle schools) and are active in theater, I was able to chat with some parents I hadn’t seen in quite a while. Afterward, North and I went out for pizza and ate it al fresco. It was a fun outing.

I was just starting to make dinner the next evening when Beth and Noah pulled into the driveway. I saw the car from the kitchen window and met them in the driveway. Even though Noah’s not tall, he is for our family, in which everyone else ranges from five one to five four, so I often think he’s grown when I first see him after a couple months apart. Or maybe it’s just his new maturity. After all, when I last saw him, he was only twenty.

We unloaded the car and he asked if he should help cook because it was Saturday and that’s his cooking night when he’s home. Never one to turn down help, I said sure. I was making an egg and asparagus salad because he’s fond of asparagus if not egg (I left it out of his helping and gave him some tofu cubes instead) and we served it with the sunflower seed-studded sourdough rye bread we got at Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, which had been in the freezer waiting for his return since last month because good bread is one of his favorite things to eat.

After dinner we watched his film. North and Zoë, who was sleeping over, wandered into the living room in the middle so we started it over. It was very professionally done. I noticed the actors looked a little older than college age. It turned out he never did find any Ithaca students and he hired two local actors. His crew consisted of his friend Gabriel, who also wrote the script, and a few volunteers from his film class. (He returned the favor, serving on their crews.) Beth told me that the difference between the better films and the rest was mostly in lighting and sound quality and also that the professor, who was very taciturn, praised his film and no one else’s. Of course, he’s not completely satisfied with it, and he wishes he’d had time to add some music, but overall I think he’s pleased with the final product. I’m glad it all worked out and he didn’t have to withdraw from the class. To wrap up the evening we started season four of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I am hoping to finish at least one season before he leaves for Australia. (We don’t actually know when he’s leaving as one program he’s considering starts in July and the other in September.)

Today Noah continued to consume media with different members of the family. He watched an episode of Dr. Who with North after Zoë left and then he and I started a new book (The Desolations of Devil’s Acre, last book in the Miss Peregrine series) and a new television series (The Wheel of Time). We had our shared birthday cake after dinner. The weekend was too busy for baking, so we had a bakery cake, chocolate with cookies-and-cream frosting.

Our May celebrations of birth and motherhood are officially over, but it doesn’t feel like it because now what we’re celebrating is having everyone under one roof for a spell. Plus, we still have leftover cake.