First Steps

Posted on January 6, 2025 by Steph

North is back at school. While I was cooking dinner on New Year’s Eve and listening to Roseanne Cash sing “Everyone But Me,” the line “It goes by real fast” jumped out at me. I thought of the kids’ childhoods, of course, but more immediately, North’s three-week break.

The first two days we were home from the beach North was wiped out by a cold—they tested for covid, and it was negative—and they spent those days mostly in bed. By Monday they’d recovered enough to take a short walk with me to Koma and get a chai (them) and a latte (me). On Tuesday, they delivered a tin of homemade Christmas sweets to Maddie and Miles and spent most of the afternoon at the twins’ house. Then Noah and North stayed up to see in the New Year, finishing a season of Queen’s Gambit, and consuming a lot of snacks while they waited for midnight. Meanwhile, I’d caught North’s cold, and Beth and I were abed by 9:45. If I could have roused myself from the couch—where I was feeling sick and listless—I would have gone to bed earlier.

New Year’s Day: First Hike

On New Year’s Day Beth and I went on a Maryland State Parks First Day hike, as we often do. I was quiet in the car on the way to Merkle Natural Resources Management Area. I was still sick and fatigued. Also, the persistent dread I’d been feeling since the election, which lessened a little over the holidays, was settling back down around me, if anything worse than before because it was finally 2025. After hearing so much about Project 2025 for so long, the very name of the year sounds menacing and dystopian. Is that going to wear off?

But we got there, and we took the hike, and it was nice to be walking outdoors, and it lifted my spirits a little. It almost always does. The park is a Canada goose sanctuary. Some geese live there year-round, but most of them winter there from October to March. We saw a lot of geese on the drive to the parking lot and hundreds more in the fields surrounding the visitors’ center, but we didn’t see any on the actual hike, because it was mostly on a wooded trail, and they prefer water and open fields.

The ranger pointed out a beaver dam and beaver-gnawed trees and identified tree species as we walked past streams and ponds and a heap of garbage that he said was eighty to a hundred years old. There was an upside-down car, what looked like an oil tank, some appliances, something made of porcelain that might have been part of a sink or a toilet, and what I think was the torso of a rocking horse. There was also the rusted frame of a banana-seat bike, which made Beth speculate some of the trash was from after the 1940s. After the hike we went into the visitors’ center and watched turtles swimming in a tank. It was the first day I was wearing my new Fitbit, and it was novel and interesting to have something counting my steps and zone minutes again after an almost six-month break from that.

Back at home, we had a lunch of fancy cheeses, crackers, fruit, and sparkling juice. This is another New Year’s tradition for us. And I made black-eyed peas for dinner because there is no way I am skimping on luck this year.

Thursday to Sunday: First Road Trip

Thursday morning, we hit the road for Oberlin. The drive took eight and half hours and we passed the time with music and podcasts (a couple episodes of Handsome and one each of Normal Gossip and Where Should We Begin). Somewhere in Western Pennsylvania I fell asleep and when I opened my eyes the first thing that I saw was a sign that said, “Trump. Fuck Your Feelings,” so that was a rude awakening… literally.

We arrived in Oberlin around six. We dropped North’s things off at their new, possibly temporary, first-floor single room in Keep, which they requested because it was empty for Winter Term and it’s easier for them not to have to climb two flights of stairs. We helped them move some of their stuff down from their third-floor room into the first-floor room.

It’s still trippy for me to be in Keep, where I lived for a year and a half. To intensify that feeling, North’s new room used to belong to my sophomore year boyfriend, so I once spent a lot of time in it. I also spied a picture of myself North added to the “Keeple of the Past” display, a collage of photos of people who once lived in Keep. Can you spot me? The Christmas tree was still up in the lounge, and we noticed the ornaments we gave North over Thanksgiving on it.

We went out for Thai at a very festive-looking restaurant, all strung with colored lights. I got a green curry the waitress warned me was hot and she did not lie. I ate all the tofu and vegetables, but I had to leave half the broth, and it got my nose running and knocked all my congestion loose. Beth said that was good for me and maybe it was because the next day my cold was almost gone.

North came back with us to our Air BnB, took a shower, and hung out for a little while and then Beth drove them back to Keep for their first night in their new room.

Friday morning, we woke to a couple inches of snow on the ground and snow falling through the air. It wasn’t a surprise, it had been forecast, but Beth was delighted anyway (even though now she had the cold we were all passing around). We’d had flurries a few times at home and a dusting of snow over Thanksgiving weekend in Wheeling, but no accumulation anywhere we’ve been this fall and winter so far. After breakfast we walked through the snow to CVS to get a comb since Beth had forgotten hers and vitamin D and magnesium because I’d forgotten mine. Then we met up with North for warm beverages and pastry at their favorite coffeeshop in Oberlin.

We had a busy morning and early afternoon. We took North to two different grocery stores to stock up on fresh and dried fruit, olives, bagels, cream cheese, yogurt, cereal, milk, and frozen foods. Keep’s kitchen will be closed over Winter Term so North will be living there but eating in a different co-op and it seemed like a good idea to have some food on hand where they live. This was in addition to the tote bag full of instant oatmeal, hot chocolate mix, toaster pastries, and popcorn we had presented them with before we left home. I don’t think they will starve, even though their play rehearsal schedule may cause them to miss meals sometimes. After the first grocery store, it was snowing so hard there were almost white-out conditions, and we had to stop at Keep so we could wait out the squall before proceeding to the second store.

Next, we took a walk in the arboretum. I promised Beth I would not break up with her there. It’s an old joke—I once took a “yes, we are really breaking up” letter from a quite recent ex-boyfriend there to read and I broke up with two other boyfriends there in person, so it does have a break-up vibe for me, but it’s a pretty place and I do have other memories associated with it. The reservoirs were partly frozen, and the snow was lovely on the tree branches and cattails. We were all rather cold after that walk, though, so it was nice to warm up with a tasty lunch of Mexican food.

We picked up some medications that had arrived at the mail room for North. Beth and I walked a little more on campus after that, passing by Noah Hall—it wouldn’t be a trip to Oberlin without at least walking by the dorm where we met—and then we picked North up at Keep and drove the building where their first rehearsal was starting at two, and we hit the road for Wheeling.

It was sad to leave North, of course, but happy at the same time because I think they’re going to have a good Winter Term. I always loved Winter Term, being able to focus on one intensive class or project for four weeks before the spring semester. Rehearsing a play seems like a perfect project and we’ll be back in Oberlin in a month to see it performed.

The snow was heavy and blowing across the road at the beginning of the drive, but it cleared up, and we got to Wheeling around 5:15. We were staying at a hotel that night because Beth’s brother and his wife were at her mom’s house. They’d been there for Christmas and had gotten sick with norovirus and had to extend their stay because they were too sick to fly. They had since recovered and were leaving early the next morning. After Beth and John consulted with each other on the phone they decided not to visit with each other, just in case John and Abby were still contagious. Beth and I brought pizza back to the hotel room and had a quiet evening—she read, and I wrote much of this.

Saturday morning, it was quite cold, in the teens, so Beth didn’t want to go out with wet hair, and we stayed in the hotel room until it was dry. We ran some errands and then arrived at her mom’s house in the late morning. We all sat in her mom’s bedroom, and she caught us up on various members of the extended family, who was doing well and who wasn’t. It made me think how people’s lives are kind of like a microcosm of a family’s or even a nation’s life, alternating good times and bad times, always a mix of both, even as the ratio shifts.

Beth and I went to Oglebay Park to walk in the snow. When we set out the wind was blowing hard and it was so cold my face ached and I thought I’d made a mistake coming along, but it died down and then I was fine. I had on a new pair of boot socks we’d purchased that morning because my feet had been cold in the arboretum, and they helped. It was quiet in the park other than occasional honking geese. You know how smell travels farther when it’s very cold? Even when I was walking a few feet behind Beth, I could smell the cherry cough drops she was sucking.

We walked from the lodge to the mansion and around Shenck Lake and saw a big flock of geese hunkered down, motionless on a snowy hillside. Afterward we got coffee and hot chocolate in the lodge. I stared out the window watching the falling snow, still feeling pensive and a little melancholy.

When we got back, we went to visit Beth’s aunt Carole, who lives two doors down, and Carole’s son Sean, who was visiting from Ireland, and shared more news of family. Then we had a late lunch and settled in for a quiet afternoon of reading and writing and watching the falling snow.

Sunday morning, we ran some more errands and hit the road for home a little before ten. We took our time on the drive. We stopped for lunch at a café in Cumberland—where I got a cozy meal of tomato soup, grilled cheese, and chocolate-peppermint tea—and for a walk in Rocky Gap State Park. There wasn’t much snow there on the ground there, or anywhere after Cumberland, but Lake Habeeb was partly frozen. There were ducks on the water and a couple beaver-felled trees.

In the first five days of the new year, we walked in four different parks in three different states. I don’t know where the year will take us as a family or as a country, but for better or for worse, we have taken our first steps.

Welcome Christmas

Posted on December 22, 2024 by Steph

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Christmas Day is in our grasp,
So long as we have hands to clasp.
Christmas Day will always be,
Just so long as we have we.
Welcome Christmas as we stand,
Heart to heart and hand in hand.

From How the Grinch Stole Christmas

Return to the Nest

Noah came home from his week in London on the second Wednesday in December. He’d been to a concert and a play (it was a play about a play, an ill-fated production of A Christmas Carol). He visited the British Library and the British Museum, Big Ben, and the Tower of London. Beth and I went to meet him at the airport. BWI was all decked out for Christmas, “merry and bright,” I said. There was a big tree where you wait for international arrivals with flags from all the states, so Beth had to go inspect it to find the West Virginia flag. We had to wait there a while as Noah went through customs, but finally he emerged. It was the wee hours of the morning London time, but he was hungry, so we took him to eat dinner at Chipotle (we’d already eaten).

North flew home from Cleveland the next day, and we went from a week-long empty nest to a full one in the space of less than a day. I couldn’t go to the airport this time because I had book club that night—we were discussing Sir Gawain and the Green Knight—and I needed to get dinner on the table in time to leave for that. But we were able to have dinner all together. I made black bean tostadas and put red and green salsa on the table so people could make them Christmassy if they were so inclined and I put on the Roches’ We Three Kings, in an attempt to make the dinner festive. Beth had finished the outside lights a few days before North got home and we had the Christmas cards we’d received on a string in the living room, with a garland of pine rope and a string of colored light above them. We never did any more inside decorating than that. There are whole unopened boxes in the basement. I feel a little bad about that, but there’s always next year.

Second to Last Weekend Before Christmas

North had left school right after classes ended and had three short papers to write at home, for Psychology, Sociology, and Nutrition. They did one a day until they finished on Sunday, four days before the last one was due. In between finals, they found time to go to Butler’s with us on Saturday to get a Christmas tree. We took pictures of ourselves in different combinations with the 5-to-6-foot sign because we are all between five and six feet tall. Around the field were decorations made from a wagon wheel and a tractor wheel (wreaths), and piles of tires painted green to form a Christmas tree, plus wooden cutouts of penguins and gingerbread men. (At the market later, we saw a snowman made of hay bales and a wooden sleigh.) It was very festive and whimsical.

After we picked out a Frasier fir from the 7-to-8-foot section of the field, we visited the snack bar where we got hot chocolate, hot cider, and two apple hand pies to share, and then the farm market where we got smoked cheddar, pasta, and some treats (chocolate-covered cherries, candied pecans, orange-cranberry bread). I picked up ginger cookies for my friend Megan (whom I was going to see the next day), because I know she likes molasses cookies, and they looked similar. We browsed the market’s selection of ornaments, even though we’d decided we really didn’t need any more. We stayed strong and did not buy any.

I met Megan the next morning for coffee. Megan and I have been friends since her oldest and my youngest were in preschool together and we have not seen each other in ages, probably over a year. We talked for two hours and managed to touch on all eight members of our two families, and work, and the dark political times in which we find ourselves, all the important things. I felt like we could have talked another two hours.

While I was gone, Noah raked leaves for the leaf truck that was due to come the next day, Beth did a big grocery shop for the now full house and made black bean soup for dinner. Noah went out to his weekly Sunday afternoon board game group and the rest of us addressed nearly all the Christmas cards and then watched Last Exmas. We’d been watching Christmas specials (Charlie Brown, The Grinch, Frosty, and several Rankin-Bass specials) prior to this and after this, but we thought we’d watch something Noah wouldn’t mind missing. To clarify, he’s not opposed to watching bad gay and lesbian Christmas romances (and in fact he would the following weekend) but he does not feel left out if we do it without him.

Last Work Week

Beth and I were working and North’s friends from high school (who are mostly a year younger) were still in school, so during the week they had plenty of time to bake. They made an apple crumb cheesecake with homemade caramel sauce, almond butter chocolate chip cookies, and pinwheels. We got this recipe from the program at the White House Christmas tour last year and they made them, and they were a big hit. So, I found the recipe and left it at their place at the dining room table and they got the hint and made another batch.

North and I went out for coffee twice that week. They had a psychiatrist appointment one day and I met them at a coffeeshop we like near there and then another day I had to get yard waste bags at the hardware store and I hadn’t had a gingerbread latte at Starbucks even though they brought them back this year after a hiatus of several years and they were always a favorite of mine, so we walked down there together.

On Friday afternoon North met up at a mall with several of their high school friends who were fresh out of school for winter break, and they had a not-so-secret-Santa gift exchange. They drew names and then went around the mall buying presents for each other right in front of each other. North came home with a smiling plush jar of strawberry jam and a small, round stuffed T-Rex. That night we watched Season’s Greeting from Cherry Lane.

Solstice/Last Weekend Before Christmas

This weekend was really packed. We went to see an early afternoon showing of The Muppet Christmas Carol at the American Film Institute. It’s fun to see a movie like that on a big screen, with an audience laughing at the funny parts. Noah objected to the applause at the end “because the people who made the movie are not there” but despite that, it was a very satisfactory outing.

As we left, I opined to the family that the movie is “a masterpiece” and no one contradicted me.

Later that afternoon Beth made buckeyes, and Noah and I made white beans in a tomato-cream sauce with arugula for dinner and afterward we opened presents from my extended family and Beth’s mom. We do this when we’re traveling over Christmas to make room in the car and to have a little Solstice celebration. Often, it’s a little more ceremonial. We’ll light candles and I might buy cookies in snowflake or tree shapes to go with the nature theme. But we had so many sweets in the house that seemed unnecessary this year. I ate a buckeye and told Beth it was “a religious experience.”

“Well, then I’m glad I made them,” she said. We each read a poem about winter from this book. Then we called my mom and sister and niece to thank them for the gifts.

I didn’t even have time to finish the dinner dishes before it was time for our next activity. We had eight p.m. tickets for the Garden of Lights at Brookside Gardens. We didn’t spend as long wandering through the lights as we might have because North had turned their ankle earlier in the weekend and it was quite cold—in the high twenties and windy. (I will pause while my hardy Canadian readers do the temperature conversion and laugh at us.)

We got hot chocolate and funnel cake fries to warm us up before we started and then we walked along the familiar paths. It was mostly the same as always—I saw some of my favorites like the dragon that breathes fog and the frog whose throat lights up when it croaks—but there were some new displays, notably a flamboyance of flamingoes by the pond, reflected in the water. There was also a Christmas tree that for some reason was flashing its lights to the rhythm of “Don’t Stop Believing.” Later we heard “Magic” by the Cars playing. I’m honestly not sure what accounts for these musical selections, but as we left, I said the lights were “magical” and then remembering the song, started to sing it.

That night when we went to bed, I told Beth it had been the happiest day I could remember since the election. So, apparently what I need is multiple outings, a beloved story well told, poetry, pretty lights, presents, and sugar.

Sunday morning Beth made pizzelles in two flavors (vanilla and anise) and then I made gingerbread dough. I saved most of it to take with us on our travels, but I baked a few to put on a cookie plate for Becky. Becky is another family friend. We met when she was North’s Kindermusik teacher and then the music teacher at their preschool and then her daughter babysat for us, and by that point we’d become friends. I piled a plate with pinwheels, pizzelles, gingerbread, and buckeyes, while North filled a tin for their friends Maddie and Miles to deliver after Christmas. Beth, North, and I went to visit with Becky that afternoon. She was delighted to sample a buckeye and served us tea and pepparkakor, her own Christmas specialty. Her daughter Eleanor was driving home from Philadelphia for the holiday, and we hoped to see her, too, but we needed to leave before she arrived.

Beth and I took separate walks, she cooked dinner, I blogged, Noah returned from his games, and we all began packing for our drive tomorrow morning, which will take us to the beach, where we will soon be ensconced in the house where are welcoming Christmas, heart to heart and hand in hand.

Waiting for Joy

Posted on December 7, 2024 by Steph

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We’ve been home from our Thanksgiving week trip for almost a week now, but once I got back into the swing of work and chores, I never did get around to blogging about the last few days, so I thought I’d finish that before switching gears.

Black Friday

On Friday morning Beth and I lingered at the hotel long enough to have a soak in the hot tub after breakfast. It seemed it would be a waste to stay there five days and not use it. We showed up at Beth’s mom house in the late morning and took separate walks in snow flurries that persisted on and off all day and gave the day a festive feel. (The snow never did stick in Beth’s mom’s neighborhood, but when we went back to our hotel that night there was a dusting there. Wheeling is a hilly town and apparently it has microclimates.)

Most of us ate Thanksgiving leftovers for lunch and then Noah and I finished The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires and Beth went ice skating at Wheeling Park. In the mid-afternoon, Beth, North and I left to do a little Christmas shopping. We went to the Artisan Center and Centre Market. We got a few small gifts for my niece Lily-Mei, who at eleven and a half is redecorating her room in a goth theme. This turned out to be the holiday project I didn’t know I needed. Maybe because it seemed more like Halloween than Christmas it was the only gift buying that interested me (and even now it’s the only gift buying I’ve done). We got some little figurines of cats in goth outfits, a painting of a raven, and picked out a wooden statue of another raven (though by the time we returned to that store to buy it, it had closed).

We went into a vintage clothes and record shop to look for a warmer winter coat than North currently owns. Since the thin down coat that served them for a couple winters in Maryland seemed to be about right for November in Ohio, they suspected they will need something heavier for winter, but they couldn’t find anything at this store. Next, we stopped at a coffee kiosk and got a half-sweet gingerbread latte for me and chai for North and headed home.

When we got home, Beth’s mom was watching a WVU-Arizona basketball game (WVU won) and then Beth, North, and I watched an episode of Gilmore Girls. Beth went to pick up pizza for us to eat in front of Hot Frosty, which was Noah’s pick for a Hallmark-type Christmas movie. It was just what you’d expect from this kind of movie. I don’t think I need to say more.

Small Business Saturday

In the morning, Noah and I started Dracula. I taught this book for years in my horror class and I’m deeply gratified to be sharing it with him. We went out for lunch at Later Alligator. (The promise of crepes was how we enticed Noah out of the house for the first time in a few days.) I didn’t read the description of my crepe carefully enough and when it arrived, I was a little dismayed to find it had white rice in it because rice tends to spike my blood sugar and unlike a lot of other things I was eating that week, it wasn’t worth the splurge. I did my best to eat around it.

We met up with Beth’s mom for more Christmas shopping at the Schrader Environmental Center gift shop in Oglebay park. Because of the rice and because I wasn’t really in a good headspace for more Christmas shopping, I decided to take a walk in the park while everyone else shopped. Next, we proceeded to the park lodge coffeeshop for coffee and pastries. Beth and I had noticed lavender lattes there earlier in the week and they are North’s favorite, which was part of the reason we returned. (Thanks to the walk, my blood sugar was low enough so that I was able to have half a slice of gingerbread cake.)

Back at the house I did laundry and made cranberry applesauce out of our apple-turkey centerpieces and some leftover cranberries. But before dinner, we headed out to Oglebay to drive through the light show. We haven’t been to Wheeling for Thanksgiving or Christmas for a long time—this was the last time—because in recent years we’ve been going to Rehoboth for Thanksgiving and Blackwater for Christmas, so we haven’t been to the light show in nine years either, though when the kids were small we went almost every year.

I think a lot of people who live in Wheeling think of the Festival of Lights as a touristy thing, and find the traffic it attracts annoying, but I am quite fond of it. It’s been around for forty years, and I probably went for the first time in the late eighties or early nineties, so I’ve seen it grow bigger and bigger. I like seeing the old familiar lights, like the candles surrounded by poinsettias, and the newer LED displays. I only took one picture and didn’t ask Noah to take any because it’s hard to take pictures from a moving vehicle and I didn’t want ask Beth to stop the car repeatedly. I knew which one I wanted, though.

Back when North was in preschool and knew their letters but couldn’t read, they used to insist every word that started with a J was their name because their birth name started with a J. So, the year they were two and a half, when we drove through the Festival of Lights, they saw the word JOY and got very excited about seeing their name in lights, so to speak. For years afterward it became a family joke to say the sign said North’s old name. But we hadn’t been through since North changed their name and when I said, “Look, it says North,” everyone laughed.

There are several tunnels made of lights along the route, and these fixtures also inspired nostalgia. I reminisced about how the kids used to try to hold their breath in them. The tunnels are not long but when traffic is slow, which it generally is, it takes a long time to get through them. I remembered how this used to lead to conflict and tears. When they were nine and fourteen for instance, when Noah was trying to hold his breath and North wasn’t, he claimed they had “forfeited” and he had won, which made them mad. So, at the next tunnel, North retaliated by breathing as loudly as they could to torment him while he tried to hold his breath. Reminded of this tradition, of course, both of them held their breath and it took so long to get through one of the tunnels I thought they would pass out, but they didn’t. And no one cried, so I guess that’s improvement.

That night after a dinner of leftovers and cranberry applesauce, Carole came over to say goodbye because we were leaving the next morning.

Advent

Even though I am not Catholic, it always pleases me when Advent starts on December 1 and the little chocolate-dispensing calendars are accurate. This was one of those years. We didn’t buy an Advent calendar this year, but I thought of it anyway.

On Sunday we were one the road for fourteen hours, first driving North back to Oberlin, making a lunch stop there, and then driving from Oberlin home. On arriving in Oberlin, we helped North carry their luggage up to their third-floor room and they hung some ornaments they’d asked us to bring from home on the tree in the Keep lounge.

Next, we stopped at a grocery store to get them some food because meals were not starting up at Keep for another day and a half and we had brunch at a restaurant in town. Everyone but me got pancakes—sweet potato-cranberry for Noah, chocolate chip for Beth, and blueberry for North. I had a broccoli-quinoa omelet, salad, half the potatoes that came with my meal, and some hot tea, and I did not feel too deprived. I put this photo of Beth and the kids at the restaurant on Facebook and North saw it and texted me, “I like this picture where none of us are smiling and only Beth is looking at the camera.” Believe it or not it was the best of four pictures I took.

After eating we took North back to Keep and said our goodbyes. It was not nearly as hard as when we left them there in August, partly because we’re getting used to being apart but mostly because we were going to see them again in less than two weeks when they come home for winter break. (And now it’s less than a week.)

If Advent is a time of waiting for joyful things, even in dark days, it truly has begun.

To Be Grateful

Posted on November 29, 2024 by Steph

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Tuesday

Two days before Thanksgiving, on North’s first full day in Wheeling, they did schoolwork for much of the day and I worked on a long-form blog post about nootropics, as I had the day before. Beth’s aunts Susan and Carole dropped by separately. I saw Susan, but missed Carole, as I was out on a walk.

Late that afternoon we did a photo shoot for our Christmas card in Wheeling Park. I wanted to do it that day because it was going to get colder as the week progressed, though as it was it was still kind of chilly to be out without jackets in the late afternoon.

In 2016, I didn’t know what to do about the Christmas card. This is what I said about it:

A few days ago, I told Beth I was thinking of not doing a Christmas card this year. It just seemed like a lot of work and it was hard to imagine putting a smiling picture of us on the front of it or writing a cheerful letter about what we’ve been up to this past year. The annual card means more to me than to her, so I thought she might go along with the idea of taking a pass. Instead she looked surprised.

I said I wasn’t sure if it was just post-election depression and if I’d regret it later if we skipped a year. She asked if I’d thought it was too much work last year. I said no, so clearly it was post-election depression, but that the part I wasn’t sure about was whether I’d regret it or not. She gently suggested we take some pictures at the beach “just in case.” We discussed the possibility of sending a card with no letter, of taking a more pensive looking picture, of putting some political message on the card.

I’m still not sure what we’re going to do, but I think she handled it just right. If she’d said that we should do the card, I might have said it was pointless and started crying. If she’d said sure, let’s skip it this year, I probably would have cried, too, because that would mean it really was pointless.

We ended up doing cards that year. I suggested to the kids that they look pensive, and Noah did, but North didn’t. I can’t remember what we did about the letter, and I can’t find one in the folder where I keep those documents, so it’s possible we skipped it, but my filing is not impeccable and other years are missing, too.

I felt similarly about the card this year, but we couldn’t stare moodily at the ocean on this year’s card because we weren’t at the beach. Before the election, we’d planned to pose by the Christmas decorations at the lodge at Oglebay but I couldn’t imagine doing anything so cheery now. So, instead of our usual red and green color scheme, I asked everyone to dress in muted, nature-evoking colors (blues, greens, and browns) and we posed in the autumnal, less decorated landscape of Wheeling Park. They all indulged me. Beth asked jokingly, if I’d like to take the photo in the cemetery that’s adjacent to the park and the thing is, while we were standing there with the hill of graves in sight, I had actually thought of that, but I didn’t want to go that far. Plus, as North said, it would be disrespectful of the dead to use their gravestones as props.

We walked around taking pictures by various bushes and trees, some bare, some evergreen, and some with red berries or leaves. The graveyard did show up in the background of some of them. I told people to smile or not, as they chose. I alternated between small smiles and more somber expressions. Then we approached the lake with its “Danger. Thin Ice” sign and took some pictures there (for Facebook, rather than the card), as it seems to be a good representation of the outlook for 2025.

It turned out to be comforting outing, being outside with the four of us all together, joking a little in a dark sort of way. I asked North if it was nice being back with their “weird family.”

They said, “Yes. Is it nice being back with your weird kid?”

I said, “Yes.” And it was.

When we’d finished the shoot, we went to warm up with coffee, tea, and hot chocolate at the coffeehouse in the park. Then we went back to Beth’s mom’s house and North and I collaborated on an improvised vegetable soup for dinner.

Beth and I checked into a hotel that night. This was the plan all along because her mom’s condo is small for five people. But since North had arrived earlier than expected, we’d managed the night before with Beth, Noah, and me in the guest room (he was on an air bed) and North on another air bed in the living room.

Wednesday

In the breakfast room of the hotel in the morning, I entertained myself by people watching. (Beth and I went down separately because I wasn’t ready when she was.) I heard a little boy complaining that his brother had sausage, and he did not have any. His mother fetched him some sausage and then he exclaimed indignantly, “I didn’t want sausage!”

Next a college-age young man in the same party tucked a few packages of Nutella into his pocket and his father (or maybe stepfather—based on the ages of the four kids it could have been a blended family) said, “What are you doing with your life that you’re stashing Nutella?” It wasn’t said in a joking way either. He seemed to mean it. The young man, undeterred, started putting muffins into his backpack while the (step)father started to mansplain Tik-Tok to a teen girl, opining it was “all about trends.”

Eventually I tore myself away from this fascinating family and Beth and I went for an hour-long walk in Oglebay park. We checked out the site where the winter carnival is running in the afternoons and evenings. There was a tiny skating rink with artificial ice (made of plastic). Beth decided she was not interested in skating in such a small area. We looked at all the Christmas trees decorated in different themes (culinary, floral, animal-themed, patriotic, athletic, and one dedicated to the Oglebay family—iron barons who donated the grounds of the park and its mansion one hundred years ago).

Back at the lodge, we stopped for coffee, a muffin, and biscotti. It was there I heard my first Christmas music in the wild this year (an instrumental version of “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentleman”) and from then on it was full-on Christmas music, which Beth pointed out was not surprising given that the Festival of Lights is in progress.

We went back to Beth’s mom’s house and found North cleaning up from having made pie crust. We stayed long enough for Noah and me to read for a half hour (We were near the end of The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires) and then have lunch. Then Beth, the kids, and I went to see Wicked.

The situation in the theater was very strange. In the lobby, there was just one kiosk for tickets and no staff other than those selling concessions. The kiosk was serving both people who needed to buy tickets and those who had bought them online and still needed to print them. The lines for both concessions and the tickets kiosk were quite long, so we split up. The kids got popcorn, pretzel bites, and soda, and Beth stood in the ticket line. She sent me deeper into the building to go look for a ticket taker so we could find out if we really needed to print the tickets (as an email she received indicated) or if the code on Beth’s phone could be scanned, but there was no one anywhere. It turned out we could have waltzed right into the theater with no tickets, and no one would have been the wiser.

But just to be safe, Beth did wait in the line (which stopped for a while when the machine broke down—and one of the two staff people did come over then to fix it). Unbeknownst to us, Beth’s aunt Susan was attending the same screening of the same film with several of her grandkids and great grandkids in tow, so when they arrived Beth bought tickets for them, too, so they wouldn’t have to wait as long in line. Susan said Beth was “an angel.” Anyway, we did pay to see Wicked, because we are law-abiding citizens. It was fun. I recommend it.

Back at Beth’s mom’s house, North made the filling for their pie and put it in the oven, we looked over the almost forty pictures from the park and narrowed it down to three finalists, and we had Chinese takeout for dinner and then watched A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving and Mayflower Voyagers.

Thanksgiving Day

Beth and I returned to the house from our hotel around 9:20. The kids were still asleep, but her mom was watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade. Beth and I got started on the mushroom gravy and then I left her to finish it while I folded laundry in the living room while watching the parade.

Later that morning we went for a walk in a cemetery, not the one from the photo shoot, but another one. It’s a big graveyard with winding paths, tall trees, headstones, mausoleums, columns, and obelisks. I saw stones from as long ago as 1875 and as recent as this year. There are still grassy areas to fill in. I saw surnames I would not like to have (Boring) and ones I would (Seabright, not that I’d swap Lovelady for that, but it is an excellent name).

We discussed my ambivalence about what I’d like done with my body after my death. I’ve always liked graveyards, and I like the idea of loved ones visiting my grave or strangers walking by and exclaiming “What a great name” but the idea of my ashes being scattered at sea is also appealing. Of course, I said, Beth would probably rather be scattered at Blackwater. We could have our ashes mixed, she said, after we were both dead, and scattered in both places. It’s not a firm plan, but it’s a possibility. Take note, kids.

We’d been walking a while before Beth happened to mention her maternal grandparents had headstones in this cemetery, but she didn’t remember where. In a book or a movie, we would have stumbled across the graves, and I looked, but we didn’t. On the way home, we detoured to go walk to their two-story brick house. We also walked by Beth’s middle school (which was her mom’s high school back in the 60s) on the way there and from the edge of the cemetery you just barely could see the house where Beth lived during the first half or so of her childhood. I told her I liked knowing what memories I was walking by when I’m in Wheeling. We moved a lot when I was a kid, and though we’ve given our kids a childhood in one place, I have a hard time imagining what that would be like sometimes.

Back at the house we found North making caramel sauce for their apple pie, having finished the cranberry sauce. We had lunch, and Noah and I continued to read our vampire book, and Beth’s aunt Jenny came by for a visit, followed by her aunt Carole, who dropped off a pumpkin chiffon pie. We now had three kinds of pie, because Beth’s mom made a pecan pie the night before after we left for the hotel.

Beth, the kids, and I made our traditional Thanksgiving craft of turkeys made of apples, raisins, dried cranberries, green olives, and toothpicks. They grace our table every year as centerpieces, but this year Noah wanted to take them outside to photograph them. I went with him, and he asked me to arrange them to look “natural… like they’re in their habitat.” You can judge if I did a good job.

Later in the afternoon, North basted the tofurkey roast, Beth’s mom made mashed potatoes, Beth made stuffing, and Noah chopped the green beans, and I steamed them. Various people read and napped. I listened to “Alice’s Restaurant” and a playlist of songs about autumn, since it won’t be autumn for much longer.

Then we ate our feast (joined for pie later by Carole and her granddaughter Holly). Some years at Thanksgiving we go around the table and say what we are thankful for, but we don’t do it every year. I thought about it ahead of time and decided I would not initiate this activity because gratitude is currently a work in progress for me and I didn’t want to put others on the spot if anyone felt the same. I did want to have an answer, though, if asked, because I do want to be grateful. I think it’s important. Beth recently advised me not to let the incoming President take the joy out of my life and it is good advice.

At the table no one asked for examples of gratitude. Instead, Beth’s mom asked us to recount our most memorable Thanksgivings. She told us about the only year she didn’t spend in Wheeling, early in her marriage when she and Beth’s dad were living in Bluefield, WV, and the way she described it sounded a little lonely. I commiserated and mentioned how it strange it was to be in Spain the Thanksgiving I was twenty. My Thanksgiving dinner consisted of a sweet potato boiled on a hot plate in a dorm room. “That is sad,” she said.

Beth mentioned that she had a gallbladder attack, and we’ve had lice and covid on or very near Thanksgiving. Beth’s mom suggested we consider happier Thanksgivings and reminisced about the Thanksgiving Beth was one year old, and they had her birthday cake with Thanksgiving dinner. Beth said she’d be sure to tell her younger brother that their mother’s happiest Thanksgiving was before he was born. I put in that while we’d had many happy Thanksgivings with extended family on both sides, the first year we went to the beach for Thanksgiving was memorable because it was new.

But back to gratitude… If I am being honest, I have been very sad and disappointed and sometimes fearful since the election. It’s not irrational. My family includes a lesbian couple, one of whom works in the labor movement, a young adult who recently worked to elect Democratic political candidates, and another young adult who’s trans. While we are not the most endangered people—that would be immigrants—some or all of us could be in the crosshairs soon. There are some things that make me feel less terrible, though, and each one makes me grateful. Here are the ones that come to mind:

Family, especially my extraordinary wife and kids
The kittens
Nature
Good food and coffee
Books, music, movies, and tv (especially Ghosts UK right now)
All of you who will be fighting the good fight over the next several years

Get the Party Started

Posted on November 26, 2024 by Steph

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Beth turned fifty-eight the Saturday before Thanksgiving. Her birthday is usually before Thanksgiving and when it is, it’s what gets the holiday festivities underway for us. She had a busy, pleasant day. She was out of the house most of the morning and part of the afternoon. The skating rink in Downtown Silver Spring had opened for the season, so she went skating and then to pick up her birthday reward pastry at Starbucks and a large quantity of apples at the farmers’ market so North could make an apple pie for Thanksgiving, and then on series of errands.

Back at the house, I wrapped her presents and baked a cake, the one I most often make for her birthday, dark chocolate with coffee frosting. We had a video call with North in the mid-afternoon, during which North showed Beth a pair of mittens they had knitted for her, and she unwrapped gifts from Noah (a salad dressing shaker from her wish list) and me (a dark chocolate bar and a sampler pack of four Spanish cheeses).

Noah and I made vegetarian crab cakes for dinner, at her request, and then we had birthday cake and watched the last episode of season 3 of Ghosts UK. We are whizzing through this series, which we only started watching right after the election, but between several different travel plans, it will probably go onto the back burner for a while. Speaking of family travel, after we watched tv, we started to pack for our Thanksgiving trip. We are currently in Wheeling, where we are spending a week with Beth’s mom.

We left the following morning. Truth be told, I was melancholy for much of the drive, because there was time for my mind to wander and I’ve been trying to avoid letting it do that. Thankfully, though, there weren’t nearly as many Trump signs as I expected in Western Maryland, Western Pennsylvania, or West Virginia. (I’d braced myself.) The leaves were mostly past peak, but there were parts of the drive with some muted fall color left and at the higher elevations, there was snow on the ground. At a rest stop as we walked back to the car, Beth swerved off the sidewalk to step in it and then she smiled.

We arrived in Wheeling at 4:15 and after chatting with Beth’s mom, Beth, Noah, and I went for a short walk because we’d been cooped up in the car for most of the day. Some people had Christmas lights up and there were some lingering Halloween decorations, too, but I most appreciated the seasonal touch of the house with two inflatable turkeys.

Back at the house, Noah told Beth’s mom about his plans for his upcoming trip to London. (I don’t think I’ve mentioned this, but he’s taking a week-long solo trip to London in early December.) Beth made ravioli for dinner and then we watched Picnic at Hanging Rock, which I had not seen since college, but remains as artsy and atmospheric as I remembered.

North was originally supposed to join us on Wednesday, but the friend giving them a ride to a nearby town kept changing the day of their departure, first back to Tuesday and then to Monday. I was a little concerned about North missing so much class. We’d decided to have Thanksgiving in Wheeling (rather than coming for Christmas) partly because Oberlin’s Thanksgiving break is so short (they only had Thursday and Friday off) and we could reduce travel for North in what’s essentially a long weekend. But the decision was in the driver’s hands and of course, we were also happy to have more time with North. I got some texts from them about their change of plans Monday morning while I was taking a walk in Wheeling Park.

Late that afternoon, Beth and I drove to Cambridge, Ohio to pick North up at a Starbucks. Our car pulled into the lot probably less than two minutes before Levi’s car did. North emerged, we thanked him and wished him a safe drive—he was going all the way to North Carolina in one shot. We proceeded inside where North picked up one of the cranberry-coconut milk refreshers they’ve been wanting to try and a cranberry bliss bar. (There are no Starbucks within walking distance of campus, so North has been impatient to try the new items and old favorites on the holiday menu.) From there we proceeded to Taco Bell for dinner and then drove back to Wheeling, where North was reunited with their brother and grandmother and our Thanksgiving party was now complete.

Before Breakfast: A Long Hop

Posted on November 17, 2024 by Steph

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As he came down the hill, Grenfell was chuckling to himself: “Anyhow, when that first amphibious frog-toad found his water-hole dried up behind him, and jumped out to hop along till he could find another—well, he started on a long hop.”

From “Before Breakfast,” by Willa Cather

The Day After

I cried three times before breakfast the day after the election. I had not stayed up to watch the results come in. Because it was projected to be down to the wire and the last time around it was several days before we knew who was going to be President, I really didn’t expect it to be settled that night, and I didn’t see the point of losing sleep. I did watch some MSNBC coverage with Noah, for about an hour and fifteen minutes and went to bed only a little later than usual. No swing states had been called and none of the states that had been called were surprising. Still, I was a little nervous about the granular analysis of results that focused on how Harris wasn’t getting the margins expected in the counties she was winning, and how she was losing by more than expected in the counties she lost. Based on the rate at which he was putting Halloween candy away, I think Noah was nervous, too. Even so, I didn’t have too much trouble getting to sleep.

In the morning, I looked at Facebook before getting out of bed and I learned from a friend’s post what had happened. At first, I did not believe it. I thought maybe the election had not been called and maybe it was looking bad, but perhaps my friend was being hasty. I guess that was the denial part of the five stages of grief, but it only lasted a few seconds until I saw another post and another. I skipped right over bargaining. (How would that even work? With whom would I bargain?) I have felt anger. Mostly, though, in the past twelve days, I have been stuck in depression, with very little acceptance.

Beth, who got up before me, came back into the bedroom, got into bed and gave me a hug and that was when I burst into tears for the first time. The second time was when Noah emerged from his room, and I pulled him into an embrace in the hallway outside the bathroom. The third time was when North answered the text I sent shortly after getting the news. They had not stayed up either and my texts and Beth’s, read on waking, were how they found out.

The day after the election was Noah’s last day at work. From Monday through Wednesday he was working on a montage of clips from election ads his company made for female candidates that would be used to promote the firm to future clients. So, he wasn’t home when we had a video call with North that morning to touch base and share our sadness.

But North also had some good news. The day before they’d learned they had a part, one of the leads, in a student-written play. It means they will be in Oberlin over Winter Term instead of home as they had planned, because they have four weeks of daily rehearsals, starting in early January, and then the play will be performed in early February. Beth and I plan to road trip up there to see it. This was very heartening news as North was never satisfied with the roles they had in high school plays. I am so glad for them that I don’t even mind that they won’t be home for as long as we thought.

Even though before the election I had advised North not to isolate themselves and skip meals or class if things went poorly, I did not take my own advice, at least in one instance. I skipped book club on Wednesday night. In the thirteen years I have been attending this book club, I have never done that unless I had a schedule conflict, or I’d decided ahead of time I was not interested in the book. This was the third of four meetings on Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Children. I’d been to the first two, but I just couldn’t imagine talking about nineteenth-century Russian literature that night or leaving the house.

Instead, Noah, Beth, and I started a new series, Ghosts UK, which I highly recommend if you are looking for something light, funny, and distracting. It has made me laugh more reliably than anything else the past couple weeks. It doesn’t feel like exaggeration to call it a lifeline, which is a little ironic, considering it is about dead people.

The Week After

I muddled through the next few days, doing the things I was supposed to do (work, cooking, housework), operating on autopilot. On Saturday Noah and I made homemade whole-wheat pumpkin ravioli. He’d been wanting to do it for several weeks, and we never seemed to have time. If I’m being honest, I was not initially enthusiastic about the project, because we’ve done at least twice before, and I know it’s a lot of work and I just wanted to phone things in at this point. But he wanted to, and imagining what it might be like to want something someone else could give me, I wanted to do it for him. And it turned out to be kind of therapeutic, to make something difficult and to do it successfully. There are tricky parts rolling out the dough in the machine and not breaking it, and I found myself focused on that and not the potential downfall of democracy for a little while. That was a relief.

Two days later, Beth and I went to Great Falls, on the Maryland side of the park. It was Veteran’s Day so we both had the day off. We went on the theory that getting outside never hurts and sometimes helps. We walked for two hours to various overlooks, along the canal towpath, and on a trail in the woods.

Watching the rushing waters proved mesmerizing and temporarily calming, as did being in movement that long. At one of the overlooks, we watched kayakers paddle in a calm bend of the river and then venture briefly into the white water, going back and forth, occasionally overturning and then righting themselves. It didn’t seem like these forays were meant to go anywhere as they always returned to the same pool. I asked Beth what she thought they were doing, and she said they were practicing paddling in rough waters. My mind tried to make a metaphor about how that’s what we will need to do, rest in the calm waters, dart out into the turbulence, get knocked over and get back up. I told my mind to shut up. I wasn’t ready for motivational speeches, even from myself.

At one point along the trail, we saw a pay phone and as we got closer, I saw it was not operational. Most of the receiver was missing and wires protruded from it. That’s the metaphor, a sulky part of my brain tried to say, but I shushed it, too.

After a picnic lunch eaten on a fallen log, Beth suggested going out for ice cream, so we did. I got chocolate chip, because you don’t see plain chocolate chip very often anymore and it seemed retro in a comforting way. There was a neon sign in the shop that said, “Ice cream solves everything,” which Beth didn’t even notice until I pointed it out. I said I did not believe it. She said it may not, but it “gives you the fortitude” to go about solving things.

We got home and found Noah making a pear crumble. When the kitchen was free, I made eggplant parmesan. Comfort foods were on the menu all week. Beth made a cream of vegetable soup that tasted just like the inside of a pot pie. I made the eggplant for Beth because she loves it, mushroom stroganoff on mashed cauliflower for myself (it would have been on egg noodles if not for diabetes) and a vegetable-tofu stir-fry on soba for Noah (soba is a relatively safe pasta for me).

The Second Week After

Two days later, on the second Wednesday after the election, I woke and realized I had not been jolted from sleep in a panic between four and five in the morning for the first time in a week. I was aware I’d had bad dreams, but I could not remember what they were about, and it seemed like a hopeful sign to me that my brain had switched to a more symbolic form of processing, instead of sheer terror. My mind settled into the familiar early morning routine of remembering the early Trump months, or really the whole god-dammed presidency, and wondering how we could possibly do this again and probably worse this time. And then my mind said, rather firmly, we just will. And I had a flash of acceptance. It lasted about five minutes, but still…

Thursday morning, I remembered my bad dreams, which could be interpreted as another form of progress. There was one in which I was hiding in a kitchen cabinet with a bunch of mothers and children (we somehow all fit) while someone threatening, maybe soldiers, rummaged through the house looking for us. In another, I was shepherding several small children along a street that I used to walk along to get to and from my kids’ preschool and two of them ran away and I ran after them and caught them but then I realized I’d left a boy no older than two alone in the middle of the street a block away. I don’t think I need to analyze these dreams for you.

The second dream woke me up earlier than usual and I couldn’t get back to sleep, so before breakfast I completed my first set of post-election postcards. It was for a Congressional race in California that was too close to call. The postcards were directed to people whose ballots were spoiled and had not been counted, urging them to get in touch with election officials.

This might have been an inspiring end to this post, with me getting back in the saddle, but right after I finished, I looked at the newspaper on the dining room table, which I had not yet read, and discovered that after two races were settled the House had been called for the Republicans. Every branch of government—President, Senate, House, and Supreme Court—would now be in the hands of people with ill intent for at least two years and quite possibly longer.

The House race I’d been writing for did not seem so important now. I reached for the Wite-Out and covered up the optional line in the script about the whole nation waiting to see who would control the House on all fifteen cards. Then I went back to the paper and read further. Learning one of the two races that tipped the House was in California, I got a sinking feeling. I googled the postcard candidate and sure enough, it was his race. I wondered if I should even mail these postcards. I was running low on stamps, and I could probably peel them off. But I’d committed to send them and if my vote had not been counted, I think I’d want to know so I could correct it for the historical record, plus you never know when there could be a recount, so I went ahead and mailed them.

And over the weekend, I finished my book club book with the intention of going to the final meeting on Wednesday, and I completed a new set of postcards for a state Supreme Court runoff in Mississippi. I will hop to the next water hole, paddle into whitewater, try to find a phone that works, or whatever metaphor you prefer. I hope you can, too. Maybe there will be some ice cream along the way to fortify us.

Fall Break AF

Posted on October 29, 2024 by Steph

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Weekend 1

Friday

Beth and Noah and I were all in bed when North got home for fall break at eleven-thirty p.m. on Friday night. They were home earlier than we expected. They’d gotten a ride from someone they knew from their housing co-op and made surprisingly good time. I heard them come in and got up to greet them, when I discovered they had two of their fellow Obies with them. As I was only wearing a long-sleeved t-shirt and underwear I retreated to the bedroom while their friends used the bathroom, played with the kittens a bit, and left. North came into our room to give us hugs and shortly afterward they went to bed, too. They said the friends admired our copious Halloween decorations, which were only about half up at the time.

Saturday

Beth went kayaking Saturday morning, but the kids and I hung around the house all day, except for my daily walk. North and I watched an episode of Emily in Paris, and we talked a lot.

I learned North is now thinking of a double major in Theater and Psychology with the possible career goal of becoming an intimacy coordinator. They received an invitation to register for Acting 1 for the spring semester, based on the audition they sent for the fall, and they are going to audition to be in a Winter Term play. Their favorite classes are Sociology and Psychology and while they were struggling in their Spanish class earlier in the semester, they’ve brought their grade up to a B.

They are still going to Quaker meetings and volunteering at the kitten shelter where they have learned to give vaccinations to cats. They’re also active in a group that fundraises for humanitarian relief in Gaza. And of course, being in a housing and dining co-op takes up a fair amount of time.

North made a batch of pumpkin-cream cheese muffins, which was the first of several baking projects over the course of break. When the kitchen was free, Noah and I made spinach manicotti for dinner. Although Keep was a mostly but not quite vegetarian co-op when I lived there, apparently now it’s a mostly but not quite vegan co-op and North was hungry for eggs and cheese, so we planned a lot of meals with those ingredients—omelets, grilled cheese sandwiches, tacos, ravioli with alfredo sauce, and broccoli-cheddar soup. (North even turned down my offer to make breaded tofu sticks with homemade applesauce, which is one of their favorite meals, in favor of cheesier options.)

That night we watched A Ghost Story. North was sorry to hear we’d watched I Saw the TV Glow and Summoning Sylvia earlier this month, saying it was “mean” for us to watch two queer horror/horror-comedy films without them, but we’d drawn the nominated movies out of a hat (well, a bike helmet). “Blame the helmet,” I told them.

I liked the movie, but afterward North said, “I think I like movies where people talk.” (It is not a silent movie, but it is remarkably sparse on dialogue. A minor character actually gets the longest speech in the whole thing.)

Sunday

North met up with several of their friends who are still in high school for lunch. They brought four of the muffins with them and then forgot to give them to their friends, so there were more for us. That afternoon we headed out to Northern Virginia for our annual pumpkin gathering expedition.

We set off at three-thirty, listening to a Halloween playlist Noah found, all of us singing along with “Ghostbusters” as we got underway, and offering our judgments about which songs belonged or didn’t on the playlist as we went along. (Harry Belafonte’s “Banana Boat”? The Eurhythmics “Sweet Dreams?” Why?)

While we were in the car, North asked about an unfamiliar WiFi network they’d noticed in the house—Last-Name AP (the kids’ real and rare hyphenated last name I’ve decided not to include here). Someone joked it could be Last-Name AF. And then we started to discuss what was Last-Name AF. This whole outing, we decided. Why?

We have been going to the same farm stand since before the kids were born because it’s owned by the family of a friend of ours from college. Over the years we’ve added required stops to the itinerary—we’ve been eating dinner at the same restaurant since 2016 and we added two different parks during covid when we were all looking for outdoor activities. One is for strolling before dinner and the other is for eating dinner at the picnic tables.

The stand is on the original location of the farm, which relocated to cheaper land further away from the city as development encroached on it. It’s now hidden behind a tall highway sound barrier wall. You really have to know it’s there to find it. It’s also unstaffed sometimes and operating on the honor system, as of last year. This year there was another surprise—there were no jack-o-lantern-sized pumpkins! We picked out some tiny ornamental pumpkins, a pie pumpkin to use for soup, and apple cider; paid for them; and then turned our minds to the problem of finding bigger pumpkins.

North searched on their phone and found a nearby garden center that was selling pumpkins. We picked out four, took pictures at the bower of hay bales and cornstalks that I think was designed for that purpose, and picked up apple cider doughnuts and pumpkin butter.

Our next stop was Meadowlark Botanical Gardens, where we traditionally take a pre-dinner walk. It was decorated for Halloween, which was a new, fun development. We walked among the changing leaves, along the path of ghosts and ghouls (and my favorite, a skeleton in a bathtub of dirt); watched ducks, geese, and koi in the pond; and wondered why there weren’t any kids dressed up in their Homecoming outfits getting photographed, because we’ve seen that every other year. No weddings, either, though there was mother, father, and toddler girl getting professionally photographed.

We ordered dinner from Sunflower while in the park and went to pick it up, then headed to Nottoway Park to eat at the picnic tables in a grove of trees. Our timing had been thrown off by needing to go out of our way to find a new pumpkin venue so it was almost completely dark by the time we got there, but we were near a lighted playing field, so we could see our dumplings, seaweed salad, miso soup, sushi, vegetarian shrimp and noodles well enough to eat them.

It turned out to be too dark for our customary walk in the community garden plots. We tried, but we couldn’t see what flowers and vegetables were still growing in mid-October, which I always find interesting. The last stop was Toby’s for ice cream. Beth and I, independently of each other, got the same thing—one scoop of pumpkin and one of cinnamon. I recommend that combination if you find yourself in Vienna, Virginia any time soon.

North said later it was a “very satisfying” outing.

Monday through Thursday

Beth, Noah, and I went back to work on Monday. Over the course of the week, North completed an online food safety training so they can sign up for a head cook slot next semester, and they had a video call with the other food buyer at Keep so they could confer on the food order for next week, but they had a lot of free time, too.

On Monday night I asked North to consider their “television goals” and they said, “that sentence is Last-Name AF.” But there were a lot of options because we are all watching different shows in different configurations and a lot of them include North, so we haven’t watched those since they left for school. While North was home, we watched the last five episodes of season 3 of Emily in Paris (North and me), one episode near the beginning of season 6 of Gilmore Girls (North, Beth, and me), the last few episodes of season 2 of Good Omens (North and Noah), and the first four episodes of season 3 of Grownish (everybody).

In other activities, near the beginning of the week, North filled out their Ohio ballot and put it in the mail (before they returned to school, they were notified it had been received). They had Maddie over for dinner and to watch Clue on Wednesday. They baked a lot. After the muffins, they made a batch of almond butter chocolate chip cookies and a loaf of pumpkin-chocolate chip bread from the same recipe I’d used when I sent them their second care package of the year. Sadly, between poor timing on my part (it was still in the mail over the three-day Columbus Day weekend) and the vagaries of the college mail system, it took six days to reach them, and it molded. They said it had smelled good, and they wanted to try it, so they recreated it at home.

North and I went on a couple little outings. On Tuesday morning we went to the co-op to get yet another pumpkin because I’d forgotten to get an extra one to cover with metal spiders. North helped me pick out an appropriately warty one and then applied the spiders to it later in the day. (Throughout the week they helped add Halloween decorations on the porch and yard.) On the way home from the co-op, we stopped at Spring Mill Bread Company and got coffee and a lemon bar. On Wednesday we went to the Langley Park farmers’ market and got pupusas and supplemented the meal with a pink drink and apple croissant (for North) and a pumpkin chai latte (for me) from Starbucks. In a less recreational but important errand, Beth, North, and I all got flu and covid shots on Thursday morning.

Weekend 2

Friday

Friday evening, Beth, North, and I went out for pizza at Roscoe’s, which is North’s favorite place to get pizza in Takoma. We ate outside and got the marinated olives appetizer, which is also their favorite. Noah was still at work, so we got an additional pizza to bring home for him. From Roscoe’s, we went to the newish Red Hound (where Beth and I have eaten a couple times, but North never has) for soft-serve. North was intrigued because we’d told them they have interesting flavors there, just one flavor at a time. That night it was maple ice cream with optional apple cider syrup. We all got our ice cream with the syrup, and it was very good. It was a pleasant evening, so at both establishments we ate outside.

When Noah came home, we watched the first hour of Beetlejuice, but not until a long discussion about whether to have the subtitles on (North’s preference) or off (Noah’s). It was starting to get heated when Beth pulled out some of the conflict resolution tools we learned when we were in family therapy, and we ended up setting a laptop on the floor under the tv playing the same movie with the subtitles turned on so there was one screen each way. Once the movie got started, we discovered why “Banana Boat” was on that Halloween playlist we’d been playing the weekend before. It features prominently in the movie, which the kids had never seen, and Beth and I hadn’t seen since it came out in 1988. Still, the song is not spooky in itself, so we still disallow it.

Saturday

On North’s last day at home, we tried to cram as much autumnal fun as we could into one day. It started with a trip to Doc Waters Cidery to pick apples. We’ve never done this before, but it’s not much different than picking berries and we do that every year at Butler’s, which is just down the road from the cidery. (Butler’s has their own apple trees, but you’ve got to pay the rather exorbitant pumpkin festival admission to get to them when the festival is happening, so we didn’t do that.)

The main difference is that you reach up rather than down to get apples and for the high ones there’s a tool you can use to shake them loose and catch them. It looks like a lacrosse stick. The rows of trees were labelled with the variety, and we picked a few different kinds and then of course they got all mixed together and we didn’t know which ones were which. Some of the varieties were almost finished and there were a lot of apples on the ground with bees buzzing around them. We filled our peck bag to overflowing and then visited the snack bar where we got a cup of warm cider we passed around and more apple cider doughnuts (bringing our total apple cider doughnut consumption for North’s break to a dozen). We stopped at a shopping center where we got Noodles and Company and Mexican for lunch.

We made a pit stop at home to unpack the apples and our lunch leftovers and then we headed to the Takoma Park Halloween parade and Monster Bash. None of us was participating in the parade (though North will dress up first as a package of Lorna Doone cookies to trick or treat at department offices at school on Halloween, and later as Fluttershy from My Little Pony in a group costume at a party).

Historically, we have often been critical of the costume contest judging, but I found after watching the parade go by that the only costume that I was really invested in was the kid in the five-to-eight-year-old group whose face was painted white and whose head was enclosed in a carboard picture frame painted with the background of The Scream. I thought he should win something, probably Most Original. Noah liked the costume but thought the painting was too famous to be original. I said I thought it was original for a Halloween costume, and we agreed to disagree. If I had been a judge, the preschooler in the Pennywise mask accompanied by a toddler brother in a yellow rain slicker with a red balloon would have presented me with a dilemma. It was inarguably the scariest costume on anyone in the four-and-under group, but it made me feel kind of icky, seeing a kid that young dressed as an evil, psychotic clown. Beth opined that maybe Scariest shouldn’t even be a prize for that age group (they do have different categories for different ages some years, but not this year).

Anyway, Pennywise did win Scariest in her age category and The Scream won Most Original in his. There was a nicely executed excavator made of painted yellow cardboard in the youngest age group. The kid in it wore a hard hat. One of the prizes for the nine-to-twelve-year-old group went to a monster with multiple tongues and long claws and among the teen and adult winners was an alien rock star. The group prize went to a family dressed as Super Mario characters. If there had been a category for dogs (and given how often dogs are in the parade maybe there should be), I think it should have gone to the one in the panda costume. There was no one I thought really should have won a prize who didn’t… so good job, parade judges.

Back at home, we started to carve our jack-o-lanterns. We’d held off until the weekend before Halloween so they wouldn’t rot. Beth made the cat, I did the Kamala pumpkin, Noah carved the bat, and North’s is the scarecrow. While we carved, we listened to the official family Halloween playlist, to which I added The Addams Family theme this year, at North’s request.

Noah and I made a broccoli and cheddar soup for dinner. After dinner, I did the dishes and started roasting pumpkin seeds (so North could take some to school) while Noah finished his pumpkin and then we finished Beetlejuice, and watched It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. Beth and I went to bed, but the kids got in two episodes of Good Omens before calling our busy day a wrap.

Sunday

At 8:45 a.m., I watched from the porch as our car pulled out of the driveway and down the street. Beth was driving North back to Oberlin. They took most of the apples we picked to donate to the co-op with some reserved for Beth’s mom. When they got to Oberlin, they visited the college arboretum and had Chinese for dinner. Then Beth drove to Wheeling, where she’s staying for several days to visit her mom and brother who’s in town, too. I would have gone with them, but I thought someone should be here for the trick-or-treaters since the yard is all decorated and that seemed like a visual cue that we would be handing out candy. I was second guessing myself a little about staying home, though, as I watched the car disappear. It was a good break, and Last-Name AF, but it was hard to see it end.

Let Them Eat Cupcakes

Posted on September 27, 2024 by Steph

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Every half-birthday and birthday Noah was away at school I had cupcakes from a local bakery delivered to his dorm or apartment. The bakery was one we liked to patronize when we visited him, and it always went smoothly. If you’re ever in Ithaca, I recommend you drop by for bagels or pastry. It’s a lovely place. I liked being able to picture the store when I made the order. So of course, when he graduated, and we needed a cake for the family picnic that’s where I got it.

There is a bakery in Oberlin that’s been there since the nineteenth century and whose orange juice doughnuts, whole-wheat doughnuts, and buckeyes were favorite treats of mine when I was in college. You’d think it would be a shoe-in for our business, but it’s become a controversial place to shop after this happened. It’s complicated, because while there was no question that the students were initially in the wrong, the bakery’s reaction was over the top and cost the school tens of millions of dollars. And the fact that many students of color have reported being racially profiled there puts a different light on it as well. I have made a couple small purchases there since this all happened, for sentimental reasons, but I didn’t feel right making it our go-to source for cupcakes for the next four years. There’s a new bakery in town and campus catering delivers treats to students as well, so I decided to try something new.

I called the new bakery first, thinking it would be nice to support a local business over a big food service corporation. In my first call (a couple weeks before North’s half-birthday) I learned they don’t deliver, so I decided to think it over and call them back. I resolved it wasn’t a big deal for North to pick the cupcakes up themselves because the place is very centrally located and close to buildings where they have class. So, I called back and tried to order three cupcakes (I wanted the numerals 1, 8, and ½ in the frosting) only to learn the minimum order for cupcakes was a dozen. That seemed excessive so I got off the phone again.

At this point, I decided to go with food service. They had what looked like a convenient online order form and their cupcake minimum was four cupcakes, which was closer to what I wanted. I selected a delivery date, a cake flavor (red velvet), a frosting flavor (cream cheese), and described the decoration I wanted: 1, 8, ½, and an exclamation point since I needed to come up with something for the extra cupcake. So far, so good.

However, there was a warning on the website that said it will seem when you order that the order has not gone through but go ahead because the orders are being received. But then there was an email to use if you didn’t hear back in two to three business days. This last bit made me think the orders weren’t all going through, but I decided to see what happened.

When I’d filled out all the boxes and submitted the order, there was no confirmation message from the website, which was not a surprise. What was surprising was there had been no boxes for payment information. I supposed if it worked, I’d hear back, and they’d ask for it then, but I didn’t hear back. Two business days later I tried the email provided. I waited a couple more days. No response. I found another form on the website for “communication” and as that was exactly what I wanted, and wasn’t getting, I wrote the order out again and noted that I had not paid because there was no way to give my payment information. And then without waiting to see if this would work, I also tried texting a number that was also provided in the same place on the website. I got an answer almost immediately (probably from a bot) saying I’d hear back in a few minutes. Reader, can you guess if I heard back? I did not.

By this point, North’s half-birthday was several days away, and I remembered the bakery required a week’s notice for special orders, so it was too late to go that route. So, I called them and purchased a gift certificate for North to pick up at the store. In our weekly family call, I told North the bakery would have something for them on Monday and added, “It wasn’t what I wanted,” and told them I’d explain later.

“Well, I thought it would be cupcakes,” they said, sounding intrigued. They’ve had half-birthday cupcakes every September since they were eighteen months old, and they knew I sent them to Noah at school, so it wasn’t exactly intended to be a surprise.

On Monday morning I got a text from North, who was at the bakery where the cashier was saying they didn’t have anything for them. I instructed them to specify it was a gift certificate and that cleared it up. They purchased two apple cider cupcakes with dried apple in the frosting and sent me photographic proof that I had fulfilled my maternal duty. I was relieved that it had all worked out.

But it wasn’t over… Tuesday, the day after North’s half-birthday, they got a text that said, “Someone has gotten you a sweet treat” and instructed them to go to a dining hall to pick it up. They went and lo and behold, there were four red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting with the numerals 1, 8, and ½ in the frosting. Instead of the exclamation point I asked for, there was a big purple circle on the fourth cupcake. But given that I never paid for them, I can’t really complain.

It’s been three days since the second set of cupcakes arrived, but the whole situation has been so bizarre I wouldn’t be at all surprised to get a bill at some point. I don’t know if I’d be inclined to pay it if I do, though, since I had no way of knowing the order had gone through and I made other arrangements. Plus, they came a day late. I did ask North which cupcakes they liked better, just to help me decide which difficult establishment to start with next September. They said they liked the red velvet ones better. I suppose food service had the advantage in this contest because I could select a flavor that’s a favorite of North’s, while at the bakery they had to select from what was in stock that day. Meanwhile, Beth told me that on the Oberlin parent’s Facebook page, people have been complaining about Sweet Treat orders not going through and apparently, the only thing that works is to call, rather than text, the number it says to text.

When I reported to Beth that North preferred the food service cupcakes, she said, “Free is good.” It is indeed. And I’m pretty sure this was a half-birthday North will remember.

Three Weekends

Posted on September 15, 2024 by Steph

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Three weeks have gone by since we took North to Oberlin and then came home without them. It feels odd to be a household of three, none of whom attends a Montgomery County public school, needs to go to a Back to School Night anywhere, or is starting any new extracurricular activities. But September has not been completely unrecognizable. Each of its first three weekends we did something familiar in the form of a picnic, a music festival, or a pie contest. And we tried something new, too.

First Weekend: Labor Day Picnic

I had gotten used to the rhythm of North coming home from camp on Friday evenings and staying until Sunday morning, so I guess it wasn’t surprising that when on the Friday before Labor Day weekend they didn’t come home, it felt strange and hard.

The weekend itself was low-key. Beth went kayaking Saturday morning, and I went swimming. Noah mowed the lawn, he and I made zucchini fritters for dinner, and we all watched a movie. The day before we’d all conducted a round of movie nominations and vetoes, which netted us six movies to watch in September and October. Saturday night we watched King of Hearts, a movie which North had vetoed in a previous round, and I threw back into the pool, suspecting it might survive the process this time. I loved this French 1960s anti-war movie as a teen and hadn’t seen it since then. It doesn’t completely hold up, but it has its charms.

Also over the weekend Noah and I finally finished reading Maskerade, which we’d been reading since mid-July and started a new book, which despite its title seems to be more fantasy than romance. Sunday night we went to Koma for soft serve. The flavor names there are kind of fanciful. Beth and I got Brigadeiro, which the menu described as “sort of like a Brazilian Fudge.” Without this helpful note, I would have thought it was chocolate. Noah got caramelized coconut (and a salad because he hadn’t eaten much at dinner).

Labor Day was barely a holiday, as two out of three of us worked. Noah went into the office for a shortened day and Beth was at her computer most of the day as well. AT&T was on strike and strikes and political campaigns don’t take holidays. Noah’s been working on ads for Democratic political candidates, but also issue ads, on topics such as abortion and redistricting. A lot of them are airing in Ohio.

While they were thus engaged, I made a plum torte (your recipe, Suzanne) and assembled a picnic dinner of vegetarian hot dogs, devilled eggs, tomato slices, corn on the cob, and cole slaw to eat in the back yard. The torte was slightly burned on top, but independently of each other, Beth and Noah both declared it “pretty” and it was tasty, too.

Noah wasn’t initially sure he’d be home by dinner time. He has a long commute—two buses and a train—and generally gets home at seven-thirty or eight and eats a plate of whatever Beth and I have already eaten. But he got off early enough to eat dinner with us. I was glad about that because our three summer picnics (Memorial Day, Fourth of July, and Labor Day) are long-standing traditions and Beth and North had both been out of town this Fourth of July, and of course, I was missing North. It wasn’t like being all together, but it was still nice. The weather was pleasant, warm but not hot or humid, and it’s always relaxing to eat outside.

While we were eating Noah spotted a huge wasps’ nest high the branches of the silver maple in the back yard. We decided to leave it there, as it’s obviously been there a long time, and they haven’t bothered us yet. When I say we decided, I mean mostly me, as Beth and Noah initially assumed we’d be getting it professionally removed. But I offered to take over mowing the back yard for the rest of the mowing season (probably a month or so) since Noah is hesitant to do it now. It seems to me if we’re going to plant sunflowers and zinnias in the garden at least partly to attract pollinators to the cucumbers and tomatoes we shouldn’t object if they set up housekeeping near the garden.

Second Weekend: Takoma Folk Festival

On Saturday I went swimming, but Beth couldn’t go kayaking because of a small craft advisory so she did the grocery shopping a day early in hopes the warning would be lifted by Sunday, but it wasn’t. The silver lining was that we had more time for the Takoma Park folk festival that day.

We’ve been going to this music festival since Noah was a toddler, and we’ve been almost every year it’s been held since then, rain or shine. In fact, it was rainy the past two years (and cancelled for covid the two years before that) so we all appreciated that the weather was perfect—sunny, in the mid-seventies, and not a trace of humidity. We spent the whole afternoon there, arriving a little after noon and staying until it ended at six-thirty.

I enjoyed every act we picked—a mix of country, singer-songwriter, and rock– but later I wished we’d seen some music from another country, as I often like to do that. Most of the international music was on one of the three indoor stages, though, and the day was too beautiful to go inside. Here’s who we saw and what the program had to say about them.

Karen Collins and the Backroads Band: Classic country with vintage sounds and rockabilly flair
Amoreena: Blending baroque pop and piano folk with introspective lyrics
Acacia Sears: Poetic indie rock with metaphor-rich lyrics and unique melodies
Ammonite: Songs of queer joy and heartache, wrapped in a fusion of country, punk, folk, rock, blues, and roots music
Blank Page: Vibrant Americana rising stars sharing joyful original songs
iylAIMY: The most welcome jolt in folk, featuring rapid-fire lyricism, lush harmonies, and even beatboxing
Samiah: Enchanting and powerful female-fronted original modern rock songwriting

The two country acts had the greatest diversity of age. If I had to guess I’d say Karen Collins is in her seventies and the two youngsters that make up Blank Page are still in high school, though I learned from their Instagram that they have a busy performance schedule, with about a half dozen gigs a month. Overall, it was a fun day listening to music from young and old.

When we got home, we watched our second movie of the half dozen we’d picked— Whisper of the Heart. This was one of Noah’s picks. He wants to watch the whole oeuvre of Hayao Miyazaki and by now we’ve watched so many of his films it feels familiar and comforting to enter these bizarre but recognizable worlds.

Third Weekend: Long Branch Festival and Takoma Park Farmers’ Market Pie Contest

On Saturday, Beth went kayaking and I went swimming, which as you are by now gathering, are our normal weekend routines. But we did do something a little out of the ordinary. We’ve never been to the Long Branch festival before, and we decided to try it out.

There was one stage and when we arrived around five-twenty, the Cuban band Beth had most wanted to see was just finishing up. We listened to their last song and then walked around the playground where the festival was held, looking at vendors and food booths. Dinner options were less extensive than we anticipated— quesadillas and pizza were the only vegetarian choices. After mulling over our options, we decided to eat at El Golfo, which is right across the street. I got my usual—spinach enchiladas and Noah and I spilt an order of flan and a slice of tres leches cake. (I thought the almost an hour round trip of walking to the festival and back would prevent a blood sugar spike and it did.) We ate outside and while we were eating the band came back from a break, so we got to hear them after all.

When we got home, we watched movie number three—Las Niñas, so between the Cuban music, Mexican food, and Spanish film it ended up being quite the Hispanic evening.

The pie contest was the next day. Long-time readers probably remember that North entered this contest every year it was held from the age of seven or eight and they won twice—with a cantaloupe pie when they were ten and a mushroom pie when they were thirteen.. They also entered several apple pies (it was originally an apple pie contest), a lavender-mint pie, a corn custard pie with an Earl Grey-infused crust, a plum pie, and most recently a Dutch pear pie, all delicious.

Unlike the Labor Day picnic and the folk festival, this wasn’t just something we did with North, it was something we did because of North. It was their thing. In fact, if they gone to school at Saint Mary’s, which is a two-hour drive away, they may have even come home for it. (We talked about that when they were still deciding.) So… I wavered a little about whether I wanted to go, but it’s a fun event and you get to eat pie, so in the end I did. I went alone because Noah had plans (he goes to a board game event at a Panera in Rockville most Sunday afternoons) and Beth had to work because the strike at AT&T finally ended that day, after a month, and she had to write a statement.

I got there about a half hour after pie slices had gone on sale, swinging by the farmers’ market first for tomatoes and a raspberry-yogurt smoothie. The line was long, so it took me twenty minutes to get to the tent. I perused the list of winners at the entrance. I decided if there were any slices left of the winner for Kid’s Pie (raspberry) or Other Sweet Pie—this means non-apple, non-peach– honey-fig was the winner, I would get one of those. The raspberry pie had sold out. There was one slice of fig pie left and I wasn’t sure it was the winning fig pie as there are often a couple fig pies and I’d forgotten the number associated with the winner, but I bought it anyway. It was quite good—the crust was crispy and tasted of molasses. I picked up one of the slices of apple pie for Noah. It was very pretty, with intricate leaves in the crust.

I sent North a picture of the pie slices and gave them the lowdown on the winners in various categories. I figured they’d be interested in Most Unusual because that’s a category they’ve won in the past. It was called ABC Medley, which we both assumed meant it had ingredients that start with those letters. I did see a pie with cucumber in it and I thought that would certainly be unusual (more unusual than cherries for instance) so that could have been the ABC pie, but I don’t know what else was in it or if it was even the winner for sure.

Meanwhile, in Oberlin

We’ve been texting a lot with North, and we’ve had three all-family calls. They’ve been busy. Classes have been in session for two and a half weeks. They say Spanish is their most challenging class. They were elected one of the food buyers for their dining co-op, they’ve been to interest meetings for a couple different theater groups, they auditioned for a part in a play (which they didn’t get), they’re volunteering at a cat rescue, and they attended a Quaker meeting in town to see what it was like. They’ve been to the movies in town (seeing Reagan) and went to a party at which people pretended to be rushing a non-existent sorority (Kappa Epsilon Epsilon Rho, which spells KEEP, the name of their co-op).

We sent them their first care package. I made almond butter chocolate chip cookies, Beth bought Jolly Ranchers for North’s candy bowl, and then I filled up the box with things I found in the pantry I thought they’d like to have (a box of Annie’s mac-n-cheese, Pop Tarts, Honey Vanilla chamomile tea). Beth said the theme was “random things North likes.” I had no idea where the Pop Tarts had come from, but it turned out Noah bought them for himself, so I replaced them.

Things seem to be going well. We miss North, but we’re all settling into our grooves, running on separate tracks until they cross briefly when they come home for fall break in a little over a month.

Welcome Home, Obie

Posted on August 28, 2024 by Steph

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Friday evening to Sunday morning: Wheeling

We arrived in Wheeling around seven, after a six-hour drive and let ourselves into Beth’s mom’s house. YaYa arrived shortly after we did, bearing takeout pizza. We ate and then Beth, North, and I went for a stroll in Wheeling Park. There was a festival going on, with live music, food stalls, multiple bouncy castles, and a clown. The band was playing covers of the Romantics and Dire Straits (and during their break a recording of Elton John). “We’re the demographic,” I told Beth, and she agreed. It was a pleasant night, not too humid and with a lovely sunset. We walked on paths through tall trees and around the swimming pool and the pond.

The next day we went out for lunch with YaYa at the garden bistro in Oglebay Park (where we just spent a week at the reunion). It’s on a terrace with a nice view of the hills of the park. We shared a cheese plate, and everyone got soup or a salad. (Mine was a tomato-burrata stew.) From there we went shopping for decorative items for North’s room at the artisans’ center. When we’d surveyed their room at home looking for knickknacks to take, they felt dissatisfied and said there was nothing they wanted to bring, except for a glass pumpkin they were afraid to break, and so left at home.

And then on the drive to Wheeling, a metal frog sculpture at a market spoke to them. They texted its picture to their roommate and between them they decided its name was Vert, but rather than pronouncing it like the French word, North is going to pronounce it to rhyme with Bert. At the artisan center, to complement Vert, North picked out a red glass candy dish. I said if they kept it filled, they’d become known as the kid with candy on offer in their room and this would make them popular.

When got back to YaYa’s house we had a little surprise going-away party for North. Beth’s aunt Carole, Carole’s son Sean, and her granddaughter Holly came over and we had red velvet cake and ice cream, and Sean told us stories about his college days including one about his journey to college, which involved Carole seeing a cow that seemed to be dead but wasn’t after she dropped Sean off at to catch his bus to school. We managed to surprise North, and they seemed pleased. Later that afternoon, we went swimming in the condo pool and Beth’s aunt Jenny dropped by the pool deck to chat and had a gift for North (and one to take home to Noah, too). We had Chinese that night and then North and YaYa watched Unfrosted.

Sunday morning to Monday afternoon: Oberlin

We left Wheeling early the next morning and drove to Oberlin, arriving around 10:30, and moved North into their room. North is living in Keep Cottage, a student-run housing and dining co-op where I lived for three semesters (my sophomore year and the second half of my senior year). It houses about fifty-five students and feeds about seventy-five.

North has a third-floor corner room with sloping ceilings, windows on two sides and deep closets. It’s right next door to the room where I lived my last semester of college. Keep was the place I lived longest at Oberlin and the building is just seeped in memory for me. After I helped carry their things up to their room, I peeled off to explore. I found my sophomore year room with the door propped open and no one inside, so of course I stepped in for a moment. I visited the second-floor bathroom I cleaned twice a week for a year and stood outside the door of my sophomore year boyfriend’s room. Then I walked by other friends’ rooms and wandered through the lounge and the kitchen. (The next day I tried to go down into the basement, but the door was locked.) Keep has changed very little. It was like stepping back into 1986. Even the smell was familiar.

North’s roommate Sarah and her parents arrived soon after we did, and the kids seemed to hit it off and began to sort out the room arrangement. I think I may have scandalized Sarah just a little when I told her that when I lived in Keep my roommate had an illicit cat whose litterbox was in one of those roomy closets.

Beth and I left North to unpack while we went to visit Noah Hall, where I lived my first year and Beth lived her first two years at Oberlin. Surely by now you all know we met there on my first day of college, when she was sophomore dorm staff and checked me into the building, and that we named Noah after this dorm. Every time we’ve visited Oberlin in recent years, Beth has wanted to get inside Noah, but the doors are always locked. We thought it would be open for move-in and it was, so we got to poke around there.

It was fun but not quite as satisfying as walking around Keep because there weren’t as many rooms and common spaces we could get into, but we did find our rooms and stood outside the doors. We both lived on the second floor the year we met and there used to be three lounges there. The carpet that depicted hunting scenes in the north and south lounges has been replaced with something more generic. The center lounge is gone, converted into two bedrooms, but a door to one of these was open, and we could see they left the pretty wooden paneling on the walls.

I mentioned that my high school boyfriend with whom I’d come to Oberlin broke up with me in that now departed center lounge. (It happened during orientation. Because I had the luck to start dating my wife at the tender age of twenty, it ended up being the worst break up of my life.) Beth knew about this of course, but not exactly where it happened. “Well, good riddance,” she said, even though it was a cozy lounge.

I learned later that Noah is a substance-free dorm now. In the eighties… well, let’s just say it wasn’t.

We met up with North and Sarah at Keep and walked to Tank Hall. It’s the only co-op open during orientation and all OSCA members are eating there until the rest of them open. I ate in Tank as a dining-only member the year I lived in Noah, so this was a familiar space as well. I popped into the kitchen, where I first learned to cook in an industrial kitchen. Lunch—rice, breaded baked tofu, sauteed cabbage and carrots, homemade pickles, and granola—was served buffet style. There was nutritional yeast in the breading, which I don’t mind but Beth and North don’t care for, and it caused me to reflect that my recipe for breaded tofu also has nutritional yeast (that I just don’t put in, subbing extra wheat germ) and I wondered if it could be the same recipe. (It’s from the Zen Monastery Cookbook.) Nutritional yeast aside, I wondered if the fact that I learned a lot of what I know about cooking in OSCA and that as a result its hippie-style of cuisine made it into a lot of the food North ate as a child will make the food at Keep seem homey.

Most of the students were eating on the lawn, but Beth and I ate on the porch, to give North some space and a chance to socialize without their parents hovering. The spacious, wraparound porch took me back, too. Many nights after dinner at Tank my first year I used to sit there and have long talks with the young man who would be my boyfriend the next year.

North and Sarah went off with other OSCA members after lunch. Among other things, North changed their voter registration from Maryland to Ohio. Beth and I went to the campus bookstore to look for Oberlin pencils only to discover they were sold out. I was disappointed because I already have a lot of Oberlin swag (a hoodie, two t-shirts, and a couple stickers on my laptop) but of all the Ithaca merch I bought when Noah started college, I found the pencils and the mug most comforting, because I used them in my daily routine. I did get a mug, even though we have a great quantity of mugs at home. Beth knew better than to say anything about that.

Next, we took a sentimental journey walking to and photographing every dorm, co-op, and apartment building where either of us ever lived (not all pictured here—I moved around a lot). The selfie is in front of the house where I was living the summer of 1987, when we started dating. Beth is standing in front of the apartment building where she lived her junior and senior year, plus the year after she graduated.

We hadn’t taken pictures at Noah (the big brick dorm) the first time we went so we returned. We noticed someone had painted “Noah Bench” on a bench outside it in fat purple letters, so I texted a picture of it to Noah and wrote, “They named a bench after you.”

The day was hot, and we’d walked a lot so we went to the student union to rest until it was time to meet North in Finney Chapel for the welcoming ceremony. They weren’t calling it a convocation, but that’s what it was. Various administrators spoke, the speeches interspersed with musical performances. The acoustics are good in there, so it would seem like a waste not to have music.

There was a picnic dinner afterward—we had barbequed tofu, corn on the cob, corn and bean salad, potato salad, cole slaw, and fruit salad. We had dessert plans, but there were cupcakes, so Beth and North each got one and gave me a sliver of each. We drove to the Dairy Twist, which is just outside town and got the second ceremonial end-of-summer-break ice cream. North got a root beer float, which has been their frozen treat of the summer. Beth got a cherry-dipped chocolate cone, and I got a mint-chocolate flurry. This establishment was another place we used to go. Because it was the eighties, and a lot of my friends were humanities majors we used to call it the Dairy-Da. (Get it? Derrida.)

From there we returned to Finney for a concert of performances by conservatory students and faculty. We could only stay for half of it—a mix of classical, jazz, and compositions by conservatory students. The highlight was probably watching a student play the enormous organ. It was impressive how he twisted around to use both hands and both feet at once.

North had a house meeting at eight-thirty, so we slipped out of the concert, said goodbye until the next day and drove to the house of Beth’s retired colleague Jeff and his wife Karen. They live outside Cleveland and graciously hosted us for the night. Jeff even made homemade almond croissants for us in the morning.

We returned to Oberlin the next day and met North back at Finney. They had two morning sessions, one on adapting to college life, which I attended with them while Beth took a walk, and a second one with their PAL group. These peer advising groups seems to have taken the place of impact groups, which were more loosely organized, dorm-based, group therapy-type sessions we had when I was in college. (Beth was my impact group leader.) While they were there, Beth and I attended a session about the transition to college for parents. We didn’t learn much as this isn’t our first rodeo, but we did learn that starting next year Thanksgiving break will be one day longer than the four-day weekend it is now, which was welcome news as the short break has already posed challenges for our travel plans this fall.

When we were all finished, we met up and wandered through the student activities fair, but we didn’t linger because North had a few places they wanted to go before lunch. We browsed in the campus bookstore where we bought them a sweatshirt, Ben Franklin where we got them a water bottle sticker and a candle, and Gibson’s Bakery where we bought some treats.

And then it was time to say goodbye. Parents were encouraged to be off campus by two. There was an event with cookies called Sweet Goodbyes to send parents off, but North had a crew shift at Tank right after lunch (learning how to clean a co-op kitchen) that conflicted with that, so we were leaving early. We dropped them off at Tank for lunch, stood on the lawn outside the car, and said our teary goodbyes.

Monday Afternoon to Wednesday: Oberlin, Takoma, and the Road in Between

We had a long drive ahead of us, so we just picked up some food at Sheetz for an a la carte lunch to eat in the car, but by dinnertime we had made pretty good time, so we stopped at a diner in western Maryland. It turned out that a grilled cheese sandwich (American on white bread) with fries was exactly the comfort food I needed after leaving my youngest child at college. We followed it up with ice cream, just to be safe.

North has been keeping busy. Monday after their crew shift, they had another PAL meeting, and they played cards and attended a tea party with some people in Keep. Tuesday, they met with their academic advisor, went to a meeting on campus safety, and there was a picnic dinner for new OSCA members. Today was a day of service and they participated in a beach cleanup at Lake Erie (where they met another kid named North!) and toured some museums in Cleveland. Classes start tomorrow. They have sociology, psychology, and a class about college life.

Back at home, we miss them, of course. I defrosted two quarts of soup they made earlier this month (lentil and black bean), and we had it for dinner Tuesday and Wednesday, which I found consoling. I washed their sheets on Tuesday and when I realized I couldn’t just toss the fitted sheet on the bed for them to put on the mattress themselves because they weren’t here to do it, it hit me hard. But despite these moments, we are glad for them. They came a long way to get where they are.

All day Sunday and Monday almost everyone who gave a speech said something along the lines of, “Welcome to Oberlin,” “Welcome Obies,” “Welcome home, Obies,” or assured any nervous first-year students in the audience “You belong here,” and each time both Beth and I felt a little jolt of emotion. It certainly feels like coming home to us and we trust that with time, it will be home and a place of belonging for North too.

This is what Beth wrote on Facebook:

Forty years ago I walked through the door of the Oberlin dorm on the left and into my future. Thirty-nine years ago Steph walked through the same door. I was living there a second year and checked her in.

Yesterday our youngest child walked through the door of the Oberlin dorm on the right. I know that their journey will be unique to them, but I hope they find what I found there: a bunch of brilliant, passionate oddballs who became beloved friends. And if they also find the love of their life, well, that would be OK too.

Welcome home, Obie. You’ve got this. You belong here.

All For The Love Of You

A Chronicle of Suburban Lesbian Family Life

Category Archives: College

First Steps

Welcome Christmas

Waiting for Joy

To Be Grateful

Get the Party Started

Before Breakfast: A Long Hop

Fall Break AF

Let Them Eat Cupcakes

Three Weekends

Welcome Home, Obie