Before the Leap

I’ve had a Leap Year blog post tradition going here since 2012. Each year I write about the leaps one kid or the other has experienced in the past year. (It still bugs me that I didn’t think to do this in 2008 because North was almost two then and the transitions that occur in the year from one to two are some of the most dramatic ones you see in parenting.)

This is what I had to say about the previous posts in 2020:

Two leap years ago North was in kindergarten in a Spanish immersion program and I wrote a blog post, called “Leap Year” about how kindergarten is a year of social, cognitive, and physical leaps. That year North learned to spend a longer day away from me than in preschool, they learned to speak Spanish, and they learned to read and write in both English and Spanish. Plus, they learned to jump rope and pump on the swings. It felt like a big deal.

Then one leap year ago Noah was in ninth grade and I wrote another blog post, called “Hop Year” about how the transition from middle school to high school had gone smoothly and how being in a high school humanities-based magnet program wasn’t that different from being in a middle school humanities-based magnet program.

Well, here it is, four years later and Noah’s in the midst of another transition, this one bigger than starting elementary or high school. He’s living away from home, managing his own life, taking the first steps of young adulthood. I thought I should write a leap year blog post about that. “Vault Year” seemed appropriate, given the magnitude of the changes.

Little did I know that just a few weeks after I wrote that, covid would send Noah home for almost a year and a half, but still, he did leave home, and then he did it again, going as far as Australia and Los Angeles before bouncing back here.

While I was writing my 2020 post, North and I discussed the fact that in 2024, they wouldn’t be starting anything new. Instead, they’d be finishing their senior year of high school. North asked me to write it about senior year anyway. I could call it “Before the Leap,” they suggested. I agreed and I try to keep my promises so—even though it’s been four years and North doesn’t even remember this conversation—here goes.

Senior year has been decent for North, especially if you compare it to what came before. Covid hit in the spring of their eighth-grade year, so most of ninth grade was remote school—which was not good for them—and they were dealing with a cascade of health problems at the same time, including partial paralysis and non-epileptic seizures. Tenth grade they were back at school, but they were absent a lot (about a quarter of the days of second semester) due to migraines and chronic pain. In eleventh grade they didn’t attend school in person at all from the end of October to the end of January, due to mental health challenges, and after that they had half their classes online and half in person.

This year we got an accommodation for a shortened school day (five periods instead of seven), and they don’t go in until third period. They get more sleep now and this has helped eliminate morning migraines (though they still get them in the late afternoons four to five days a week). Their attendance and grades are good, straight As for first semester. They are taking AP English and IB math and they’re involved in extracurriculars, mainly GSA and theater. They are the lead Cappies critic for their school, they directed a one act play, and they’ve had small parts in the fall play and spring musical (which opens next week).  They’ve been accepted to four colleges, one is an honors college, and at two of the others they’ve either been admitted to the honors program or invited to apply. They’ve lined up a summer job. Compared to where things were this time last year, they are doing really, really well.

Last weekend, right before we left the condo, I texted North this photo commenting, “The building where we stayed is named after you.” I didn’t mention the other part of the high rise’s name, but it seems appropriate. North is at a high point—not of their life, no one wants to peak at almost eighteen—but of high school. We are proud and excited to see them take the next steps in their journey, wherever that may take them.  Maybe this was a leap year after all.

As for Noah, it could be he’s poised on the edge of something new as well, if he accepts the six-month job at the video production company. He’s been waiting to get a formal offer and a contract for two weeks now. The uncertainty about that is driving me a little crazy, but it hasn’t been radio silence from the company. They’ve been in touch, and he went into the office for a one-day job yesterday, editing video footage for an educational technology company’s social media. If it all works out, this will be his first full-time job. That’s a big leap, too.

Ups and Downs

So, what’s been going on since Beth came home a little over three weeks ago? Let’s see. The snow gradually melted, late winter flowers (crocuses and snowdrops) appeared in our yard and the woods by the creek, first semester ended, and North is now a second semester senior. On the last day of first semester, they brought home a cookie jar they made in ceramics class and then made a new batch of chocolate chip-almond butter cookies to fill it. (This is a new favorite recipe.) Rehearsals for Beauty and the Beast are underway and North reviewed Cabaret at another high school.

Most recently, I got shingles, we got a new mattress.

Downer

I don’t know why I never got the shingles vaccine. I guess I just never got around to it. If you’ve never gotten one either and you’re over fifty, I recommend you make that appointment, because shingles is no fun, even if you have a mild to moderate case like I did. It started with an itchy rash on the left half of my chest that eventually wrapped around to my left side. For around a week and a half, it only caused nuisance-level discomfort, so I put off finding out what it was. I should not have done that.

By Thursday it had started to get more uncomfortable, so I got it checked out and received a prescription for an antiviral medication. It was too late to help the more established part of the rash, but it did stop the newest part in its tracks. That section faded before it progressed from itch to pain. The oldest part of the rash did get quite painful, though. I told Beth it felt like I’d been kicked in the ribs and then left to lie in the sun until I got a sunburn over the bruise.

“Why are you topless in this scenario?” she asked.

“I’m wearing a bikini,” I said.

“You don’t have a bikini,” she said.

On the very worst night (Sunday) as I was lying in bed I was trying to breathe as shallowly as I could because the movement of my chest rising and falling hurt. After that, the rash started to hurt less every day and now it’s back to mildly itchy with very little pain.

On the Upside

We have a new mattress. We’d been sleeping on the old one, which we got when I was pregnant with Noah and we decided to part with our futon, for twenty-three years. We tried to get a new mattress in 2013 but for reasons you can read about here, we didn’t go through with it. (Read that post before the next paragraph if you don’t want spoilers.)

Fun fact, I’m pretty sure we never even had bedbugs. When we got it inspected by an independent company the result was inconclusive (!) and they wanted to bring in an expensive bug-sniffing dog, which we declined, and by then we were so puzzled we didn’t know what to do so we waited more than a decade. No one ever had any bites.

Last weekend, Beth, Noah, and I went to mattress store in Silver Spring and bought a new mattress for our bed and one for his room, too. I was half-afraid when the delivery people came, they would tell us they us we had bedbugs, but they took away the old mattresses and left us with new ones and it seemed like a small miracle.

Our new mattress is adjustable, and Beth has been having fun raising and lowering the ends of it. Most of the time we’ve had it I’ve been too miserable with shingles to feel comfortable in any position, so I didn’t care much, but that will probably change soon.

As a bonus, when we were preparing to move the old mattress and box spring out of the bedroom, we did some decluttering and deep cleaning (and by “we” I mean mostly Beth) so now the bedroom is less dusty and we have divested ourselves of a breast pump I knew was on the lower shelf of my bedside table and a pacifier we didn’t know was behind Beth’s bookshelf.

There are some good things on the horizon, too. Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, and we will finally get to try the raspberry-white chocolate cheesecake bars with Oreo crust that North made over the weekend. Noah has a job interview, tomorrow, too. Fingers crossed for that, and more info to follow if it works out. Thursday we leave for a three-day road trip to attend Admitted Students Day at Johnson and Wales University in Providence, and the following weekend, Beth and I are having our first weekend getaway (to Ocean City) since 2012 when my mom took the kids for a weekend so we could spend the weekend in Philadelphia.

I hope you are experiencing more ups than downs these days.

 

A Taste of Christmas

Saturday

“The bag didn’t fall off and the tree didn’t fall off,” Noah observed, gesturing to the roof of the car, when we stopped for lunch at a Sheetz in Virginia. It was true. Both the rooftop bag and the tree were still securely attached to the car. The ride was going very smoothly. We got out of the house roughly on schedule, the weather was clear, and traffic was light, all the way from the DC suburbs to Blackwater Falls State Park, even though it was the Saturday before Christmas.

When we got close to Blackwater, we started seeing snow on the ground. They’d gotten a foot of it five days earlier and it was mostly melted, but in places it was still a few inches deep. We wondered if any would be left on Christmas. No more was forecast, so that was our only chance for a white Christmas. Because we’d just finished watching White Christmas the night before, the kids predicted it would snow on Christmas Eve and they would each find love at the resort. (“Siblings, siblings/there never were such devoted siblings,” North sang, altering the lyrics to “Sisters” slightly.) Stay tuned to see if either of these predictions came true.

We arrived at the park lodge around 2:40 and met Beth’s mom in the lobby. We had to wait about an hour to check into our cabin, so we chatted with each other and wandered around the gift shop. While Beth was somewhere else in the lobby, I bought her a rainbow-striped sticker in the shape of West Virginia to put in her stocking. She’s getting a new work laptop and she’d been saying she needed stickers for it.

When we got into the cabin, we unpacked, and Beth went out to get some groceries for dinner and the next morning. She came home and made chili and almond flour cornbread for dinner. (I asked if she really wanted to cook after the drive, but she said she preferred to get her responsibilities out of the way early—we were all cooking one meal during the trip.) After dinner, we watched Christmas is Here Again, because the internet connection was too slow to download The Shop Around the Corner, which YaYa had mentioned was her favorite Christmas movie. Once we finished the movie, we found the other one had finished downloading, so we had it all lined up for the next evening.

Christmas Eve

We only had one day in the cabin before Christmas and there was a lot we wanted to do. We needed to trim the tree and deck the halls and make chocolate-peppermint cookies and gingerbread and take a lot of walks.

I was awake a little earlier than I would have liked. It’s so dark and quiet there, it would have been perfect for sleeping in, but I was wide awake at 6:20, so I got up and went for a walk down to the Pendleton overlook. I left the house a little after seven, hoping to see the sunrise, but I think I was actually too early because it takes the sun a while to clear the mountains. It was a pretty walk anyway. There was a smear of pink in the sky over the ridge, and some snow on the rocks in the river below, and golden light glowing in some of the windows of the lodge on the other side of the dark canyon.

After breakfast, Beth did the main grocery shopping for the trip, Noah and I read, and North got busy making the chocolate-peppermint cookies. They were pleased with the crackle and shine they got on them this year. They’ve been perfecting them for the past six Christmases.

When Beth was home and the cookies were baked and the kitchen cleaned up, we decorated the tree. Decorating a tree is always the same, isn’t it? Everyone oohhs and aahhs over the ornaments they’d forgotten and reminisces about when they were made or purchased. Somehow, despite the petite tree and multiple boxes crammed full of ornaments, we made them all fit. Beth also gathered some evergreen branches from the woods behind the cabin to line the mantel and North arranged the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer figures around them, making Rudolph and Clarice seem to kiss.

We took a little break for lunch before Beth and I went on another walk, this one down to the falls. The day was mild and big chunks of ice were melting and falling off the rockface and crashing to the ground as we approached the staircase. The wooden stairs were wet and half-covered in slush, and I didn’t have appropriate footwear on, so I only went halfway down the steps and waited for Beth at the upper platform as she went to the very bottom and then climbed back up. Then we browsed the gift shop near the falls. Beth spotted the same sticker I bought her at the lodge, and I was afraid she was going to buy it, but she was torn between that and another one, and decided to wait and think about it, to my relief.

When we got home, Beth and YaYa set out on another walk, while the kids and I shaped gingerbread cookies from the dough I’d made at home, decorating them with colored sugar, nuts, dried cranberries, and hard candy. They came out well and when I took my first bite of one, I thought, this is the taste of Christmas.

I made kale and potato soup for Christmas Eve dinner. While I was cooking, Beth asked me if I’d packed the cranberries, remembering she hadn’t seen any in the freezer, and we came to the distressing realization that when I read “cranberries” on the packing list I thought it meant dried cranberries for gingerbread and not the frozen cranberries that North needed for the cranberry-orange muffins they were planning to make for Christmas breakfast. North tried soaking the dried cranberries we had left to see how much they’d make, and it only came to a quarter cup, when the recipe called for one and half cups of fresh cranberries. So, after dinner, Beth set out to see if she could find any fresh, frozen, or dried cranberries at Dollar General, which was the only store open anywhere nearby. Alas, there were none to be had.

That night we watched The Shop Around the Corner, which I recommend if you’re in the mood for a 1940s Christmassy movie with Jimmy Stewart that’s not It’s a Wonderful Life. North was crocheting a sock with the multicolored yarn and crochet hooks my sister got her for Christmas. (We’d opened presents from my West Coast relatives on the Solstice to make room in the car). They finished it as we were watching the movie. It was their first attempt at a sock (earlier this year they made a sweater and part of a blanket) and it fits and even has some ribbing at the top. They finished its mate a few days later.

After the movie, North opened the last window of our Advent calendar and ate the chocolate Santa they found behind it, Noah read “A Visit from St. Nicholas” aloud (a Christmas Eve tradition), and we put things in each other’s stockings without any pretense at secrecy, just the occasional instruction to “avert your eyes.”

Christmas

Despite the kids’ predictions, it did not snow on Christmas Eve. By Christmas morning, there was a little snow left on the deck and in piles near the road, where it had been plowed, but that was about it. YaYa, North, and I were all up by seven, so North and I opened our stockings together. YaYa wanted to wait until Beth was up, so they did theirs together a little while later, and Noah was last. In addition to sweets and a clementine each, everyone had several little gifts. Coffeehouse gift certificates (from Starbucks and Koma, a new one in Takoma Park) were popular. Beth was surprised to see the rainbow WV sticker and declared I was “sneaky” to have gotten it under her nose.

Noah set the mood by lighting the gas fireplace, plus setting up fireplace videos on two screens in the living room, declaring, “The more fires the merrier,” and putting on Christmas music and occasionally singing along, most enthusiastically with “Feliz Navidad.”

North started making a delicious breakfast of eggs, vegetarian sausage and bacon, orange-cranberry muffins (light on the cranberries) and blackberries. I had a cup of the chocolate-peppermint tea I got in my stocking with it.

After breakfast, we opened presents. Food, books, and clothes were the most popular gifts. A great deal of chocolate was exchanged, YaYa got elderberry-infused honey and jam, and I got three flavors of fruity teas plus chai. I got four more books to add to the three I’d opened on the Solstice and left at home. Noah got even more than that.

North got a pastel colorblock sweater they’d admired in Rehoboth over Thanksgiving weekend and fuzzy socks in pale green and red and white. Noah got a flannel shirt, and we got sweatshirts and robes from YaYa. I got gloves and a pair of navy corduroys I’d bought myself from an expensive catalog, immediately regretted buying, and almost returned, until I asked Beth if she’d like to buy them for me for Christmas and she said yes, so she reimbursed me for them and took them from me and wrapped them. So that wasn’t exactly a surprise, but now I have them. There were some practical gifts, too. Noah got a toolkit, North got headphones, and Beth got a Dutch oven that was so big and heavy we almost despaired of fitting the gift into the crowded car and considered leaving it at home. In fact, I thought we had until we were unpacking the gifts in the cabin and I saw it among them.

From the late morning to the mid-afternoon, Beth took a long hike up the along the ridge behind Lake Pendleton. The ground was soggy from all that melted snow and as mentioned previously, I had failed to pack boots, but I accompanied her for the first leg of the walk, up to the lake and then I wandered its shore for a little while. The lake was still frozen, and it was lovely there.

We settled in for a quiet afternoon of reading and crocheting. I’d been considering finishing the book I had in progress before starting any Christmas books, but I’ve been wanting to read Holly and stopping myself from buying it for months, and there was a big chunk of the other book left, so I switched over to King, getting up every hour to go outside and walk twice around the perimeter of the house to keep my Fitbit happy.

YaYa made a scrumptious dinner of spinach lasagna, garlic bread, and salad, and we watched The Nightmare Before Christmas afterward—which somehow Noah had never seen, though we’ve watched it without him several times—and Christmas was a wrap.

After Christmas

Then things took a turn. The morning after Christmas, YaYa had a bad fall and after she was checked out at the nearest hospital, Beth ended up driving her home to Wheeling where she’d be more comfortable that afternoon. Beth stayed overnight at her house. She returned to the cabin Wednesday morning, along with her aunt Carole and Carole’s granddaughter Holly, who had come along to drive YaYa’s car back. We had a nice, if short, visit with them. We served them gingerbread and chocolate-peppermint tea and drove to the Pendleton canyon overlook. That night Beth and I had a soak in the hot tub at the lodge and Thursday morning we all went to the accessible falls overlook as a last little goodbye before we left the park.

We were sorry to miss the last two days of our visit with YaYa, and it wasn’t precisely a white Christmas, and the kids did not find their true loves, but that would have been difficult given that they didn’t even leave the cabin until Tuesday afternoon when I suggested a walk to the falls, and then once more when we went to White Grass Café for lunch on Wednesday, after Beth got back. But we all got a taste of Christmas. I hope you did, too.

Merry and Bright

Eight days out, Christmas preparations are in full swing. The living room and yard are decorated. My shopping is finished, barring any last-minute impulse purchases. Our Christmas cards are a little more than half addressed, and I’m more than halfway finished wrapping presents, but there are some left and more come in the mail every day, so it’s hard to get caught up. I am not stressed about the gifts, but I do wish the cards were in the mail.

In addition to the pinwheel cookies, our resident baker made Christmas crack, or toffee bark if you prefer to call it that, which I think I might. They filled a tin with it and gave it to our new next-door neighbors as a housewarming gift, and in the two days since they made it, we finished the rest. Sometime this week I’m going to make gingerbread dough, which we’ll take to Blackwater with us and bake there.

We’ve been watching a lot of Hallmark and Lifetime Christmas movies, mostly with gay or lesbian protagonists. We usually watch one or two in December, but so far, we’ve watched four and I don’t think we’re finished. I can’t really say what accounts for this behavior. To balance it out, the kids and I have also been watching Christmas horror (Krampus and the Day of the Beast) and Friday night all of us watched Tokyo Godfathers, which is also kind of dark and takes place at Christmas (though North asserts is not a Christmas movie).

Our main Christmas activities over the past few days have been a visit to Brookside Gardens to see the lights, and a trip to Butler’s Orchard to get a Christmas tree. We went to Brookside on Thursday. It was hard to pick a day because of the need to ration North’s migraine medicine, but we settled on that day partly because it’s North’s night to cook and if we went to the lights on the same evening they could take part in two medication-enabled activities for the price of one. This is the kind of strategizing we do constantly. I commented after we’d figured out the plan that North’s headaches are like Noah’s homework used to be, the axis around which the whole family turns.

Anyway, it was a fun outing, and it felt particularly festive because just that day North had found out they got into Saint Mary’s College of Maryland, bringing the number of schools to which they’ve been admitted to four. (The third one was Towson University, which I don’t think I mentioned.) Both Saint Mary’s and Towson are state schools. Saint Mary’s is the public honors college. So now their current choices are one school in Wales, one in Rhode Island, and two in Maryland. They’ve heard from all the schools to which they applied early action, and there will be a pause of a few months before they hear from the remaining two (Oberlin and Mount Holyoke) to which they applied regular decision. It will be interesting to see where they land.

Getting back to Brookside…at a stand just inside the entrance, Beth and the kids got hot chocolate, cookies, and funnel cake. My blood sugar had gone higher than I expected on dinner (or maybe my newly changed sensor wasn’t fully calibrated yet) so I decided to abstain, except for a sip of Beth’s hot chocolate and few bites of North’s funnel cake.

Once we had food we started to walk through the gardens. The lights were lovely, as always, and mostly the same as always. (Beth did notice a snail she thought was new.) I have too many favorites to list, but the Loch Ness monster is probably my top pick. It blows fog out of its mouth. I’m also fond of the croaking frog. We saw a toddler boy standing by it with a look of pure wonder on his face.

We walked through the display a little more quickly than usual, as it was chilly evening. Also, Noah had forgotten his camera and usually he stops to take a lot of pictures. I was kind of sorry not have those. I took some, but his are always better, partly because he has a fancy camera and partly because he’s a skilled photographer.

Two days later we headed out to Butler’s, where we get strawberries in the spring and blueberries and blackberries in the summer, in addition to Christmas trees in December. I don’t know why, but there were a lot fewer trees on offer than usual. There was also a sign saying they only had six-foot trees, although, as Beth pointed out, the orchard seemed to have “a generous interpretation” of six feet. Many were probably more like five and half feet, based on how they measured up against our son, who’s 5’ 8’’. We picked a silver fir that was probably about six feet tall that North liked. I was concerned that it might not be big enough for our ornament collection, but there was nothing much bigger, so we had it baled and put on top of the car. (And later when I looked at a picture from last year of North standing near our tree right after we’d picked it out, it looked about the same size, so we’ll see.)

We went to the farm market where we shopped for little gifts and treats for ourselves. I got a caramel pecan turtle truffle and a slice of gingerbread for later. Noah got a bottle of something called “eggnog milk” because he wanted to see if it was any different from regular eggnog. He reported later that it was not.

There’s another week of school and work before winter break. We’ll be opening presents from my West Coast relatives a little early, on the Solstice, to make room in our always-crowded car for the drive to West Virginia. That will add a little more merriment to the last days of the wait for Christmas.

Magic, Wonder, Joy

Almost a week ago Beth, Noah, and I picked North up from school toward the end of fourth period and drove to the Wheaton Metro stop, where we boarded a train headed for the city. We had gotten tickets for the White House Christmas tour from Beth’s office.

We’d been to White House tours or events a number of times in the over thirty years we’ve lived in the DC metro area. Five, the number is five: a Christmas tour during the Clinton Administration; an East Wing tour and the Easter Egg roll in the Obama years; and two garden tours, once during the Obama administration and one last fall. And now we’ve come full circle and done the Christmas tour again.

A lot of labor groups had been scheduled for that day; you could tell from the conversations of people in line. We saw our around-the-corner neighbors Chris and Mel and their two teen and preteen daughters. (Chris works at the AFL-CIO.) They had to step out of line at one of the security checkpoints because there was a problem with someone’s i.d., but it was resolved, and they were able to rejoin the line. I was glad for them. It would have been sad to be turned away.

At the entrance to the East Wing there seemed to be a tree growing through the porch roof. I’m guessing it was the bottom and top halves of two trees, or maybe the same tree, set up above and below the porch. Anyway, it was a fun effect. When we entered, we walked through a hallway full of sparkly lights and cookie-and-candy-themed decorations hanging from the ceiling and the walls. Actually, there was candy everywhere. The theme was “Magic, Wonder, and Joy” and given the prominence of sweets, I’m guessing that President Biden or the First Lady must have a sweet tooth.

The whole tour really was magical. I enjoyed looking at photographs of the former first families (especially the Carters, given Rosalynn’s recent death) in the White House at Christmas time, the portrait of Michelle Obama, and all the Christmas trees, decorated with different themes. There was a gold star family tree with the names of fallen soldiers, a tree covered in numbers meant to evoke an advent calendar, a tree with the names of the all the states on it, and one with letters from children.

I appreciated getting glimpses of the Capitol and the Washington Monument through the windows of the East Wing, framed with wreaths, ribbons, and ornaments. One room had Nutcracker decorations, there was an antique creche that’s been on display every year since 1967, and a gingerbread house in the shape of the White House. Because it’s the two-hundredth anniversary of the publication of “’Twas the Night Before Christmas,” there was a display of vintage editions of the famous poem behind glass and there was also a giant sugar cookie in the shape of the book set up behind the gingerbread White House. North said it would be fun to be a White House baker, commenting “Life goals.”

Reindeer twined along a track near the ceiling toward the end of the tour and the U.S. Marine Band was playing near the exit. As we walked out, Beth said that when she’s in the White House it just seems like a museum and it’s always when she walks out and looks back that it hits her where she just was.

Right before we left, we were handed chocolate bars. I was saving mine for later, so I asked if it was good chocolate as others were eating theirs. It was decent, middle-of-the-road chocolate, it was concluded. Much like Joe Biden himself, I joked. On the way home, North was paging through the brochure and said they might try the pinwheel cookie recipe in it. And a few days later, they did. It was a moderately complex operation–making two kinds of dough, rolling them out on top of each other, rolling them up, and cutting them into slices. They came out beautifully and they were quite tasty. There’s orange peel in the vanilla dough and you can really taste it. North said they might add them to their regular Christmas baking rotation.

Our house is not as elaborately decorated as the White House (or as it is for Halloween), but Beth and Noah put up the outside lights this weekend, and North decorated a wreath. I haven’t gotten the mantle decorations or the Christmas village set up yet, but it’s on the agenda for this week or maybe even later today. And the first Christmas cards have been trickling in, so the mantle is not devoid of cheer. Little by little, the magic is taking shape.

Thankful

Before the Beach: Weekend to Tuesday

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

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

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

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

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

Birthday Eve: Wednesday

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

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

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

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

Birthday/Thanksgiving

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

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

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

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

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

Black Friday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Small Business Saturday

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

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

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

Of Pageantry and Pumpkins

Prologue

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

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

Saturday: Parade & Play #1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday to Monday: Pumpkins

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

Tuesday: Pretending or Panhandling? (and another Pumpkin)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wednesday: Pupusas

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

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

Thursday to Saturday: Pumpkin Again & Play #2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

October Harvest

Sisterly Visit

My sister came East for a wedding the second weekend in October, and we got to see her for a few hours Saturday afternoon. We were hoping to take her on our annual pumpkin stand outing, but events conspired against us. The day was rainy, North had to review a show for Cappies, and Sara had to leave earlier than she originally thought because she didn’t realize she was invited to the rehearsal dinner. So that left us a three-and-a-half-hour gap when everyone was available, but it was nice to see her anyway. When Sara comes East, we mostly meet up at the beach, or before our mom moved West at Mom’s house, so she hasn’t been to our house in twenty years. We showed her around the house (she admired the newly yellow kitchen walls and the not-so-new kids’ self-portraits from preschool on the living room walls). I took her through the front yard full of Halloween decorations and the mostly moribund garden out back.

Then we had a leisurely lunch at Busboys and Poets, where she was impressed with the array of gluten-free options (I’d chosen it with this in mind) and then we came home and served her gluten-free mochi brownies Noah had made the night before and then we sent her on her way to Winchester, Virginia with a piece of gluten-free almond-flour cornbread North had made for dinner a couple days previous.

Last Open House

The next Tuesday there was an Open House at North’s school. This was a surprise because the school has not had them in years past, unlike all five of the other MCPS schools our kids have attended.  (The first couple years I thought it was because of covid, but I later learned they just didn’t do it.) I have always enjoyed getting a glimpse of the kids’ school day, so when I found out it was happening, it was a given that I was going—the only question was how many and which periods I would visit.

It turned out the Open House didn’t cover the whole day, just the end of second and fifth, and all of third and sixth periods. Luckily, the classes I most wanted to see just happened to be third (AP Lit) and sixth (Mythology and Modern Culture), so I was having a hard time choosing the morning or afternoon block when I decided to do both, even though it was busy work week. I haven’t had a chance to do this since North was in middle school, and I knew in the future, I’d remember having gone, but I would not remember writing a blog post about adaptogens for a supplement company.

North has an abbreviated schedule with no first or second period class, so I commuted with them to school for third period. They take a bus-to-train-to-bus route every day, leaving an hour and a half before they need to be at school. We got there about half hour early, which is what happens when North catches every bus and train. We sat at the tables outside the school, and I ate the yogurt and plum I’d packed for breakfast.

AP Lit started with a warm-up in which the students had to write down an example of juxtaposition, euphony, and/or motif. The teachers asked people to share, and a few did, then she went over definitions and examples of each term on the electronic board. I noticed that the Emily Dickinson poem she put up for euphony wasn’t on the screen long enough for anyone to read and find where the euphony was. (I can’t help it. Whenever I’m in a high school English class I tend to think how I would teach it differently.)

Next the kids were asked to produce poems they’d chosen to bring to class to share and they rotated through pairs, reading their poems aloud for each other (or exchanging copies to read silently) then explaining to each other why they chose the poems they did. This activity also seemed rushed. I might have done fewer rotations in hope of achieving a deeper discussion. The teacher then asked for people to share their poems with the whole class, and a few kids did.

The last activity was silently reading an Amiri Baraka poem, “An Agony, As Now,” and annotating it in preparation for a timed writing on it the following class. I got a copy, too, and I have to say, it’s a hard poem. While the students were working on that, she had them come up to her desk one by one and pick a poet for an individual poetry project. One girl who had just read “The Road Less Travelled” out loud announced no one could pick Robert Frost because she loved Robert Frost, and she was calling dibs on him. It didn’t work. Someone who got called up before her chose Frost and the girl was put out. North later said she probably wasn’t that upset, she’s just dramatic. North didn’t get their first choice (Emily Dickinson) either, but they got their second choice (Anne Sexton), and they seemed okay with that outcome. At least they did not complain loudly.

I went back to the outside tables for fourth period while North went to computer science. I’d brought my laptop, and I thought I might work, but I read the newspaper and wrote some of this. North usually eats in the theater room, but they came out to join me for lunch. It’s nice they’re allowed to eat outside. The day was pleasant when the sun was out, but a little chilly when it went behind the clouds. I probably should have brought a jacket. There were kids eating at the picnic tables and on the sidewalk and throwing footballs around and one annoying boy kept trying to ride a locked Lime scooter without paying for it, causing it to beep loudly. North said, “That kid has to be a freshman,” with scorn befitting a senior. The lunch period is generously long, fifty minutes. (In my high school we only had twenty-five minutes.) We both ate and they did some math homework and we talked.

There was an information session for parents prior to the afternoon class block and I ended up stuck in for most of fifth period. You weren’t supposed to go to your kids’ classes until it was over. It was sparsely attended, as was the Open House as a whole. It wasn’t well publicized and as I mentioned, the school hasn’t done it before, or at least not in the last few years. The parents at the session skewed toward those with kids in ninth grade. In fact, at one point a mother introduced herself as having a ninth and twelfth grader and the principal joked, “but you’re not here for your twelfth grader” and right after that I had to introduce myself as the mother of a senior, which was a little awkward.

I managed to catch the last five minutes of North’s math class. The students are about to start a statistics research project and the teacher was explaining how to construct a hypothesis for it and what a null hypothesis means. North’s project will be to determine if schools in more affluent areas win more Cappies awards for their school plays and which categories are most affected. They got curious when, as a critic, they noticed how much more elaborate the costumes and sets are in wealthier schools.

Mythology was next. The vibe was more laid back than in AP Lit. The teacher spent almost the whole class going from small group to small group talking to them about their ancient Egyptian culture research projects. North was in the mummies group and the group told the teacher they were going to focus on the how-to aspect of mummification and how social hierarchy affected who was mummified and who was not. The teacher suggested they include information on canopic jars and the evolution of mummification techniques. The teacher obviously has a lot of enthusiasm for the material, which is always nice to see. I noticed some of the groups were getting off topic, though, when the teacher wasn’t with them. When I mentioned it to North later, they said, “Well, it’s an elective, so that will happen.” Seventh period was closed to parents, so North headed off to ceramics and I made my way home, walking to the Metro stop for the exercise and then taking a train and a bus.

Working Man

Noah was out of the house all day Thursday and Friday working. As of two weeks ago, he’s junior editor on an as-needed basis for a video production company in DC. In those two weeks, they’ve had him come into the office six days. So far, he’s worked on two projects, sorting footage from a conference into categories and matching different voiceovers to an ad for biofuels. He has no guaranteed hours, so it’s hard to tell how regular it’s going to be, but it’s good work experience and nice for him to have some money coming in, in addition to what he makes on the more occasional work he does for Mike. I think he must be feeling flush because he bought concert tickets for Royal and the Serpent and Nightly and he’s going to a live recording of the Nightvale podcast. The office is not near a Metro stop, so like his sibling, he has a long bus-to-train-to-bus commute.

Alluring Applications

And speaking of his sibling, they have completed three of their six college applications: to Johnson and Wales University (the culinary school in Rhode Island and their top pick), Saint Mary’s College of Maryland (the public honors college), and Aberystwyth University in Wales (yes, Wales). Towson University (another Maryland public school) is up next. They have been very organized and on top of this, getting the applications with November 1 deadlines finished before fall play rehearsals goes into crunch time, which will happen very soon. Yesterday they mentioned they’d forgotten to switch their career path from chef in one of the non-culinary school options, but then they said breezily that might just make them seem “mysterious and alluring.”

Pumpkin Day

Friday morning, the day before our rescheduled pumpkin outing, having had a sore throat and some congestion for a couple days, I decided to take a covid test. I was wondering if it would derail the expedition a second time. Would it have? I honestly don’t know. We were going to be outside for all the planned activities and maybe if I stayed away from the pumpkin stand, allowing others to go up to it and if I didn’t go inside the restaurant to pick up the food… I was already trying to talk myself into it, even though I was simultaneously thinking I probably shouldn’t be in a car with the whole family for a non-essential activity. But the test was negative, to my relief. That’s a very specific kind of relief that exists now, isn’t it? The, oh it’s just a cold relief.

We set out around 3:20, and traffic was heavy for a while, but we got to the farm stand in plenty of time. On the way, we listened to my Halloween playlist, which North downloaded to their phone because the Apple one we listened to on the way to Cedar Point has too many songs that don’t belong on a Halloween playlist, in their opinion. The downside of this was that we couldn’t complain to each other about the playlist, so we turned our critical eye to people’s Halloween decorations, or rather the relative scarcity of them. The ones we saw were quite nice.

When we arrived, were surprised to find the stand unstaffed with instructions on a laminated sheet at the counter explaining how to pay electronically. The whole set up was quite trusting, but apparently, it’s working for them. We loaded up the car with jack-o-lantern pumpkins, a soup pumpkin, decorative gourds, sauerkraut, apples, apple butter, apple cider doughnuts, and apple cider.

We’ve been coming to this stand since before the kids were born, back when the farm was located there and there were pumpkins in the fields, and a cider press and farm animals. (It’s moved out to cheaper land as the area has gentrified.) In 2018, we thought it would be the last time with Noah, but he came with us in 2020 when he was spending his sophomore year of college at home, and again this year, so I’m not going to make any predictions about whether it will be North’s last time or not, but it could be. Or maybe one or both kids will settle in the DC area, and we’ll be bringing our grandkids there. You never know.

From the farm stand we set out for Meadowlark Botanical Gardens for a pre-dinner stroll. It was a pretty day and we enjoyed the changing leaves, fall flowers and berries, the koi in the ponds, and the pavilion, arch, totem poles, and statues in the Korean Bell Garden. We also got a glimpse of the holiday lights in the shape of flowers, mushrooms, and small trees that are being installed.

As always when we visit these gardens in October, the place is teeming with dressed up teenagers taking homecoming photos. Between the girls in tiny dresses and teetering heels, the boys in suits, and a wedding party, people in formal wear probably outnumbered visitors in street clothes. It makes you feel undressed, taking a walk on a Saturday afternoon, dressed in khakis and a flannel shirt. We didn’t realize it when the wedding was in progress because everyone was up on a deck that was partly obscured, but as we were leaving, we saw the two brides in big white dresses and realized it was a lesbian wedding. It made me think about how when Beth and I had our commitment ceremony in 1992, it would have been quite daring to have it in such a public outdoor space. The world really has changed.

Sitting in a pavilion overlooking a small lake, we ordered from Sunflower, a vegetarian Chinese restaurant and our traditional dinner spot for this outing, and we went to pick it up.

We took it to the picnic tables at Nottoway Park, to eat. We used to eat inside the restaurant, but starting in 2020, we added the picnic component, and we’ve kept it, even though we occasionally eat inside restaurants now. There is a nice community garden in the park and after we’d had our fill of seaweed salad, dumplings, two kinds of soup, two kinds of noodles, vegetarian shrimp, sushi, and a stir-fry, we took a little walk down there. There were tomatoes still thriving and a lot of fall vegetables (cabbage, chard, collards, etc.) and zinnias in many of the plots. It was almost full dark, and a half moon had risen as we left.

Our last stop was for ice cream. We tried a new-to-us place, which I recommend if you’re local. I got half pumpkin and half green tea. Beth placed a similar order, half pumpkin, half coffee. I told her it was like a pumpkin spice latte in ice cream form. We ducked into a nearby CVS to look for candy corn, but Christmas had overtaken the store and there was none to be found. (Beth found some the next day.)

“Another successful pumpkin outing,” Beth said as we carried the pumpkins to the porch after driving home. Noah noted that none of them fell out of the hatch onto the highway.

“Is that the bar?” I asked. It isn’t, though. Even if we’d smashed a pumpkin or two, we’d still have had another chance to pick out pumpkins and autumnal treats, walk in a beautiful place, and eat delicious food together one more time. That feels like a windfall.

Here’s our October harvest:

  1. A rare visit from a sister, sister-in-law, and aunt
  2. A last chance to get a sneak peek into North’s school day
  3. Encouraging developments on the job front
  4. Three completed college applications
  5. Pumpkins, gourds, apples, and other fall delights

HalloWeekend

A week ago, on Saturday morning, we were in a hotel room in Western Pennsylvania discussing the comparative usage and etymology of the phrases “fraidy cat” and “scaredy cat,” having discovered that Beth and I would use either term, but the kids had only heard of the latter. The reason for this was that we were on our way to HalloWeekends at Cedar Point (having picked North up at school on Friday afternoon and driven most of the way there the day before) and as we were preparing to hit the road and drive the last few hours, Beth was considering buying one of the necklaces with cats on them that let scare actors know you don’t want to be scared. She speculated it was supposed to evoke the idea of “fraidy cat” and the kids were surprised by the term, which sent us down a pre-breakfast googling rabbit hole.

The trip was a long time in the making. When Noah graduated from high school in 2019, he asked if we could go to Cedar Point that summer, but North was in a play and had a couple day camps and we had another trip planned and we couldn’t fit it in, and you can probably guess why we didn’t go to any amusement parks in 2020 or 2021. It’s a lot easier to get to Hershey Park from where we live, so when we did go to one in 2022, that’s where we went.

But Noah doesn’t ask for much, so it had been bothering me for a long time that we never granted his wish. And then when North got covid this summer and missed a camp field trip to Hershey Park we decided a fall visit to an amusement park was in order. As always, it made more sense to go to Hershey Park. It’s only a couple hours away and Cedar Point is in Ohio, nine to ten hours away. But it’s always going to be that far away, and we’ve been to Hershey Park in the Dark, but not Halloweekends, so we decided to road trip to Ohio over Columbus/Indigenous People’s Day weekend.

I’m glad we did it. It was a lot of fun, long drive and all. We arrived at the park mid-afternoon Saturday and stayed until the evening and then all of Sunday, too. We stayed at the Hotel Breakers, which is a stately early twentieth-century hotel right next to the park and on the shore of Lake Erie. (You can see it in the background of the first picture.) Cedar Point is the amusement park of Beth’s childhood and her family used to stay at this hotel and she really loves it. We got a suite with two beds in one room and a fold-out couch in another, so Noah was able to close the doors between the rooms and have his own space at night. Being so close to the park allowed us to go back to the room in ones and twos as people wanted, which was convenient because the kids wanted to stay longer than we did both nights.

The hotel went all out when it came to lobby decorations. There were spiderwebs on the chandeliers, skeletons riding the carousel horses that usually reside there, life-size figures in various spooky tableaux, and It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown was playing on a continuous loop on a television. Right outside the front entrance there were witch legs sticking out of planters.

The park was also nicely decorated. There were giant collages made of pumpkins and different colored squashes– my favorite was the skull—and all sorts of skeletons and monsters, both statues and animated, talking ones. We all liked the big ogre that sang “Ogreface” to the tune of “Poker Face.”

North used a loaner wheelchair because they didn’t feel up to hours of walking. It works just like at Hershey Park. You get a pass that allows you and your party to go to the front of the ride lines and then they make a note of when you’re allowed to go to the next ride (based on the length of the line you skipped). It was easier pushing them around Cedar Point, which is flat, than Hershey Park, which is a little hillier, but even so by the second day my arms were sore.

Over the course of one and a half days, in different combinations, we rode all kinds of rides—many coasters, a mine ride, a Ferris wheel, swings, a train that goes through a village of skeletons (this is a permanent feature of the park—it’s not for Halloween), and one of those tower rides that drops you from a great height. This last one is called the Power Tower and it’s 240 feet high. North was the only one who wanted to ride it. Together the kids rode much scarier coasters than I ever have, but Beth said that’s because in my youth there weren’t coasters with the cars hanging off the sides of the track or with so many inversions. I do want to note, as I do whenever we go to any amusement park, that in 1989, the week before my college graduation, when it was the tallest coaster in the world (205 feet), I rode the Magnum at Cedar Point. It is far from the tallest now and I would never ride it.

While we were in line for the Blue Streak, which at 78 feet is the smallest wooden coaster in the park and right at my limit, I was explaining to Noah that in my experience, the years from my mid-teens to early twenties marked the peak (pun intended) of my roller coaster bravery. So when the ride was over and a middle-aged woman in the row in front of me asked her friend, “Why is this ride so much scarier than it used to be?” and I relayed the comment to Noah, he laughed.

We had minor mishaps on two rides. On the Wild Mouse, a small coaster with cars that spin on the tracks (think of it like a teacup ride that also goes up and down), North’s car got stuck on the track, still spinning, and it was a while before they could get off, quite dizzy. On the Ferris Wheel, there was no malfunction, but we misjudged how cold it would be up there after dark. In the daytime it had been in the mid-fifties, and I was warm enough in my hoodie with two layers underneath. I enjoyed the first two rotations of the wheel and the lovely view of the all the lit-up rides and the shimmering surface of the lake, but during the third rotation we were stopped for a long time near the top and we were all freezing, especially Noah who was only wearing a t-shirt under his denim jacket. So we when we got to the bottom we were all aghast when it started back up again for a fourth and final spin, again with long stops.

After that, Beth lent Noah her fleece jacket, hat, and gloves, so he could stay in the park with North to do some of the haunted mazes and outdoor scare zones, while Beth and I retreated to the hotel to rest and relax after a long day. (She may have mentioned once or twice that she told everyone it was going to be cold and to dress warmly.)

On Sunday we did fewer rides and took in some shows. We saw a short musical murder mystery play called Wake the Dead. The premise is that it’s the funeral of the victim and his four potential heirs are expecting to find out who will inherit, but instead each is accused of his murder and must mount a defense in song. In the end the audience votes and then the guilty party (who presumably varies from show to show) sings again. It was fun and featured an actor who did a spirited version of Meatloaf’s “Hot Patootie/Bless My Soul.”

Next, we attended a recitation of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” with a brief frame narrative in which the murderous narrator is about to be executed for his crime and then sets out to explain himself to the witnesses to the execution. I’m not sure the extra bit added much. The story stands alone and the actor who recited it did a nicely creepy job.

After the second show, we split up because the indoor mazes opened at five and the kids wanted to do more (the outdoor fright zones weren’t open on Sundays). Beth was not interested, being the self-described fraidy cat in the family, but I stayed with the kids for two mazes. The first was a tour of a haunted house with members of a paranormal society leading you through it. Just a few steps in I got North’s wheelchair stuck in a doorway and North said, “Noah is better at this,” and I handed it over to him. He was very good at maneuvering it through narrow spaces, even when the lights went out and it was not at all clear to me which way to turn. I walked behind him and held onto the hem of his jacket. Later I told Beth that there were so many people jumping out at you it made it less scary, because there was no suspense. You were pretty much always expecting it if it had been thirty seconds or more since the last one. The second maze was a dance club run by vampires. It was called Orpheus, so I thought it was a nice touch that “Don’t look back” was spray-painted on the wall in two places. There were more mazes, but by that time I’d had enough so I left the kids and went back to the hotel.

Beth had already eaten dinner, but I hadn’t so I invited her to join me on the beach while I ate half an apple, plus a cheese stick and a latte I got at the Starbucks in the lobby. (Finding diabetic-friendly vegetarian food in the park was kind of a challenge so I carried food with me.) Cedar Point and Lake Erie hold a lot of childhood memories for Beth, but it’s also very near Oberlin and we went to the park once or twice and to the lake many times in college, so it has nostalgic early relationship vibes for us, too. We didn’t stay too long, though, because it was cold out and we wanted to go inside and soak in the hot tub while we waited for the kids to come back. That was nice, as after over 24,000 steps that day, my feet were sore.

On Monday morning Beth and I took separate walks on the beach. It was lovely down there. There was a big flock on seagulls near the water and the remnants of the sunrise in the sky. I would have liked to walk longer, but we had a nine-plus-hour drive ahead of us, so I said my goodbyes to the beautiful lobby and lake, and we hit the road, back to work and school and the routines of the week.

Watery Weekend

I know it was a week ago, but how was your Labor Day weekend? Our was hot—it got up to the high nineties on Sunday and Monday—so we sought out water, wading or swimming in a creek, a river, a bay, and a pool.

Saturday: Sligo Creek

The kids and I go on a creek walk every year at the end of the summer, usually the week before school starts, but when we don’t manage that, over Labor Day weekend. That’s what happened this year, as the week before school started first North had covid and then we were at the beach.

Our neighborhood is sometimes called Between the Creeks because, you guessed it, it’s between two creeks. Usually we wade in Long Branch, but this year North proposed Sligo because they’d discovered a pretty stretch of it while on a walk recently. Noah and I were game.

I needed to pick up Their Eyes Were Watching God from the library for book club and the library’s new temporary-during-renovation location is in a storefront near Sligo Creek, so we made that part of the outing. There’s a Starbucks on the way, too, so we’d been out of the house for about an hour before we entered the creek, carefully stepping around the poison ivy on the shore. The heat hadn’t set in yet—it was only in the mid-eighties that day—so it was pleasant to amble around doing errands and then spend another hour wading in the creek.

North led us to a deep pool and then to a fallen log where the kids tried to limbo. Noah found a dead moth, still perched on a ragged leather jacket caught on a branch. We crossed underneath two bridges, a footbridge (pictured) and the tunnel-like space under the New Hampshire Avenue bridge, where the rafters are filled with more branches, presumably from the last time the water was that high.

We came home in the late afternoon, washed our feet and legs with poison ivy scrub, just in case, and Noah and I made manicotti with homemade tomato sauce for dinner, then finished Kiki’s Delivery Service, which we’d started the night before. It was a very nice day.

Sunday: Patapsco River/Chesapeake Bay

Sunday afternoon, we drove to Fort Smallwood Park in Anne Arundel County at the confluence of the Patapsco River and the Chesapeake Bay. We’ve been there a couple times before. The draw is that drones are allowed and there’s swimming, so there’s something for everyone in the family. In the car Noah realized he’d forgotten his bathing suit and he didn’t want to swim in his clothes, despite our encouragement to do just that. Instead, he waded up to his knees, flew his drone, and lay on a towel on the sand and read a Game of Thrones book.

Beth, North, and I went deeper into the water. It was slightly salty, with little swells from power boats, and a pleasant temperature. We stood in the water and talked. I floated on my back a while. That might have been when my phone, which I’d accidentally left in my swim bottom pocket fell to its final resting place at the bottom of the river. I didn’t realize what had happened until I got back to my towel and started looking for it. Then I remembered I’d had it with me right before I went in the water. I was intending to take a picture of Beth and North, but they were too far out to get a good one, so I went to take it back to my bag and to stash my wedding ring somewhere safe, too. (It’s a little loose so I don’t like to wear it in bodies of water.) Apparently, I only put the ring away and not the phone.

I thought about going back into the water and looking for it, but the water was too murky, the area we’d covered was too large, and it just seemed impossible, so I didn’t even try. Everyone was reading, so I tried to force myself to concentrate on the afterword to Robinson Crusoe, which I’d finally finished a couple days earlier, but it was hard because my mind kept wandering from Crusoe’s watery misfortune to mine.

When we were about to leave and I was on my way to the restrooms I looked carefully at the clearer shallow water along the shore, just in case the phone had washed ashore, but it hadn’t. Before we got in the car, I asked North to try to track it with their phone one last time, but their phone couldn’t reach mine, so we drove away, leaving it behind.

We stopped twice on the way home and I consoled myself with a child-sized frozen custard at Rita’s and then an hour later, a Pineapple Paradise drink at Starbucks (while Beth dropped off bags of clothes at Value Village). What the hell, I thought, my glucose monitor wouldn’t be tracking my blood sugar for a while anyway. (I take the readings with my phone.)

Monday: Long Branch Pool

Beth got me a new phone at the AT&T store the next morning after spending a long time on the phone with AT&T the night before. She is very good to me.

She and I went to Long Branch pool that afternoon, the last day it was open for the season. North and I went a few times at the beginning of the summer, but I don’t think we went at all in July or August. Noah isn’t much for swimming pools and he declined to come, as did North, who was originally planning to come but decided it was too hot to leave the house a second time that day. (They went for a walk with me that morning and we got iced lattes at Takoma Beverage Company.)

I thought the water might be too warm for swimming laps, but it was actually a perfect temperature. I guess that was because it hadn’t been hot for very long—and the week before had been unseasonably mild. I did twenty-five laps in the crowded and somewhat chaotic lap lane and then I went down the slide for good measure, since I won’t be able to do it again until next year. Beth soaked in the main part of the pool and then retreated to a chair to read a magazine. I would have liked to read there for a bit, too, but I needed to get back to the house to make dinner, so I hit the showers and we left.

Despite the heat, we had a picnic dinner—vegetarian hot dogs, baked beans, devilled eggs, corn on the cob, watermelon, and vanilla ice cream with peach-sour cherry sauce. (I’d recently found the sour cherries leftover from earlier in the summer at the bottom of the chest freezer.) Noah hosed and scrubbed the dirt off the patio table, and North shucked the corn and made the sauce. We usually have a backyard picnic with some variation of this meal on Memorial Day, Fourth of July, and Labor Day, but it was the first of the long summer weekends we were all together, as Noah left for California before Memorial Day, and the four of us we were scattered over three states on the Fourth. It was nice to have one last (well, also first) summer picnic dinner together.

After Labor Day

In addition to all the profound contributions of the labor movement to our lives, Labor Day also makes us think that fall is around the corner. Despite this, it was hot the week afterward, our hottest weather of the summer actually, with a high close to 100 degrees at least one day. But today it started to feel more bearable after a rain. (Out for a walk afterward, I actually saw steam rising from the street.)

Tomorrow the high temperature is only supposed to be in the low eighties and the weather chart has some enticing numbers that start with seven after that. The cooler weather will come just in time for the Takoma Folk Festival tomorrow and the pie contest the weekend after that, both classic September events for us. We’re looking forward to hearing some live music and North is currently deciding what kind of pie to bake.

As for October, we are already making plans for a trip to an amusement park (probably Cedar Point) over Columbus Day/Día de la Raza/Indigenous People’s Day weekend and a quick visit from my sister the following weekend. She had a wedding to attend in Virginia and is swinging by for a day. Among other activities, we’re thinking of taking her to the farm stand where we always get our pumpkins. Summer weekends are (almost) over, but we’re gearing up for fall ones.