Go Beach: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 27

Posted on November 29, 2020 by Steph

[Show as slideshow]

Saturday

When we passed the statue of Jesus with his arms raised at the intersection of Piney Branch and New Hampshire Avenues, I said softly to Beth, “Go beach.” We pass that statue just five or ten minutes in the trip to the beach and North always said that when they were little and we’d drive by it, even though most of the times we passed it we were not in fact headed for the beach but on some more mundane errand.

It had been stressful for Beth getting out of the house, figuring out how to fit everything we’d need for a week in the car around the wheelchair, walker, and shower chair. She wasn’t in the best mood, but she gave me a little smile anyway.

But as the kids disappeared into their headphones, she and I listened to a playlist of 60s hits from a podcast she listens to and by the time we got to the Taco Bell and Dairy Queen just past the Bay Bridge around 2:15, she seemed more cheerful. We got a late lunch from the drive-through windows and ate it at the picnic tables outside the DQ. This is our new pandemic beach drive tradition. I guess it’s a tradition, as we’ve done it twice now and as a family we form traditions easily. Noah and I got pumpkin pie-flavored confections because this was a Thanksgiving trip. (Though the kids both had classes through Tuesday and Beth and I were going to work, too, so it was going to be something of a busman’s holiday.)

We rolled into Rehoboth about 4:45, picked up the keys for the house in a box outside the realty, and drove to the house. It’s the same one where we stayed in July, so the wood-paneled walls and soaring ceiling in the dining room were a familiar and welcome sight. I knew just where the hook was to hang my mask when I walked in the front door.

After we’d unpacked, North and I walked down to the beach for a quick hello. I stood briefly with the toes of my rain boots in the foamy water, but stepped back so I wouldn’t end up with soaked feet, as they were ankle boots. It was cloudy but we could still see a lot of stars and something golden in the sky that might have been a planet.

Beth went out to pick up some groceries for breakfast and Grandpa Mac’s for dinner. I got the mac-n-cheese with broccoli, celery, and mushrooms mixed in; I never get anything else, though I vary the vegetables. We watched the middle third of The Castle of Cagliostro, an anime film we’d started the night before at home.

Sunday

The next morning we ate breakfast and menu planned for the week so Beth could go on the main grocery shopping trip of the week. She wanted to try out their curbside delivery system but after she’d filled out the form it said there were no pickup slots available, so that was disappointing. Before she left to go shopping, she went for a walk on the boardwalk.

North and I took also took a walk around the same time. It was a nice day, mild and sunny. North wore a sweater and I was wearing jeans and a wool shirt; neither of us needed a jacket. It’s a short walk from our house to the beach, only a block, but I was still encouraged they’d made it down there twice without any mobility device because they’ve had some setbacks with pain recently, which is why we had to bring the wheelchair and the walker. Beth’s making an appointment at the pain clinic soon. I have a feeling a new round of physical therapy may be in their future.

When North was ready to go back to the house, I walked them there and then turned back to the beach because I wanted a longer walk. I spent almost two hours rambling down the beach and boardwalk and then sitting on the sand with my back resting against the fence the divides the beach from the beach grass. It wasn’t too crowded and virtually everyone on the boardwalk was wearing a mask—it’s required there. On the beach, where it’s not, it was more like half and half.

I was particularly charmed by two little girls who winter hats on but were barefoot and barelegged up to the knees, wearing matching flowered capris. They were running up to the water, getting their feet wet, running back to the sand and jumping in a big puddle the tide left there. Their joy (and constant movement) reminded me of my own kids when they were small and on the beach and made me a bit nostalgic for those days.

I went back to the house to eat lunch and read three chapters of The Fated Sky and watch a couple episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale with Noah. By 4:15, I was ready to hit the beach again and North wanted to come, too. This time we took the walker and went further down the boardwalk. And again, when they wanted to go home, I walked them home and went right back. I was out until well after dark, sitting on a bench on a stretch of boardwalk where the dry grass was short enough to see over and watching the white tops of the waves shining in the glow the streetlights cast on the beach.

Beth made chili and cornbread for dinner, then we finally finished The Castle of Cagliostro. My favorite thing about it was the setting of the castle, which is very well realized. Then we watched a couple episodes of Blackish. We’re at the end of season 3, just about up to the part where Zoey goes to college.

And speaking of college, the day before we left for the beach, Noah had to decide whether to go back to Ithaca in the spring. Three of the four classes he registered for are meeting entirely online, the cafeterias are going to operate on a grab-and-go basis, and his best friend is not going to be on campus, so he decided to stay home. One thing that made the decision hard was the one in-person class was Cinema Production II, which can be hard to get into and which is important for his course of study. Still, it didn’t seem worth a semester of taking classes and eating meals mostly in his dorm room when he could be taking classes from his room at home, where the food’s better and he’d at least have his family to keep him company.

I’m really sad for him, not being on campus for a quarter of his first year of college and the whole second year. I just hope with two (or is it three now?) new vaccines on the horizon and the promise of real leadership at the federal level, he’ll be able to go back for his junior year next fall. He’s already decided if he goes abroad it will be in his senior year so he can have a whole, uninterrupted year on campus. And I hope he gets into CP II again, so he can get more use out of the film studios that drew him to Ithaca in the first place.

Birthday

Monday was Beth’s birthday and it was such a complicated day we needed to write down the schedule. Everyone had work or school, but in addition, North wanted to go out for bagels for breakfast, I had to pick up the birthday cake I’d ordered for Beth’s birthday from the bakery, we were going to get takeout Italian for lunch and have a picnic, plus go to Starbucks for Beth’s birthday reward. In the afternoon, we had a virtual teacher-parent conference with North’s new English teacher (the original one quit early in the school year and they had a medium-term sub until a long-term sub was hired). After that, we were going to do a Christmas card photo shoot on the beach. Finally, I was making breaded tofu sticks and applesauce for dinner, which Beth had requested for her birthday dinner, followed by cake and presents.

So the day went more or less like that, with some minor variations. North and I left the house for the bagel place at eight, shortly after I rolled out of bed, so they could be home by nine for their English class. But it turns out it’s only open Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays during the off season, so we came home without bagels. I can’t say I minded much as a morning walk on the boardwalk is never amiss and I was just as happy to eat cranberry granola at home.

I worked on a technical sales sheet for a blood pressure supplement on the screened porch in the morning and then Beth drove me to the bakery to get her cake—a chocolate cake with cookies-and-cream frosting and mini Oreos on top. I might have gone to get it in a sneakier fashion, but while we were still in Takoma the bakery returned my call and she’d picked up the phone, so there wasn’t much point in secrecy after that. Soon after Beth and Noah went to pick up the Italian takeout, which took longer than we expected to be ready so there wasn’t time for a picnic before our parent-teacher conference. We’d requested one because the teacher was new and we wanted to explain more about the accommodations in North’s 504 plan. He seemed very nice and was impressively fluent with North’s pronouns.

After that, Beth and North walked to Starbucks and brought home treats for everyone. I got a latte and a doughnut. I worked some more and then took a walk on the beach and Noah and I read a little before I started cooking dinner. (We didn’t do our Christmas card photo shoot that afternoon because Noah wanted to use his drone to take some of the pictures and it was windy.)

After we’d eaten dinner, we had cake and ice cream and Beth opened her presents. I got her a pair of pajama bottoms with Peanuts characters on them, Noah got her a bottle of fancy olive oil, and North got her some French drinking chocolate. She seemed pleased with the cake and presents. She just turned fifty-four, so I’m hoping her fifty-fifth year will be better than this past one (on many fronts). I’m feeling optimistic that it will be.

The birthday girl chose the evening’s entertainment, so we watched The Animaniacs before splitting up to watch The Handmaid’s Tale (Noah and me) and The Crown (Beth). Beth and North also took a walk down to the beach to look at the stars in a clearer sky than when North and I took our night walk.

Tuesday

Beth, North, and I went on another breakfast expedition at eight, this time to Café a-Go-Go, where we got takeout coffee, hot chocolate, and pastries and had a nice walk on the boardwalk. It was well past sunrise when we set out, but the light still looked new and golden and where it touched the swelling waves it turned them a translucent green.

We ate at home, supplementing our sweets with eggs, yogurt, and banana. I settled into my corner-of-the-porch office again to work. North’s last class for the week was over around eleven and Noah’s just before three, which was around the time I finished the sales sheet. The kids still had homework, but I was finished with work for the week, and happy about it.

It was less windy, so once North woke from an afternoon nap, we headed down to the beach and Beth and Noah took turns taking pictures of us in pairs or all together (using the drone for the group shots). It was a sunny day and the sea was a brilliant blue. I’d told the kids to pack red or green clothes but I hadn’t said anything to Beth because often the photos on the card are just the kids. When I decided it would be nice to have all of us, I was pleased that I happened to have a red flannel shirt and Beth had a green sweater, so we made a festive mix. We did some photos with masks because I thought it said something about the past year, but in the end we decided not to use any of those. After we were finished, Noah and I strolled up the boardwalk to Funland so he could fly the drone over it because North wanted to know what it looked like in the off season.

North made Mushroom Wellington for dinner, which other than Thanksgiving, was the fanciest dinner we had all week. After dinner we looked at the drone footage and noted with interest which rides at Funland have been stored off the premises and which are still there but partly disassembled. The drone is really the gift that keeps on giving. Beth made a fire and we roasted marshmallows for S’mores and watched the last episode of season 3 of Blackish, the one in which DeVante is born. Sorry for the spoiler if you, like us, are three and a half years behind in this show.

Wednesday

Wednesday was a little less busy than the last two days. We ordered takeout from Egg for breakfast (I got pumpkin praline French toast) and Japanese for lunch (I got seaweed salad and udon noodles with vegetables and tofu). While we were still at home and planning the trip, Beth and I decided we’d only get takeout for dinner two nights and cook all the other nights, but we failed to specify how many times we’d get takeout for breakfast and lunch and once we were there everyone had favorites they wanted to have, so we ended up getting takeout more days than not and sometimes twice in a day. It might have been because we weren’t going to do a lot of the things we often do on this trip, like going to the holiday sing-along or shopping in the downtown stores on Black Friday, so this was something we could do.

In between breakfast and lunch, Noah and I read a couple chapters of our book, and after lunch and a conference call Beth had to attend, we made a foray into downtown Rehoboth. Beth, Noah, and I got pumpkin-cinnamon frozen custard at Kohr’s stand and North got ice cream on a some kind of European pancake-like confection. We made stops at several stores we decided we would visit: 1) Candy Kitchen where I went in alone with a list of what everyone wanted, 2) the bookstore, where Noah and I had placed orders for Christmas gifts online ahead of time and picked them up at the counter, and 3) a store or maybe two North wanted to visit and could not identify because it was to get something for me, but Beth approved and accompanied them.

I was in and out of the bookstore pretty quickly, but I was there long enough to see the store had gone all in for its native son President-elect. As I stood at the counter which also had a big display of President Obama’s new book and some RBG merchandise, I heard one harried sounding staff member tell another she had to go to the “Biden table” to see if they had sold out of “I’m a Biden Girl” hats. I also spied Biden earrings (in case you wanted his face dangling from your earlobes) and—I swear I am not making this up—Joe Biden scented candles. I was trying not to touch things I wasn’t buying so I didn’t find out what it smelled like, but the label said it was “just like that weird dream you had.” Later I read this article in the Post about how Rehoboth, where Biden has a vacation house, has gone kind of Biden-crazy and I learned the candle smells like orange Gatorade, which I’m guessing is a favorite of his. Anyway, if you’re fond of Rehoboth or Biden, the article is worth a read. It was fun to hear the owners of so many businesses we frequent (Browseabout, Egg, the soap store) talk about him.

Noah and I headed back to the house, laden with candy and books, and he did some homework while I puttered about for a while, attending to the three loads of laundry I had going, and just before dark headed down to the beach to watch the sunset. It was a cloudy afternoon and when I got there the sky was white and light gray, gradually darkening to slate with a smudge of pink at the horizon. I sat on the sand for about a half hour and then walked a little on the boardwalk, watching the moon’s bright edge occasionally slip out from behind the clouds and then slide back.

Noah made pasta for dinner and afterward he needed to work on an assignment for his audio production class that was due that evening, so Beth and North watched The Fosters while I curled up on the couch with a comforter and some escapist fiction. I’ve been reading this rather long book for two months and I’m only about two-thirds of the way through it so maybe I will still be reading it at Christmas.

Thanksgiving

North made pumpkin cinnamon rolls with maple-cream cheese frosting for breakfast, which we ate with veggie sausage. The morning and early afternoon were rainy and Noah was taking a day off from homework, so we spent a few hours reading our book and watching The Handmaid’s Tale. We are close to the end of the third season and if you’ve seen it you know some episodes are almost unbearably suspenseful. When we finish it’s going to be hard to wait for the new season, which doesn’t even have a release date yet, though it’s supposed to be sometime next year, maybe spring.

I went down to the beach to sit and watch the ocean for a bit before it was time to cook. In the space of about forty-five minutes, I saw a family, and then a lone woman get into the ocean and swim (albeit briefly). It was a very warm day for late November, in the high sixties, but I can’t imagine the water was warm, so that was surprising. On the way back to the house I was noticing all the footprints in the sand—human, canine, and avian—and how the afternoon shadows filled them.

Back at the house, we made our traditional turkey centerpieces out of apples, toothpicks, raisins, dried cranberries, and olives and everyone pitched in to make a feast of tofu roast, gravy, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, Brussels sprouts, cranberry sauce, and rolls. Before we ate we shared our gratitudes and there was a lot of overlap—family, the ocean, and the changing of the political tide.

After dinner, Beth, North, and I took a walk down to the beach. The light reflecting off the undersides of the cresting waves was so bright that at first North thought it was phosphorescent seaweed. Then we came home and watched A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving and Mayflower Voyagers.

Black Friday

I knew Black Friday was going to seem strange because we had no plans to shop or to attend Rehoboth’s holiday sing-along and tree lighting. The origin of this traditional off-season beach trip was an annual Christmas-shopping-and-see-Santa-on-the-boardwalk weekend in early to mid-December we used to take when the kids were small. Then, six years ago it became a long weekend over Thanksgiving, so we could have a little longer at the beach, and we’ve come at Thanksgiving every year since then except one. This year’s week-long trip is probably a one-time thing, made possible by the fact that no-one has to go to work or school anymore to do work or school.

But ironically, even though we probably had time to most or all of our shopping, we only did the very little we did on Wednesday. Instead of shopping on Friday, we took three walks.

In the morning North and I walked to Dave & Skippy’s to get a bagel and an iced tea for them and to Greene Man to get an apple-beet-carrot-ginger juice for me. Or rather, I walked and North wheeled. Over the course of the week, they ended up using the wheelchair for all trips that were more than a few blocks long. We ate and drank on a boardwalk pavilion right next to the tent under which television news reporters had been camped out since Wednesday. Beth suspected they were using the boardwalk as a background for stories about Joe Biden, who was in town for Thanksgiving, though they weren’t broadcasting while we were there.

When we got back, I hung the laundry up on the clothesline behind the house and Noah and I read. Then we had a lunch of Thanksgiving leftovers before Beth, Noah, and I headed out on the second walk of the day, Gordons Pond Trail, which goes through a salt marsh. The trail is just over three miles long. We walked about half of it and then turned back, stopping along the way at an observation platform. We usually see a lot of water birds here, but this time there weren’t any except ducks. Beth pointed out we usually come in the summer. Noah was going to fly his drone over the water, but the airspace was restricted, possibly because Biden’s house is quite close. In fact, we were hoping to drive by it on our way home, but the street was closed off. It made me think with some sympathy that it’s going to be harder for the President-elect to enjoy his favorite places in Rehoboth for the next several years, though I hear that shortly after the election he did manage to take a bike ride on the same trail we’d just hiked.

The combination of a big lunch and a long walk made me sleepy so when we returned to the house, I had a nap and surprised myself by sleeping pretty deeply for almost an hour. We got pizza delivered for dinner. The night of the holiday sing-along we usually have Grotto pizza and then wander through the restaurant, looking at little Christmas trees local charities decorate and deciding which ones to donate to, but not this year. It’s possible Grotto is open for inside dining and the trees are there. I didn’t check, but we noticed a lot of restaurants in town were serving people inside, though others were outdoor seating or takeout only. (Greene Man had someone taking orders on the porch and passing the food around a plexiglass divider.)

The sing-along was canceled, not that we would have gone if it was taking place. Scroll down to the color photo with the bandstand if you want a look at how crowded it often is. We are probably somewhere in this photo. We were there that year. For our third walk of the day, Beth, North, and I went to visit the lit up tree, sans singing crowds. They were playing recorded music from the Nutcracker in the vicinity of the tree. It was a little sad to be there without people singing or families lining up for a chance to visit Santa’s little house on the boardwalk, which was not there this year, not even the letterbox. The boardwalk lights were not up this year either, maybe to discourage crowds, though Beth and I have noticed the display seems to get smaller every year, so maybe they’re phasing it out by attrition as the lights break down.

Even so I wasn’t too sad to have a pizza dinner, a walk with my wife and youngest on the boardwalk with the moonlight glinting off the waves again, and a pretty tree to admire. One thing 2020 has taught us is how to appreciate what’s at hand, even when it’s not what we usually have. Back at the house, we watched our first Christmas specials of the year, A Charlie Brown Christmas and How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

Saturday

We packed up and left the house in the morning. The kids and I went down to the beach one last time while Beth returned the keys to the realty. They stood barefoot at the waterline and let twenty waves wash over their bare feet, while I stood a little behind them in my rubber boots, trying not to get my socks or jeans’ cuffs wet. The number of waves in this ritual is determined by the final digits of the year. The kids got into a discussion about whether it was the last two or the last three and if in 2100, they will need to stand barefoot in freezing cold water for one hundred waves or none. I pointed out that in 2100, they will be ninety-four and ninety-nine and, maybe, just maybe, it won’t be an issue. “We’ll still be coming to the beach,” North assured me. I guess they really are my kids.

I know if I’m still around when I’m ninety-nine, I will still want to go beach.

Once in a Very Blue Moon: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 25

Posted on November 1, 2020 by Steph

[Show as slideshow]

So in the end I wrote another twenty postcards to Michigan voters and seventeen to Iowa voters (that last number was how many stamps I had left). I mailed the Iowa batch Friday morning. Time’s up for getting things in the mail and I voted a week and a half ago (via drop box), so all I can do now is wait, but Beth is going to phone bank on Monday night.

We’ve been trying to decide what to do on Election night, as watching the returns come in and not watching the returns come in seem equally impossible. Beth bought “emergency ice cream” and when I asked her if that meant we couldn’t eat it if Biden won, she said then it would be “celebratory ice cream.” What I remember about snacking during the night of the 2018 midterms, though, was that I thought I’d overeat Halloween candy but when it came down to it I was too nervous to eat much at all.

Okay. That’s all I’m going to say about the election. The rest is all Halloween. Though we were all sad about the cancelled parade and costume contest, I think we salvaged a half decent holiday.

On Wednesday night I made soup in a pumpkin. The kids aren’t fans of this soup, which consists of evaporated milk, rye bread crumbs, swiss cheese, onion, mustard, and horseradish, served with chunks of the cooked pumpkin, but Beth and I like it so I make it most years around Halloween and feed the kids canned soup.

Around 5:45 Thursday afternoon, I was asking Noah about his evening plans when he remembered we’d all been invited to the outdoor premiere of the movie he’d been helping some local families make and it was going to start at 6:30. The film is based on The Invention of Hugo Cabret. There’s a group of families that traditionally put on a play around Halloween (not always Halloween-themed), but this year they decided to make it a film, so people could watch it remotely. Noah did some of the filming and lot of the editing. The gathering was just for people who were involved in making the film and their families. After some hurried consultation, we decided Beth and I would go and North would watch the film later. The screening took place on the deck of a house. There wasn’t room for people to stand six feet apart, but I managed at least three feet most of the time and everyone was masked. After the screening, there was carrot cake and a little awards ceremony. Noah got a statuette that said “Miracle Editor.” When the director presented him with it, she said he’d made “a silk purse out of a sow’s ear,” working under tight deadlines without a lot of direction. It was a fun event and it’s always nice to see your kids recognized, so I’m glad we made it, even if I was little nervous about the contact.

Here’s the film, if you’d like to watch it. It’s thirteen minutes long.

When we got home, the cinematic fun continued. We watched a series of vintage short horror films the city of Takoma Park was screening, while decorating paper bags with Halloween-themed stickers and filling them with candy, stickers, stamps, and temporary tattoos. The first film was from 1896 and consisted a thirty seconds of a dancing skeleton, whose pieces come apart and then reassemble. We watched a about an hour and fifteen minutes of films, ending with a 1912 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In that span of sixteen years there was a lot of innovation in how to tell a story on film, including the introduction of intertitles to provide dialogue or explanations of what’s going on. In the earlier films, it’s often a little hard to follow the plot. In a funny coincidence, a lot of the films were by George Méliès, who is character in Hugo’s Cabret’s Big Fix. When The House of the Devil (by Méliès) started, Noah said, “I’ve seen this.” When I asked when, he said in his sixth grade media class. It was this class that got Noah interested in silent film. (I remember one night when he was eleven, he showed us several of his favorites. I probably should have had an inkling then that he’d be a film buff.)

Friday night AFI was screening Nosferatu and that was also fun, especially since we’d just watched Dracula the week before and Beth and I had an interesting conversation comparing the two afterward. I have a soft spot for classic horror, so it was nice to watch so much of it this month.

In other Halloween observances, we did decide to enter the yard decoration photo contest and we didn’t win, but those are the breaks. Our letter carrier told me that we have the best yard on his route, so there’s that. On Halloween afternoon I had Noah set up his tripod so we could get a picture of all of us in the Halloween masks Beth made and we’ve all been wearing for the past few weeks, since they probably won’t be getting much more use (unless we still need them next year). North had a seizure during the mask photo shoot and fell to the grass, which seemed to encapsulate the year we’ve been having. (By the way, the brain MRI came back normal.)

Noah and I watched Rosemary’s Baby that same afternoon, which was fun. He decided not to accompany North (dressed as a galaxy) and Zoë (dressed as Hawaiian Punch—a Hawaiian shirt and a boxing glove) trick-or-treating, but North did fine with the walker and didn’t need the wheelchair. They came home with just a little less candy than a usual year, though they had to walk a long way to get it because there were fewer houses giving out candy.

Back at home, Beth, Noah, and I set up our candy table and took turns supervising it from five to nine. We decided to have only six bags of candy out at a time in case anyone got the idea to grab it all. (One teenager did make off with four, which made me wonder, if you’re going to be greedy, why not just take them all? I mean, the karma wouldn’t be much worse.) After every group of trick-or-treaters, we’d restock the table. I didn’t expect anyone in the first hour, but we started getting customers pretty soon after we were set up. During my shifts, I saw a couple Power Rangers, skeletons, and kids in Scream masks, Bat Girl, a hunchback, a devil and angel, and a unicorn with a light-up rainbow horn. At least half the time, though, I couldn’t make out what the costumes were because it was dark and I was on the porch, probably about ten feet from the table. That was a little sad because seeing the kids’ costumes is one of my favorite parts of Halloween. Some of the kids were perplexed by the bags because they couldn’t see what was inside, and that led to their exasperated parents saying things like, “Just take the one you already touched.”

By 8:05, we were down to five bags of candy and I thought we might run out, so I bagged some more candy in undecorated sandwich baggies, but we didn’t need to put them on the table. There were only two more trick-or-treaters before we closed up shop a bit after nine.

North came home a little after nine and put a mason jar of water outside in the moonlight to make moon water because in addition to being Halloween, it was also a full moon, and a blue moon to boot. That hasn’t happened since 1944 and won’t happen again until 2039. This unique Halloween wasn’t all bad—it was actually pretty good considering—but given the reasons we were all avoiding crowded parades and close contact with dressed up neighbor children seeking candy, I wouldn’t mind not having another like it for a long time. Once in a very blue moon is plenty.

Moon photo credit: Gretchen Weigel Doughty

Things Frightful and Hopeful: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 24

Posted on October 25, 2020 by Steph

[Show as slideshow]

Do you need a little break from sickening dread about the coming election or is that just me? I mean the polls look good, both for the Presidential race and the Senate, but I can’t quite trust them after the last time. I’ve been churning out postcards to voters, mailing one hundred to Pennsylvania, sixty to Florida, and twenty to South Carolina in just the past week. Noah and I watched the final debate on Thursday. Beth couldn’t bear to do it but I watched all but the dueling town halls, mostly with Noah (He skipped the vice presidential debate and missed the fly.) And I voted on Wednesday, so there’s not much else I can do, unless I find time for more postcards before they stop giving out addresses, which I imagine will be soon.

Well, if you do need that aforementioned break, this will be a post about our Halloween preparations and not much else, if I can help it. (I don’t even have any medical news to report, other than that North had the brain MRI a little over a week ago, but we haven’t gotten the results yet.)

It’s going to be a strange, somewhat austere Halloween, with no parade, no costume contest, and curtailed trick-or-treating. The city arranged some alternate activities but they are mostly online. There’s a Walk and Chalk event on the afternoon of Halloween which I think might be kind of like a parade, but more dispersed, with people in costume strolling down the street during a two-hour stretch but not all marching in the same direction at the same time. I’m a little less clear on the chalk part, but it involves drawing on the street.

I thought it might be fun to go and see other people’s costumes and if I had younger kids I might have pitched it harder, but North wasn’t interested, because they’d chosen a costume that will be covered in glow-in-the-dark paint and not that impressive in daylight. (They are going to be a galaxy.) Noah’s not making a costume this year. Without the contest it’s not the same. Well, he’s probably not. North and Zoë are planning to trick or treat, but only at houses where people have set candy out. They’ve been instructed not to knock on doors. I’m not sure how many people are going to do this, but it’s what we plan to do, and North’s trying to enlist Noah to push the wheelchair so if he goes with them he might come up with a costume or he might just go without one.

Anyway, this is what we have done this month to mark one of our favorite holidays: we made cookies with our Halloween cookie cutters and frosted them, we went to our usual farm to get pumpkins for our jack o’ lanterns, and we carved them.

We made the cookies about a week and a half ago on a Thursday, because that’s our designated family activity night. It couldn’t all be done in one evening, though, so earlier in the day North made the dough and cut most of the cookies, with Noah and me pitching in a little bit, too. North also made the frosting and then both kids tinkered with the food dye to get just the right shades of orange, green, purple, and gray, while I did the dinner and cookie dishes. The actual frosting and decorating was an all-hands-on-deck project. The cookies were a little brittle so we had a bunch of broken bits, but we frosted those, too.

When we finished making the cookies, I said to Noah, “It’s nice to have you here for this but I hope next year you’re not here.”

“Me, too,” he said. (I think we may have had the exact same exchange when we dyed Easter eggs.)

We got our pumpkins last Sunday. This was something else we never expected to do with Noah again, and it felt like a small, bittersweet gift. We drove out to Northern Virginia, to our traditional farm stand, making surprisingly good time. Apparently, when there’s almost no traffic it only takes a half hour to get there, though some years it’s taken us over an hour. There weren’t as many pumpkins on the pallets as usual, and some of them had moldy spots. Possibly this should have given us pause, but there seemed to be more than enough to find four good jack o’ lantern candidates and a big white pumpkin to cover with little metal spiders. We also got several little pumpkins for Noah’s, North’s and my desks, freshy pressed cider, pear butter, and pickled vegetables. For the past few years this outing has involved dinner at Sunflower, a vegetarian Chinese restaurant, and Dessert Story, where we’d get bubble tea or macarons or cheesecake or waffle sundaes. We did get a feast from Sunflower and ate it in a nearby park, but sadly, Dessert Story has gone out of business, a victim, perhaps, of the pandemic.

After eating we wandered around the park a bit. Behind the mansion we found some community garden plots where tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, and flowers were flourishing. Noah had brought his drone, but it turned out we were too close to D.C. or maybe the airport so it wouldn’t take off, just displayed a restricted message. It’s too bad because it would have been fun to see the little gardens from above.

We drove back to Takoma got dessert from Mark’s Kitchen and ate it at one of the picnic tables near the gazebo. I got my favorite early fall dessert, the gingerbread sundae. They were out of the ginger sauce, so it was just vanilla ice cream and whipped cream on gingerbread, but it was still good. The whole outing was highly satisfactory.

During the past few weeks, we’ve also watched Young Frankenstein, It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, and Dracula (the 1931 Tod Browning version). The Peanuts special we watch every year. The films are special favorites of mine so it was treat to watch them this year. I’ve loved Young Frankenstein since I was younger than North (though I admit parts of it have not aged well). When I taught a college class on horror, I used to do a Frankenstein unit that consisted of the novel, the 1931 James Whale film, Bride of Frankenstein, and Young Frankenstein. We also read Dracula in that class and while I didn’t teach the film, I always had a few students writing research papers on it, so it was familiar and nostalgic as well.

Last night we carved pumpkins. We got takeout from Chipotle for dinner because there was a fundraiser for North’s school that night and it made for a quick dinner before the carving. When we lifted them from the porch wall where they’d been waiting almost a week we were alarmed to discover three of the four had soft spots that weren’t there when we bought them, and two of them had rotten bottoms. But we persevered. My pumpkin is the political one. Beth’s is the flaming skull and the kids did the witches (Noah’s is on the left and North’s is on the right). As I said when I posted the picture on Facebook, they represent things frightful and hopeful.

As we were finishing up, Noah said cheerfully, “I hope I’m not here for this next year” and we discussed whether he could carve a jack o’ lantern in Australia, and decided probably not as it would be spring there and pumpkins would not be in season. Then I told the story of how the fall of my junior year of college I was studying abroad at the University of Córdoba and the Spanish students in my dorm got the idea to throw a Halloween party for the Americans, but as they weren’t that attached to the actual date of the holiday, it kept getting delayed and didn’t happen until mid-November. The kids thought this was pretty funny.

When we’d finished carving, Beth had the idea to slice the soft bottoms off her pumpkin and mine and replace them with foil so the rot wouldn’t spread as quickly. We also spread petroleum jelly on the cut surfaces to protect them. These are the tricks you learn when you live somewhere where it sometimes gets almost up to eighty degrees in late October, as it did several days last week. Fortunately, it’s not supposed to get warmer than the mid-sixties next week. Fingers crossed the jack o’ lanterns will last a week.

We are not finished celebrating. Friday night AFI is going to stream Nosferatu and we’re going to watch it. The yard decoration isn’t complete—the project stalled for a while but I’m hoping to work on it soon. The recreation department is having a photo contest for best yard. We could enter and given how over the top our yard usually is, it seems we should. I hesitate only because I’ve always found it hard to capture the overall effect in one photo and you can only enter one. I actually wrote the rec department to see if a short video panning the yard would be accepted. (I haven’t heard back yet.) One nice addition we have this year is the set of solar-powered colored lights we have to spotlight certain areas of the yard in purple, green, and red.

And of course, we’ll also be giving out and collecting candy (in a socially distanced fashion) on the big night. We’re going to set up a table at the front gate with little goody bags of candy so people don’t have to reach into a communal bowl. We’ll sit on the porch and watch so we can see the kids’ costumes (and so no one gets the idea to swipe all the candy at once). I hope you all have a very happy Halloween, with just the right amount of fright and hope.

Surprisingly Okay: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 23

Posted on October 12, 2020 by Steph

[Show as slideshow]

Medical Tidbits

Beth’s colleagues often ask how North’s doing at the beginning of phone calls and the other day I heard her answer, “Surprisingly okay” and for the most part, that’s true. Not much changed for a long while and we all adjusted to the new normal, as much as we still want the seizures and other symptoms to end.

The long-awaited urology appointment was the last Monday of September and it was kind of a bust. The doctor went over the results of the spinal MRI, noted there was no compression on the urethra contributing to North’s difficulty urinating and said she’d see North again in three months if nothing changed. We were all disappointed by the lack of a treatment plan. In the interim, though, Beth got a new diagnostic MRI scheduled, this time a brain MRI with a spinal tap. It’s happening later this week.

Then two days later, in dual setbacks, North was diagnosed with a second UTI and dropped a pasta sauce jar on their bare foot and bruised it badly. They were back to using the wheelchair to get around the house for a day or two. We got their foot x-rayed, but it was not broken, so their physical therapist gave them some exercises for it. It’s still bothering them, but it seems to be getting better.

Scholastic Snippets

On the upside, North’s interim grades (for the midpoint of the first quarter) were good, all As and Bs. This was a relief as the quarter got off to a rough start because they missed a lot of class, due to being in the hospital, and had trouble keeping up.

Noah’s doing well, too. His classes seem more challenging than last semester but he’s not overloaded with homework. His philosophy professor was so impressed with his work he suggested he consider majoring or minoring in the field, and Noah likes the class well enough to consider doing it. It would be a second minor, as he’s already declared one in computer science. He also attended an online informational session about study abroad programs and is seriously thinking of going to Australia next fall. He’s working as a video editor for several shows on ICTV and he’s also going to help a local filmmaker shoot and edit a play his neighbors are putting on, based on The Invention of Hugo Cabret. (It’s being filmed because there will be no live audience.) A friend of mine said he seems to be “flourishing” and he is, though of course I wish he could be back at school with his friends (and using the film studios that drew him to Ithaca in the first place).

An Outing

The first weekend in October we visited Benjamin Banneker Historical Park and Museum, mainly because it’s adjacent to a trail we intended to hike and we thought it might offer a wheelchair accessible entrance to the trail, but we detoured into the park and it ended up being an interesting side trip. An educational one, too, as it turned out neither of the kids had heard of Banneker, a very famous Marylander. We walked up to the reconstructed Banneker family cabin as a Brownie troop was taking a tour and as Beth, Noah, and North waited at a distance outside, I explored the vegetable and herb gardens. When the Brownies had left, the park ranger offered to let us in the cabin and give us her talk about it. We took her up on it and then we browsed through the little museum nearby before tackling the trail.

Trolley Trail #9 trail, as you might guess from the name, is built on the track bed of an old trolley line. It’s part boardwalk, part asphalt, and goes through a wooded area along a creek. Noah flew his drone to a little waterfall and over the tree canopy. The trail is sloped, so the whole mile and a half down, knowing we’d have to push the wheelchair back up, I was fretting a little, wondering if we were biting off more than we could chew. But with three of us to take turns, it wasn’t as bad as I feared and it was a pretty walk.

Home Decorating

The following week we got our porch painted a new color. When we moved into this house in 2002, the house was tan with gray trim, or at least I thought it was gray. I learned just this week that everyone else in my family perceived it as a sort of olive green. It’s amazing the things you don’t know about the people you live with, I swear. Nine years later we painted most of the trim dark green but left the porch floor, columns, and steps gray/green. My first idea this time around was to match the porch to the trim again by having it painted dark green, but on consideration, we decided if it wasn’t quite matched it would look funny so we went with a very pale green we thought would complement the darker green. I think I like it. It reflects more light into the living room, which is nice, but it also shows dirt more. I am trying not to let the fact that we painted at this exact moment because we were cited by the city for peeling paint take the pleasure out of this little makeover.

Once the porch was painted we started decorating it and the lawn for Halloween, and if you know my family in person or through this blog, you know that’s cheering. We don’t have everything out yet, but we’ve made a good start. We all bought one new item this year and mine was the charming fellow in the third picture. I picked him because he looks like he’s wearing a plague mask and that seemed just perfect for 2020. I even violated my own no-more-Halloween-decorations-that-require-batteries to buy him.

In other seasonal news, this weekend we made pumpkin ravioli from scratch. I roasted two little pumpkins and made the filling and a pumpkin-walnut-sage sauce to go on top. Beth rolled out the dough in Noah’s pasta machine and he used the hand tools to fashion the ravioli out of the sheets. It was quite a project, but the results were delicious.

Visitation Day

Today was Columbus Day, or Dia de la Raza, or Indigenous People’s Day—take your pick. In normal times in our school district, parents are invited to observe their kids’ classes on this day (because a lot of parents have it off but the schools are still open). At some schools it’s called Visitation Day. I’ve always enjoyed watching the kids’ classes and the name is pretty amusing, too. It’s as if we’ve been invited to watch a séance.

This year there was no notification from the school about being invited to watch your kids’ classes on Zoom, but I know a lot of parents of younger kids are doing it every day and nothing was stopping us, so we decided to observe two of North’s classes—English and yoga. We chose English because it was kind of unorganized for a while when the teacher quit and we wanted to see if the sub had got her footing yet. I’ve been curious about yoga because North usually does it in their room and we’ve never seen or heard little bits of it, the way I have with most of their other classes.

On the morning of Visitation Day, North woke up with a new symptom. Their right hand was clenched in a loose fist and they were unable to open it. My first thought went to the two complex migraines North’s had that left their hands and feet paralyzed but this was just one hand and the affected hand was not cold to the touch the way their paralyzed extremities in past episodes.

This was discouraging, but we carried on with the day. English started at nine and at the beginning of class, the teacher instructed the class to read “The Lottery,” annotate it, and write a paragraph about it. She gave them thirty-five minutes to complete this task and said she’d take questions at that point. I was a little disappointed in this lesson plan because it seemed like discussion would be a better use of scarce and precious class time (each class has two one-hour slots a week, if the teachers use all their allotted time). The reading and writing could have been done before or after class, as homework.

Anyway, there wasn’t much to watch, so while North worked I read the paper, checked my email and some blogs I read regularly, and eventually since it was an English class, picked up Beloved, which my book club will be discussing on Zoom later this week. At 9:40, the class reconvened. There were no student questions so the teacher asked a few, mostly about setting, and then just as things could have gotten interesting, she dismissed them to finish other work. North took an online grammar quiz and aced it. And then class was over. The discussion of “The Lottery” took a little over five minutes of class time. The whole experience made me glad North had already read this excellent story in middle school and this wasn’t their whole exposure to it.

Since we watched so little of English, I asked North if we could watch sculpture but they were insistent the agreement was two classes, so I didn’t push it. I did come over to hold their head up during at least two seizures, and I saw the teacher holding up a polyhedron that seemed to be made of folded paper, but North was wearing their headset so I don’t know what she was saying about it. I’m guessing North might be making something similar some time. Sculpture wrapped up after twenty-five minutes.

Yoga started at twelve-thirty. The teacher showed the class a yoga video and had them follow along. The sequence started with tabletop and included (not in this order and with most poses repeated) cobra, extended side angle, lunge, plank, warrior one, and warrior two, ending with corpse pose. North said it was physically harder than usual. Often the class meditates instead of or in addition to doing yoga poses. The class lasted about a half hour. Usually North attends this class in their room, on their bed, but after watching them do it on our bed, noticing how it was hard to balance in the standing positions on a bed, we are reconsidering this set up. During yoga class, North’s hand unfurled. After class I told them, “See. Yoga is good for you,” and they laughed, but I meant it. I think it could be good for them, physically and mentally.

After yoga, Beth and I went on a little date, our first since before covid, probably since our anniversary in January. We were nudged into the realization that we should do this by the fact that we always have a lunch date on Visitation Day in between spying on the kid(s)’ classes. It was rainy and in the high fifties, so not the most inviting weather for a picnic, but not forbidding either if we had shelter.

We left before North’s last class of the day, algebra, which met during a gap between Noah’s ethnomathematics and philosophy classes so we left him in charge of sitting in the living room and making sure North was in a comfortable position if they had a seizure.

We got arepas, plantains, and teqeños from Arepas Pues in Silver Spring (highly recommended if you’re local) and ate them in a pavilion in Wheaton Regional Park. Afterward we took a little walk through the woods and down to a pond. The path was scattered with the first of the season’s fallen leaves and pine needles. We picked up coffee and hot chocolate on the way home. It was nice. It was better than okay.

A Goodbye: Coronavirus Chronicle, Part 13

Posted on July 6, 2020 by Steph

[Show as slideshow]

On Friday morning around eight, North found our cat Matthew lying on the living room floor near the front door, half-paralyzed and crying in distress. We were all quite surprised because the day before he’d seemed perfectly normal, but now he had no control over his back legs. The first thing that came to mind was that he had type 1 diabetes and this was exactly how it first presented when he was about a year old. We’d just switched him and his brother Xander from high-protein kitten food to regular cat food and one day his legs just gave out and he collapsed onto the kitchen floor. After some short-term insulin, we got him on food for cats with diabetes and he never needed any more insulin or diabetes medicine. At the time, the vet told us as he got older, the special food might not do the trick anymore and then he’d need to go on insulin. That was sixteen years ago, so I thought that the time had finally come for more aggressive treatment.

We carried him to our bed, which is his favorite place, and brought him some water, which he drank, and for the next few hours, we took turns sitting with him alone or in various combinations. He seemed to calm down and stopped crying so much, but every now and then he’d try, unsuccessfully, to stand. Mostly he just lay quietly, breathing more quickly than usual, occasionally napping a little.

Beth was trying to reach the vet’s office but they never picked up the phone so she drove over there to see if there was anything posted on the door about holiday weekend hours. As it turned out, they were closed for the whole day, so she called an animal hospital in the city. It was the same hospital where our first cat, Emily, received treatment at the end of her life and died, eighteen years ago.

After asking a few questions, the staff person at the animal hospital asked us to bring Matthew in. We’d have to leave him in his carrier at the door and they’d take him inside and talk to us by phone as we waited outside. Even though we knew no one was going inside, North and I came along with Beth and Matthew, just in case we knew the answers to any questions, and for moral support. There weren’t many questions, though, and pretty soon after we left him, they told us to go home and said they’d call us.

Late that morning, the vet called with the bad news. It wasn’t his diabetes. It was heart disease, very advanced. They did an ultrasound and found fluid around his heart and lungs. The immediate problem was a blood clot that was preventing him from moving his legs, but his overall prognosis was poor.

We decided to go through with the euthanasia that day. This time all four of us went to the animal hospital. They are putting animals down in the parking garage because of COVID. This sounds really horrible, but they did their best to make a private space. There was a folding screen making a little room out of a corner. It was near a vent blowing cool air, so it wasn’t oppressively hot, and there was a wooden bench with a cushion on it and side tables with boxes of tissues and water.

Only one person was allowed to be there during the procedure, but we were all allowed to visit with him beforehand. The vet brought our loudly meowing cat behind the screen and stepped out, saying we could take as long as we liked and to call her when we were ready. We sat on the bench and petted him and talked to him and kissed the top of his head. He was wrapped up in a white fleece blanket and part of one of his front legs had been shaved, just above the paw, and the port for the drugs was already attached. My heart sank a little further when I saw that.

When we’d said our goodbyes, everyone but me left, and Beth called for the vet to come back from inside the building. I held Matthew while the vet administered the two drugs, the first to render him unconscious and the second one to stop his heart. They took effect more quickly than I thought they would. The vet listened to his chest with a stethoscope and said, “He’s gone.” She told me it had been the compassionate decision. Or at least that’s what I think she said. Between her face shield and her mask and the fact that we were in a garage, it was hard to hear. I just nodded and she asked if I wanted to stay with him for a while and I did. When I finally lay him down on the bench, I found Beth outside and asked her to call someone to come pick him up and I went back to wait with him again because I couldn’t bear to leave his body alone.

It’s three days later and we’re all sad and kind of shocked. One day we thought he was reasonably healthy for a seventeen-year-old cat—his most serious problem seemed to be a tendency toward constipation and some weight loss we thought was due to his digestive issues—and the next day a vet was telling us he was fatally ill.

We spent a quiet fourth of July. The Takoma Park parade and fireworks were cancelled months ago, so our observation of the holiday consisted of watching Hamilton and having a backyard picnic. And because it was the most patriotic thing I could think to do, I wrote a small batch of postcards, encouraging Florida voters to enroll in the state’s vote by mail program. (I’ve written over a hundred postcards for this campaign alone.)

The next day, Beth, Noah, and I went to another park. We’ve continued to do this every weekend since mid-May and we have yet to repeat a park. The weekend previous we’d been to a charming little creek off the Middle Patuxent, where we could hear what I think was a good-sized bullfrog croaking underneath a mass of submerged tree roots and we could see dozens of these beautiful black-winged, turquoise-bodied dragonflies.

This week we went to South River Farm Park, which as you might guess from the name is on the South River, a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay. We waded in the salty river and in a little pond (until some kayakers warned us out of it, telling us there were snapping turtles and snakes in there). We saw a Great Blue Heron in the pond, and picked some of the plentiful raspberries we found growing along the trail.

I was sorry North had elected not to come because I think they would have liked it but we weren’t sure whether or not the park had beach access when we set out and they didn’t want to come without knowing for sure. (And actually, this park wasn’t even the one we thought we’d visit. Our first and second choice were filled to capacity and closed.) I was timing how long it took to walk from the parking lot to the water and noting the firmness and slope of the path for future reference. Speaking of North’s condition, after the MRI last week, we learned that they have a herniated disk. It may sound like an odd reaction, but Beth and I were both really happy to learn this because it means there’s a concrete reason for their pain and it should guide the physical therapist’s plan. They already have some at-home exercises to do and they’ll have their first full-length PT session on Thursday.

After we left the park we stopped at a nursery, where I got two dwarf sunflowers and a thyme plant, then we went to a farm stand and got some excellent peaches, peach jam, cantaloupe, and tomatoes. We each ate a sweet, juicy peach in the parking lot before picking up some Chinese takeout for lunch and following it up with frozen custard and Italian ice at Rita’s. It was a nice outing and kind of therapeutic to spend so much time outside.

We brought home some extra fortune cookies and gave one of them to North. It said their luck was about to change.

“That could be good or bad,” I observed, but given that they’ve been on crutches since February, our country’s been in the grip of a pandemic since March, and a cat they loved dearly just died, we decided to read it as a good sign.

RIP, Matthew Simon
Circa February 14, 2003-July 3, 2020

He was a beautiful cat and more than a little neurotic, he loved to play with lanyards, which I think he pretended were snakes, and he was a good mouser, even in old age. We will miss him very much.

Fallen: Coronavirus Chronicle, Part 9

Posted on May 25, 2020 by Steph

[Show as slideshow]

Memorial Day is a strange and often jarring holiday, partly mournful for the war dead, partly celebratory because it’s a three-day weekend on the cusp of summer, so people are going to go to the pool, or have a cookout, or they usually would. This was an even stranger Memorial Day weekend than usual, with death so present in everyone’s mind.

The last time I wrote a Memorial Day post was thirteen years ago. We went to Harper’s Ferry with Beth’s mom and her aunts, which caused me to think about the Civil War and our ongoing wars. Here’s how we spent it this year, both in recreation and contemplation.

Saturday

We continue to take little weekend outings. It’s been nice to get out of the house after staying so close to it for so long. When Beth needed to fill the car with gas about a week ago, it was the first time in at least two months. This weekend we went on two outings. The first one was another drone-flying expedition, to Fort Smallwood Park in Anne Arundel County. It’s on a peninsula where the Patapsco River and Rock Creek flow into the Chesapeake Bay, so there are a lot of nice views of the water. I was surprised to see how many fewer people were wearing masks than in our neck of the woods. We were definitely in the minority, but people were keeping their distance for the most part. The beach was roped off, but I was able to get close enough to hear the little waves lapping at the shore and watch the sailboats and powerboats and ducks and geese. That was nice (though wading in the water would have been nicer).

Noah flew his drone out over the water and tried out some new maneuvers, setting it to automatically circle or spiral around us. He got some nice images of the roof of a pavilion and its shadow. North said it looks like an ad for the park. Have a look:

We also visited a grove of trees planted to honor fallen soldiers from Anne Arundel County. Each one had a flag and a plaque. All the soldiers died in Afghanistan and Iraq. I didn’t look at every plaque, but all the dates I saw were either between 2005 and 2007 or 2012 and 2013. The toll of our post-9/11 wars is always a sobering thing, even when you are looking at a very small slice of it.

Sunday

The second expedition was a picnic, at North’s request. The four of us drove out to a shopping center and got takeout from California Tortilla and Starbucks, which we took to Wheaton Regional Park. The picnic tables there are open for use and we had a six-table pavilion to ourselves. Well, almost. There was a surprisingly bold squirrel watching us eat from the next table over. Eventually it jumped up on our table and stood less than a foot away from Noah and me. I was starting to wonder if it was just used to being fed or if it might be rabid when it jumped down and scurried away.

After lunch, we drove to nearby Brookside Gardens and had a short stroll amidst the ferns and rhododendrons and slightly past prime azaleas. A family of geese with three half-grown goslings came pretty close to us while we were in a gazebo. I guess we were attractive to wildlife that day. I would have liked a longer walk, but I didn’t want to push North. I don’t think I’ve mentioned this here, but their chronic pain is back and getting worse. In February they fell in the bathroom and cracked their shin against the bathtub. As these things so often go for them, the pain never went away and now they’re feeling it in both legs and their spine. As a result, they’ve been getting out less than any of us, hardly at all really. I hope being out of the house for a while did them a little good. I know it helps my outlook.

Monday

Beth usually makes pancakes or waffles for breakfast on the last day of a three-day weekend and this weekend was no exception. It’s harder to time now that the kids roll out of their beds hours after we do, but we all managed to gather around the table and eat pancakes with blueberries and banana slices and vegetarian bacon. It was kind of a red, white, and blue breakfast, but I didn’t think to take a picture. I did remember to take a picture of the red, white, and blue dessert we had after our backyard picnic of veggie hot dogs, baked beans, potato salad, and watermelon. I make shortcake every year, usually on Memorial Day, because late May is strawberry season here and I love truly ripe strawberries beyond reason.

In keeping, perhaps, with the solemn part of the weekend, The New York Times printed the names of one thousand of the almost one hundred thousand Americans who have died from covid-19 to date. Chances are you’ve seen an image of it in your social media feed. Here’s an interactive version I explored Monday morning and found moving: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/24/us/us-coronavirus-deaths-100000.html

Nearly one hundred thousand people in three and a half months. That’s more people dead than American soldiers who died in Vietnam, the Gulf War, and the those post-9/11 conflicts I was considering earlier. It’s absolutely staggering. I check the front page of the Post and the front page of the Metro section every day and look at the statistics. If less than a thousand people die in a day, and less than fifty in Maryland, it feels like a good day. There are more and more of those days recently. It seems as if the first wave at least is slowly receding. That’s something.

Looking Ahead

So now that summer’s on the horizon, what’s ahead?

North has three weeks of middle school left. Promotion will be online. We’re going to watch it and have cake afterward to make it seem more festive. We received word recently that the eighth-graders’ community projects are cancelled, unless students want to carry on without institutional support. North’s school usually has a community service requirement that goes beyond the school district’s requirement. Eighth-graders design and implement their own projects. North and Zoë were sewing teddy bears to donate to patients at Children’s National Medical Center. Between North’s migraine, chronic pain, and the gender clinic, we spend a lot of time there, so the idea of giving back was appealing. Plus, the teddy bear is their symbol.

Well, I understand a lot of students’ projects are probably unworkable now and why even if North and Zoë wanted to continue with the project, a hospital might not want to accept homemade objects right now. Still, it seems sad and frustrating that in a time of such increased community need and when so many teenagers have nothing but free time, someone couldn’t have found a way to re-invent the community project and direct those kids’ energy toward something useful. But I guess since I didn’t step forward to organize it, I can’t complain.

North’s last camp (musical drama camp at the rec center) was also cancelled. They’ve gone to this camp every year since they were five, so it will be missed. The director is considering running her own private camp, outside and socially distanced, but I’m not sure about it. We’re waiting to see what conditions look like closer to July.

As for Noah, Ithaca announced it will start the fall semester six weeks late, in early October. The school says it will be a full school year, but they haven’t released a calendar yet, so we’re not sure how that will work. But we do know he’ll be home for another four months and change. He’s in the process of looking for a summer job, internship, or volunteer gig.

It’s going to be a strange summer, but we’re fortunate in this: we’re together and we’re healthy and the world still has goslings and flowers and strawberries and brave people who serve their country every day in hospitals and grocery stores and other places in ways recognized and unrecognized.

Happy in Winter

Posted on February 4, 2020 by Steph

[Show as slideshow]

Imbolc and Groundhog’s Day

Saturday morning Beth, North, and I were talking about the collection of early February holidays that fell that weekend: Imbolc (Wiccan), Candlemas (Catholic), and Groundhog’s Day (secular) and about how they are all related to each other and mark the midpoint between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. It’s not spring, but a time to look forward to spring.

North was supposed to have Jade sleep over on Friday night but she was sick and had to cancel. (All three of us have been sick, too, with different symptoms, united only by a cough.) North and Jade had been planning an Imbolc ceremony, so North asked if Beth would do it with them. (On that particular day I was the sickest of the family and had retreated to bed.) There was music involved and maybe some kind of craft, though I never saw evidence of it. Finally, they left an offering of juice, milk, honey, grains, nuts, and bread on the porch.

And then two days later, the Groundhog predicted an early spring. My daffodils seem to agree. They are poking out of the ground and some of them have yellow-green heads formed. Now they sometimes stay stalled like that just a couple inches above the ground for several weeks at a time, but I’d welcome spring, whenever it wants to come. Still, I am also sorry for Beth, who loves snow and has had to make do with two measly snowfalls, both a half-inch or less. There was some patchy snow on the ground at Blackwater Falls State Park when we were there at Christmas, but it didn’t snow while we were there either. But here’s the thing—those tiny snowfalls resulted in one snow day, one early dismissal, and one two-hour delay, so I can’t quite find it in my heart to wish for any amount of snow. Still, as I reminded Beth, we’ve probably got a month and a half left in the snow danger opportunity season.

As we were discussing the dearth of snow at dinner Saturday night, North said it must make me happy and I said, “Can I really be happy when Beth is unhappy?”

And then North, who can sometimes get right to the point, said, “So you can’t be happy in winter no matter what?”

I hadn’t thought of it that way and I said, “Maybe not.” But on further thought I decided it wasn’t true. After all, I’m not always thinking about the weather. And even with a number of challenges to happiness (being sick, missing Noah, the continuing erosion of democracy exposed by the toothless impeachment trial), we still had some nice moments over the past couple weeks.

Lunar New Year and Winter Greenhouse

This past weekend I was mostly taking it easy and trying to recover from my flu-like illness. You can put that squarely in the not-happy-in-winter column. But the weekend before that, after North’s cold was mostly better and before Beth and I were felled, we did a lot of fun things. We welcomed the Year of the Rat by going to see Winter Lanterns, a celebration of the Lunar New Year outside the Kennedy Center. It featured a collection of over one hundred large colored lanterns in various shapes—traditional Chinese symbols like a dragon and pandas, all the signs of the Chinese zodiac, plus other animals, flowers, and mushrooms. It was gorgeous and we all enjoyed walking through the display. And Beth only said, “This would be better if there were snow,” once.

In addition to the lanterns, there were white lights outlining the branches of the willow trees that grow outside the Kennedy Center, and an art installation of metal poles with lights on them. If you connect two of them by touching both, they light up more brightly. It also works if two people each touch a pole and then hold hands. That was very cool. Plus there were food trucks, and we got a funnel cake for North and a Nutella-banana crepe, which Beth and I shared.

Saturday we went to see A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood and on Sunday we went to Brookside Gardens, where we explored the warm and colorful conservatory, and then wandered on the outside paths. The landscape was mostly winter-bare, but I did spot snowdrops and some yellow acony. We walked through the labyrinth and tried to meditate, as the sign recommends, but the three little girls tearing through it soon after we started made that somewhat difficult. How can you be mad in a situation like that, though, when you’ve had your own small children? You can’t.

High School Update

I wasn’t going to say anything about where North’s going to high school until it was settled, but it may not be settled for a while, so here’s an update, which goes in the ambiguous column. Those of you who don’t live in Montgomery County, Maryland probably need a refresher about this whole complicated process: There’s a lottery to determine which high school you’ll attend if you don’t end up in an application program. Everybody enters this, ranking five possible schools. If you choose your home school as your first choice, you are guaranteed a spot, but they still make you fill out the form. Then if you want to apply to a magnet, you do that, too. If you get in and accept, your lottery results are moot. North had entered the lottery and applied to the Visual Arts Center magnet last fall.

Sometime in early January, North got their lottery results and they got into their second choice school. They were a little disappointed but within a few hours they had started to convince themselves of the good points of this school, principally that it’s one of two high schools that their middle school feeds into (assuming you go to your home school) so they would be more likely to know people than at their first-choice school. Since they seemed to be talking themselves into being happy about this outcome I decided not to say anything about the second chance lottery. Yes, there’s a second chance lottery. Students who don’t get their first choice are allowed to throw their hats back into the ring after all the application program spots are filled and there are some vacancies at all the schools. But after several days of mulling it over, North decided they did want to enter the second chance lottery and they did. We’re supposed to hear back sometime in late March.

So then, on Friday, North heard from the Visual Arts Center magnet and they are waitlisted. The VAC expects to finalize the class by late April, so it could be almost three months before we know for sure where North is headed. But North’s genuinely happy to be on the waitlist because it’s very competitive and they didn’t expect to get in at all.

Crocuses and Poohsticks

Monday I was still sick and I had a scattered, unproductive day. As a result, when North got home from school, I hadn’t taken my daily walk yet, so I asked if they’d like to take one with me. They said the crocuses were in bloom down by the creek and we should go there. Usually I’m the one who notices that and takes them there. Ever since North was tiny they’ve loved to walk on the muddy path by the creek when it’s lined on both sides with thousands of tiny purple flowers. It was kind of a sweet role reversal to have them take me. We even played Poohsticks after I mentioned how the little wooden bridge reminds me of that doing that when they were little. They did not actually remember playing this game, but once I explained it, they said, “Let’s play.”

So for a little while, instead of looking forward, to spring or to high school, we looked back.

Walkin’ Around the Christmas Trees

Posted on December 30, 2019 by Steph

[Show as slideshow]

Friday-Sunday: Before Blackwater

North’s last day of school before winter break was the Friday before Christmas. This was also the day Noah was returning from college and we had a party to attend, so it was a big day.

The party was for the family of a preschool classmate of North’s. They moved to Switzerland three years ago (around the time we were all wishing we could move to Switzerland) and they come back to the States for visits occasionally. When they’re in the D.C. area, someone from the Purple School will host a party so they can see as many people as possible in a limited period of time. It was good to see the family of honor and a few of North’s old classmates, all teenagers now, and their families. The hosts made an excellent squash and black bean chili and the expats brought Swiss chocolate and there was a gingerbread cookie decorating station and a charming five year old who wanted to decorate more cookies than she was allowed to eat so she started circulating through the room offering thickly frosted cookies. It was a fun party. Unfortunately, Beth didn’t get to stay long because she was coming from work and by that time North and I had been there an hour and a half and North was impatient to get to their next social engagement, a sleepover at Zoë’s, plus we had stuff to do at home before Noah’s bus arrived, so she couldn’t stay long.

Beth and I arrived at Union Station around 9:25 and had about a half hour wait for the bus. We got Noah some pizza and a chocolate milk at Sbarro, because we knew he probably hadn’t had time to procure himself much food for the ride. Sure enough, all he’d had since breakfast was a rest stop soft pretzel. The reason for his hasty departure was that he had an unfinished, overdue paper he’d been working on until he left (and on the bus and for two days after he got home). The paper was for his ideologies class and he said he’d been reading Mein Kampf on the bus and hoping no one thought he was a Nazi. He ate his pizza in the car and drank “this mysterious liquid,” a comment that made me hope he’s not drinking soda every day at school. When we got home, Beth and I went to bed while he did whatever it is college students do at night.

The next morning at 11:30, when Beth and I set out to get a Christmas tree, he was still in bed, though he answered the text Beth sent to say we were leaving. We drove to Butler’s Orchard, where we go berry picking in the summer. We’ve never gotten a tree there, maybe because it’s forty-five minutes away, but they had a much nicer selection than Christmas tree lots generally do four days before Christmas, so we may make it our go-to place. We browsed in the farm market, got some apple cider and garlic dip mix, and then picked out a tree. We found one we liked a lot—six feet tall and very full and bushy.

Our next stop was Wegman’s, where we intended to buy eggnog and mushroom ravioli for dinner and where we checked out with $55 worth of groceries. We don’t live near a Wegman’s so we succumbed to the temptation to splurge on several kinds of fake meat they don’t carry at the co-op, cranberry stilton, pomegranate kernels, and lunch at the deli. I got a slice of mushroom-truffle pizza and a pomegranate soda and it was very good.

North came home from Zoë’s in the late afternoon and we all had dinner around the same table, which was nice. Then we opened presents from my mom and Sara because there’s never room in the car for all the presents and it made a nice little solstice celebration. We capped it off with a viewing of Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

Sunday Noah emerged from his room shortly before eleven, and spent most of the day working on his paper. At dinner he said he was stuck, so I read his draft and gave him some ideas. We were all hoping he’d finish it that night, so he didn’t have to work at Blackwater. He’s already done that enough times. I told him he should have a college student’s break and not a high school student’s break. Meanwhile I did three loads of laundry (a lot of which was his) and swam and packed.

Monday and Tuesday: Blackwater, Before Christmas

Hike: Pendleton Overlook and Pendleton Lake

Monday morning brought us the happy news that Noah had turned in his paper the previous night while the rest of us slept. It was three days late and shorter than it was supposed to be, but as I often used to tell him in high school (and middle school and elementary school), “Done is beautiful.” We packed up the car and hit the road for West Virginia around 10:15. There wasn’t much traffic and even with a stop for lunch, we arrived at 2:30. We waited in the lodge for YaYa and when she arrived, we checked into our cabin.

We spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing and for dinner we had takeout from Panera—vegetable soup, bread, and mac-n-cheese that YaYa had picked up on the road. Then we watched Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town. We’d saved all our Christmas specials except those we’d watched over Thanksgiving break until Noah was home again (at his request), so we had a lot. During the song, “First Toymaker to the King,” both kids sang along with brio. They knew every word.

On the morning of our first full day at Blackwater, North and I took the first of many walks while Beth and YaYa went grocery shopping. North took me to a path they’d found another year we’d stayed in a cabin nearby. It goes to a rocky outcropping with a view of the river canyon, dense with evergreens. It’s similar to the other overlooks, but smaller, more private, and without a protective railing. It was a little scary watching them stand closer than I would to the edge, but I stopped myself from saying anything because they weren’t really that close. Next we proceeded to an official overlook and North put a quarter into the swiveling binoculars to better view the lodge across the canyon and the narrow waterfall going down the canyon side. Then we took a path to Pendleton Lake, which was almost completely frozen, despite the current mild temperatures. North slid on the ice near the edge of the lake, and I watched from the earthen dam between the lake and the creek that empties out of it. There were some interesting ice formations on the creek side, near the culvert where the water comes out of the dam.

Back at the house, we decorated the tree with our ornaments and YaYa’s, too. It was like decorating a tree always is, with everyone exclaiming over ornaments that remind us of years, or decades past, and getting all nostalgic in a Christmassy way over them.

After lunch, the kids and I made gingerbread from the dough I’d made at home and transported with us. This is another nostalgic activity as the recipe is my mom’s and I’ve been making it first with my sister and mother and then with my kids since I was old enough to handle dough. We go different directions with the decorations from year to year, though. This year we used dried fruit, nuts, seeds, and hard candy. I discovered pepitas make good eyes and a cashew is just the right shape for a smile. North made a very satisfactory turtle shell out of green hard candies that melted into an approximation of a diamondback pattern. And as we always do, we made initial cookies for everyone. YaYa got two, an A for her real name and a Y.

Next North and I went swimming and hot-tubbing at the lodge. The hot tub was more of a tepid tub, but it was still relaxing. There was no one else there and the tub was big enough for me to float on my back.

Before our dinner of chili and corn bread (cooked by Beth), we watched A Miracle on 34^th Street and afterward we watched The Year Without a Santa Claus. It was nice to watch something we don’t watch every year (the former) and something we do (the latter). In between viewings, the kids opened a pair of new Christmas pajamas each, green and white stripes with a red collar for Noah and red and white stripes with a green collar for North. (I feel lucky that at thirteen and eighteen they still go along with this.) Just before bed, Noah treated us to a very dramatic reading of “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” and YaYa said he really should take an acting class in college someday.

Wednesday: Christmas Day

Hike: Lindy Point

Christmas morning, as we woke singly and in pairs, we emptied our stockings of oranges, candied nuts, and other treats. Everyone was up by eight and we ate the lemon-cranberry muffins North had made for breakfast and then opened presents. A great many books, mugs, packages of tea, socks, and bars of soap were exchanged. Noah’s big present was an Apple watch. He was pleased with it and over the course of the next several days kept using it to check the temperature, note his movement goals, or dictate texts. He said it made him feel like Dick Tracy, though further questioning revealed he wasn’t actually sure who Dick Tracy was. North’s big presents were a papasan chair (which was actually at home because it was too big to bring with us, but we gave them a photo of it) and a weighted blanket, which they immediately and happily threw over themselves. “I will never need another blanket,” they said. YaYa especially liked the calendar Beth made of pictures of the kids, but what grandmother wouldn’t?

Around noon everyone but North left for a hike to Lindy Point. The day was lovely, sunny and cool but not cold—Noah and I didn’t even wear jackets. It was in the fifties most days we were there, actually, and there was not much snow, just the patchy remains of a past snowfall on the ground when we arrived, and that was all but gone when we left. Everyone was a little disappointed not to have a white Christmas, but the upside was pleasant temperatures for hiking and we did take walks every day. The year before had been snowy but bitter cold, which limited our outdoor time.

The trail to the overlook was narrow and lined with towering rhododendrons. It took us to a wooden platform on a rock outcropping that affords more views of the river canyon. Noah gave all his womenfolk a scare edging around the outside of railing to get photos from the angle he wanted. YaYa couldn’t watch. But he didn’t plummet down into the canyon, and we went home and had lunch and started one of the book he got for Christmas, American War. It’s set in the future during the second American Civil War and the plague years afterward. Then I read one of my Christmas books, Stephen King’s latest, The Institute.

Christmas dinner was YaYa’s signature spinach lasagna—she and Beth cooked every dinner we didn’t have takeout or eat out and that was a nice treat for me, as the primary cook in my family. We intended to watch Christmas is Here Again after dinner, but the internet was spotty in the cabin and it wouldn’t download, so we watched It’s a Wonderful Life instead because it was already downloaded and it was a more than adequate substitute. We haven’t been doing nightly poems since Noah left for college, but we are making an exception for Winter Poems, a book we’ve been reading read every winter for many years. We read the first five poems that night, including this one by Rachel Field I’ve always liked, which begins:

Something told the wild geese
It was time to go
Though the fields lay golden
Something whispered,– “Snow.”

And ends…

Something told the wild geese
It was time to fly,–
Summer sun was on their wings
Winter in their cry

And then Christmas was over.

Thursday to Saturday: Blackwater, After Christmas

Hikes: Pendleton Overlook and Pendleton Lake (new route), Blackwater Falls

The day after Christmas I did three loads of laundry in the cabin’s tiny washing machine. Noah and I read some more of American War and I read some more of The Institute. Everyone but Noah had lunch at the White Grass Café and the kids went sledding on artificial snow in 56-degree weather while the mothers and grandmother watched from the bottom of the hill. They each went down four times. One the second run, they shared a sled to see if they’d go faster that way, but they concluded, in Noah’s words, that it was easier to steer, “when there’s one consciousness,” so they went back to separate sleds after that.

After sledding, Noah and I went back to the cabin and everyone else went to browse in the shops of Davis, a nearby town. When they came home, we all did our own thing in the house for a while until Noah and YaYa went for a walk in the sunset before our dinner, which was a vegetable-white bean-quinoa soup. Christmas is Here Again had successfully downloaded so we watched our final Christmas movie.

Friday we went to the lodge for a late breakfast and from there Beth, North, and I proceeded to the pool, while Noah hung out in the lounge with his laptop editing the many pictures he’d taken so far on our trip and YaYa went back and forth from the pool deck to the lounge. I’d forgotten my goggles so I did backstroke for a half hour. I would have swum longer but it gets boring doing just one kind of stroke, so I went over to the hot tub, slipped on the steps, and fell into it. Luckily, I wasn’t really hurt, but it did give me a little scare.

Later Noah and YaYa retraced the steps of their walk from the day before because Noah wanted better light for pictures and for the rest of the afternoon some people read and some people watched Solo, and some did both and North did neither because they were having a long phone conversation with Jade in their room, as they did many days of the trip. (The two have become quite close recently.)

In the late afternoon I took a walk along the cross-country ski trail that runs behind the cabins. The grass was wet and muddy and I fell, soaking the knees of my jeans twice in quick succession, but I discovered a new route to the lake, which was still mostly frozen and quite scenic in the dusk. I was near the Nature Center and behind it I discovered two little skulls, one white and one green, wrapped in shrouds and mounted on sticks. I wasn’t sure if they were leftover Halloween decorations someone failed to remove. Or perhaps they were the ghosts of Christmas future.

When I got back to the cabin, Noah, Beth, and YaYa had finished watching Solo, and Noah was dragging the denuded Christmas tree back to the woods behind the house. We set out for a pizza place nearby, but there was a forty-minute wait so we went back to the park and had dinner in the lodge restaurant where we had breakfast.

There was a reading at the lodge by Ann Pancake, a West Virginian writer, starting shortly after we finished dinner, so we stayed for that, or the oldest three of us did, while the teens stayed in the lobby playing games on their phones. Pancake read three autobiographical essays, one about her childhood, one about visiting home as an adult, and one about her father’s dementia. I haven’t been to a reading in a long while, and I’d forgotten how much I enjoy them.

Saturday morning we packed up the house, checked out, and went for our last hike of the trip, down to Blackwater Falls, the majestic waterfall that gives the park its name. You descend down a wooden staircase with several viewing platforms along the way. As we progressed, we tried to remember which was the platform where North lost a croc over the edge when they were very little and which was the one where Noah and YaYa sat on a bench and played his West Virginia-opoly game, a board game he made in fifth grade. (All the properties are places in West Virginia and he and YaYa were trying to play it in all of those locations, mostly during his summer visits to her. I don’t know if they ever completed this quest.)

About halfway down, North (who had twisted an ankle a couple days earlier), Noah (who’d slipped on the wet boards, gone down and hurt his leg), and YaYa (who’d been hesitant about the hike to start with) all decided to stay where they were and view the falls from there. Beth and I went all the way to the bottom, where the boards were coated with slush and ice. There were big icicles hanging from the lower rockface as well and the boulders in the river below the falls were all encased in ice. It all looked impressively wintry given that daytime temperatures had been in the fifties for at least several days.

Around eleven we said our goodbyes to YaYa in the parking lot and drove back to Maryland. Noah will be home for another three weeks, and Beth and North go back to work and school on Thursday. I have to work starting today, but I’m planning to meet an out-of-town friend for coffee this afternoon, attend the neighbors’ annual New Year’s Eve party tomorrow, and go for another hike, this one along the Underground Railroad trail with Beth and Noah, on New Year’s Day, so there’s still a little time for celebration left.

All is Calm, All is Bright

Posted on December 16, 2019 by Steph

[Show as slideshow]

It’s been pleasantly festive around here lately, especially the last two weekends. The first week after we got back from our Thanksgiving trip to the beach, I was really not in the holiday spirit, but I decided to see if I could force it and while this usually doesn’t work for me, this time it did.

Weekend 1

Friday evening we watched The Princess Switch, which is not a Hallmark Christmas movie, but it might as well be. Beth said it was “perfectly itself.” It’s not normally her type of movie, or mine, but somehow that night it seemed just right and a good way to usher in a Christmassy weekend.

Saturday afternoon we went to the U.S. Botanical Gardens to see the holiday display. Beth was already in the city for a Philippines human rights protest she had to attend for work. The protest was right outside Union Station, so North, North’s friend Lyn, and I met Beth inside the station by the big Christmas tree Norway donates each year. We picked up some coffee, tea, and hot chocolate, admired the model trains, and walked a few blocks to the Botanical Gardens.

The theme of the display this year was botanical gardens around the country, so there were many little buildings made of natural materials, with a model train running on elevated tracks through the room where they were housed. I was especially taken with the model of the flamingo topiary from Franklin Park Conservatory in Columbus, Ohio. Its body was made of pine cones. We were all impressed with the incredibly detailed miniature Biltmore mansion, as we visited there several years ago when YaYa was living part-time in Asheville, North Carolina. As always, there were also versions of various Washington monuments made of plant materials in the room where you enter the conservatory, and poinsettias everywhere. After seeing all that, we wandered through the regular exhibits—Mediterranean plants, desert plants, medicinal plants, as well as the main atrium. It’s so peaceful in there. I wonder why we don’t go more often.

We dropped Lyn off at home and then took North to Jade’s house where they were sleeping over. Beth and I took the opportunity to have a dinner date at Kin Da, a Thai/Japanese restaurant in downtown Takoma. Then we went home and cleaned out the refrigerator because we had to defrost it in preparation for a repair Monday. (Never say we don’t know how to have fun when we’ve got the house to ourselves.)

Sunday I made peanut butter cookies with Hershey’s kisses stuck in them to mail to Noah in the Last Care Package of the Fall Semester. I included a Pez dispenser in the shape of polar bear with a Santa hat—we have a big collection of these from when the kids were younger and really into Pez. I ordered some Pez online in lemon, orange, and pineapple and had them mailed to him. It occurred to me later that some healthy snacks would have been a good idea for finals. Maybe next spring, I’ll remember to send those.

Weekend 2

That weekend was so thoroughly satisfactory that I tried to replicate the one movie-one outing-one baking project formula the next weekend. I was thinking of suggesting we watch It’s a Wonderful Life or Miracle on 34^th Street on Friday, but then North wanted to see a movie in a theater and Beth had read good reviews of Knives Out, so we decided to go see it. We met up at Mod where had pizza before the movie.

When I was about North’s age I went through a big Agatha Christie phase—I have about thirty of her paperbacks to show for it. (I haven’t managed to entice North to read any of them yet, but they did see a production of And Then There Were None last summer because a friend was acting in it, so they have a general sense of the genre.) As soon as I saw that familiar font that graces so many mystery novel covers on the screen, I knew the film would be good. It’s not entirely an homage to Christie—some other authors and genres get shout outs, too—but it’s well done, fun, and also has something to say about class, race, and the political moment we’re in. It got three thumbs up from us.

On Saturday morning, North had a portfolio review at the Visual Arts Center, where they’re applying for high school. The review was a two-hour session during which applicants wrote a paragraph about why they were applying and presented a portfolio of work to a teacher, who asked questions about it. But the bulk of the time was spent drawing a still life from an assortment of objects provided. We’ll find out in February if they got in or not.

North was putting the finishing touches on their portfolio right up until the morning of the review. The middle picture is what their desk looked like after they left. Right before it was time to go, North asked for something nicer than a backpack to carry their art in and Beth dug around in her closet and found her father’s old leather briefcase, which the teacher who interviewed them admired and called “vintage.” I wonder what Beth’s dad would have thought of that. He was kind of vintage himself.

After the portfolio review, Beth and North made a big batch of pizzelles. Well, two batches actually, one vanilla and one chocolate. Beth had made a lot of dough because she wanted enough to take to two work-related potlucks, plus some for home consumption, some to take to Blackwater when we travel there for Christmas, and some to take to our family friend Becky, who we were visiting that afternoon. I hadn’t seen Becky (who was North’s preschool music teacher) or her daughter Eleanor (who used to babysit for us and was home from college) in a while, probably over a year, so it was fun to catch up, meet a friend and bandmate of Eleanor’s who was staying with them, and eat Becky’s tasty homemade cardamom bread.

After a short interlude of Christmas card addressing and other Christmas chores, we drove to Brookside Gardens to see the light display. This is a big deal around here, but we’d never been, so we weren’t sure exactly when to arrive for prime viewing and ease of parking. We settled on forty-five minutes before the lights came on at 5:30. We didn’t have to wait in a line for parking—and there was a long line of cars waiting when we left—so it seems to have been a good strategy. We killed the time until the lights came on, ten minutes earlier than scheduled, wandering around the gift shop and listening to a choir sing Christmas songs.

The early crowd was full of families with small kids and when everyone was released into the gardens at the same time it was crowded and loud. “I thought this would be more peaceful,” Beth said. But as people dispersed along different paths, it got less congested and calmer. Calm and bright, actually, because of the lights.

It’s a lovely display. As befits a garden, there were a lot of plants and animals. You could buy your own hyacinth lights in the gift shop and they were out in the garden as well, along with sunflowers, mushrooms, and cacti. From the animal kingdom, there was a fox, a beehive, the Loch Ness monster (my personal favorite), a giraffe, a lion, a frog, a heron, turtles, a dolphin, dragonflies with flapping wings, something we thought might be a cicada because it was winged and had red eyes, a bear, a wolf, and more. There was a pond with lights strung along poles, which were reflected in the water. Trees had their limbs outlined in every color of the rainbow and there was a rainbow, too, with clouds and a lightning bolt that flashed on and off overhead. It was a lot of fun to walk around and see what was around each turn in the path. I would definitely go again.

North was sleeping over at Zoë’s but we hadn’t had dinner yet, so we swung by Zoë’s house, picked her up and had dinner at Cava and then got coffee and pastries at Peet’s, before dropping both kids back at Zoë’s house. (I’d been on the lookout for a replacement for Starbucks’ gingerbread latte, which they’re not selling this year and if you are, too, Peet’s holiday spice latte isn’t quite the same, but it’s as good, so I was happy.) It was nice listening to the kids, who’ve known each other since kindergarten, joking around in the back seat of the car and reminiscing about elementary school.

Back at the house, I resumed addressing Christmas cards and finished the stack. Sunday North attended the Christmas pageant at Zoë’s church to see Zoë play an angel in it, Beth finished the pizzelles, North and I finished our wrapping, and I went swimming, and started this blog post.

Last night we got a quarter inch of slushy snow—yes, I measured it– which switched over to rain in the early morning hours, so naturally school was cancelled and for North, the weekend was extended by a day. They went over to Zoë’s after they’d finished some chores I assigned them. I thought a little bitterly as they waited at the bus stop in front of our house that the whole reason they were off school was that it was supposedly too dangerous to ride in a bus. It’s no longer a disruption to my work day when they’re off school, but blowing through half our snow days for a minor snow event in mid-December just makes it more likely we’ll go over the limit and there will be makeup days at some point, which makes the school calendar uncertain. North told me I shouldn’t stress about things I can’t control, and this would be excellent advice if I were capable of taking it.

Anyway, the snow had all melted by the time I left the house for a walk around noon during a break in the precipitation, so we didn’t even get to see it lit by our candy cane lights this evening, which I thought would be pretty. Oh well. Noah will be home Friday night and he’s staying for a whole month and on Sunday we leave for West Virginia, where we’re spending Christmas with Beth’s mom in a cabin in a beautiful state park, so I really should not complain about anything.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Eat, Shop, Sing

Posted on December 3, 2019 by Steph

[Show as slideshow]

Wednesday

It was surprisingly easy to get to Rehoboth on the busiest travel day of the year. We’ve always driven on Thanksgiving to avoid the traffic, transporting our mostly cooked-at-home dinner with us. But this year we were planning to leave the beach on Saturday afternoon rather than Sunday, so Noah could catch his bus from D.C. to Ithaca on Sunday morning, so we pushed up our arrival by a day.

North had an early dismissal and got home at 12:50. We were on our way about an hour later. It took four hours to get there, even with a snack stop at the Taco Bell and Dairy Queen near the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. That’s about how long it would take on a summer Saturday, and now as then, the main backup was before the bridge.

When we got to the house, we initially couldn’t find the key box and then Noah found it in a flowerpot, disassembled and empty. This was puzzling, but we continued to poke around the porch and the side of the house. Shortly after Beth had called and texted the owner, Noah looked under the doormat and found a key there, so we could finally get in the house. We’ve stayed at this one before, three out of the five Thanksgivings we’ve spent in Rehoboth, actually. It’s a cozy, early twentieth-century, two-story house with a roomy kitchen, a fireplace, and a big clawfoot tub.

After getting settled, North and I took a quick walk down to the beach. I was surprised to be able to see so many stars because it had been cloudy the whole ride, but it must have cleared after the sun went down because the sky was sprinkled with pinpricks of light.

There were some off-leash dogs on the beach, too, and this was a problem because North is afraid of dogs. At least we could see where they were because their people had put lights on their collars. Eventually, the people put the dog that was running around in circles and wouldn’t stay with them on its leash and North was able to relax.

We walked back to the house and drove to Grandpa Mac’s for dinner. I got mac and cheese with broccoli, celery, and mushrooms. It’s what I always get, though I do vary the vegetables. From there we went to the grocery store and got necessities like milk, and some not so necessary items from the bakery. Back at the house we split into pairs and Beth and North watched Modern Family while Noah and I watched Orphan Black for the first time in over three months. It was a flashback episode (or maybe all of season 4 is a flashback) taking place shortly before the first episode of season 1 started. The plot of this show is very complicated, so it’s hard to say if looping back in time made it easier or harder to follow, but it was fun and I’m looking forward to picking up the thread over Noah’s winter break.

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving morning we woke to find North had set out breakfast for everyone, with cereal for me and Noah and a muffin for Beth and juice for everyone. (Noah came down late so only his place was left and he didn’t realize it was his and he poured himself another bowl of cereal– but when North told him, he agreeably ate the original one, too.)

Meanwhile, North and I took a walk to the beach, boardwalk, and around town. A pool of water had gotten stranded on the sand, and North, remembering how they used to like to play in these temporary pools, said, “This would be great if it was summer and you had a small kid, but it’s not summer and you don’t have any small kids left.”

We found a small crab on its back, weakly waving two of its legs. I wasn’t sure if its habitat was in a burrow under the sand or in the water, so I picked it up, intending to turn it right side up and leave it near the waterline. I got pinched for my trouble and dropped it, but I can’t blame it for assuming I was a predator. I didn’t pick it back up, though.

On the boardwalk, we saw a big inflatable turkey wearing a pilgrim hat and North declined to be photographed with it. “I’m good,” they said, both times I asked. We went into town to see if anywhere that sold hot chocolate or coffee was open. Most places were closed, but we did find what we were looking for eventually at Dunkin’ Donuts and a German-themed coffeeshop staffed by a very talkative and enthusiastic French man. I’ve never frequented it, but it was busy, presumably because not much was open.

We returned home and North wanted to start on the turkey centerpieces we always make out of apples, toothpicks, raisins, cranberries, and green olives. We’d failed to bring enough toothpicks, so we had to improvise. First we tried uncooked angel hair pasta we found in the cabinets, but it was fragile and prone to breakage. Then, when it had been successfully stuck into the apple and threaded with dried fruit, the moisture of the apple would soften the part inside and the rest would snap off under its own weight. When Noah made his turkey later in the day, he used wooden skewers instead of toothpicks for legs, giving his turkey a freakish, mutant appearance. Someone said it was a turkey that had evolved for the post-climate change apocalypse. We eventually got all four of the turkeys constructed/repaired at the same time and quickly took a picture before they fell apart again.

After everyone ate lunch, Noah and I went to his room to read Little Brother for an hour or so and then we came downstairs and did some Thanksgiving k.p. We trimmed Brussels sprouts and then he kept me company while I prepared the brandied sweet potatoes. When we’d finished, Beth and North were watching Modern Family again. I invited Noah to take a walk on the beach and he said yes.

We walked a long time, with the wind to our backs, which is sometimes a mistake, but it was so pleasant on the beach—cool but not cold, with pretty autumnal mid-afternoon light—that I didn’t want to stop. Eventually we turned around and the sand was blowing in our faces, so we had to walk back through town. I always find it sad to walk parallel to the beach and not on the beach or boardwalk. We went by Silver Lake and saw a heron in flight over it, though, so that was nice.

When we got home I put the Brussels sprouts in the oven and tidied up the kitchen for Beth and North who were going to start the cranberry sauce and the mushroom gravy soon. When they were done with those dishes, they put the tofurkey roast in the oven and North split off to listen to an audiobook while Beth started boiling potatoes for mashed potatoes. While things were cooking, we all watched A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving and Mayflower Voyagers. Before we ate, we volunteered what we were thankful for, being together mostly, but also for Noah being happy with his college choice, and for my new job. Then, after our Thanksgiving feast, we watched a couple episodes of Blackish while eating pumpkin and apple pie and then I took a bubble bath in the big tub.

Black Friday

North and I woke up before Beth and Noah and they wanted a bagel, so we took a walk down the boardwalk to Dave and Skippy’s to get one. On our return, we all drove to Egg, for a more substantial breakfast—I had a hankering for the pumpkin-pecan French toast and Noah wanted the lemon crepes he always gets. There was a wait, so we visited a table across the street where local boosters were giving away hot chocolate, mini muffins, candy canes, and coupons for local businesses. Then we took a walk by the canal and went back to the restaurant. It was ten minutes before the hostess had told us to return, but she’d given away our table. I understood, she had a lot of people waiting. Luckily, we didn’t have to wait long for another one.

After breakfast we split up—Noah with me and North with Beth—and we started our Christmas shopping. Or we tried to split up, but we all went to BrowseAbout Books first, where we carefully avoided each other lest we see someone buying our Christmas presents. Afterward Noah and I visited the Christmas shop and Candy Kitchen. We ran into Beth and North near there and North wanted to switch parents, so we did. We perused the tea and spice shop, made our own visit to the Christmas shop, and finally to the crystal shop. Between these three stores, North bought presents for most of the friends on their gift list and finished up their family shopping, too—all before lunch. They do this almost every year. They’re a shopping machine. I didn’t make as much progress on my list, but I bought a few things. It was good to get the ball rolling, especially with Thanksgiving late this year. Christmas is closer than it feels.

North and I had a late lunch at Greene Turtle. The food was okay; the service poor. None of this was a surprise. I keep going back because it’s on the second floor of a building on the boardwalk and the view is stunning. Beth and Noah won’t set foot in there, being more picky about food and service and less picky about a panoramic seascape, so they went out for Italian instead. Afterward, they met us on the beach where we had our annual Christmas card photo shoot. (I’ve included a couple of the runners-up here.)

That was fun, but we were a little preoccupied because Beth had just received the news that Noah’s bus from D.C. to Ithaca on Sunday morning was “very likely” to be cancelled because of a winter storm due to hit Ithaca and much of upstate New York and New England on Sunday. Back at the house, she investigated flights, but all the routes were circuitous, prohibitively expensive, or both. The closest train goes to Syracuse and that last bit of the trip could be challenging in a storm. So we decided to cut our beach weekend and Noah’s stay with us a little short and drive him up to Ithaca on Saturday morning, so he could arrive before the storm, then turn around and drive as far away as we could before checking into a hotel for the night.

No one liked this plan. We all had things we wanted to do Saturday morning and early afternoon in Rehoboth—more shopping, more beach time, some relaxing at the house—but that would have to be scotched. And North was supposed to sleep over at Jade’s house on Saturday night after we returned to Takoma. But it seemed like the least worst option.

With this settled, I set about doing a load of laundry so everyone would have enough underwear for an unexpected night on the road and organizing and packing up a little. I was sad that Noah and I probably wouldn’t get to read any more of our book in the rush of our abbreviated stay, so Beth kindly said she’d finish the last of the Thanksgiving dinner dishes I’d left to soak in the sink the night before so I could go up to Noah’s room and read a little before we left for the holiday sing-along and tree lighting on Rehoboth Avenue. (We read two chapters and ended up with four unread that we’d have to finish separately.) We got in the car and made a pit stop at Starbucks for hot chocolate, then I took North to Candy Kitchen, because they hadn’t been there yet, and Beth went to place an order for two pizzas at Grotto, which we’d pick up after the sing-along and take home.

North was upset about missing their sleepover with Jade, but the sing-along seemed to cheer them up. We ended up in a part of the crowd where not many people were singing but we all sang and Noah was cracking North up by dramatically humming the parts where he didn’t know the words and then very loudly singing the ones he did. During “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” I quietly sang “and a happy new Presidency” instead of “and a happy new year” to Beth and she nodded enthusiastically.

Back at the house, Beth made a fire and we ate pizza and watched How the Grinch Stole Christmas and A Charlie Brown Christmas. I noticed something I haven’t before, which is that the Grinch starts with the Whos singing around a tree and that’s how Charlie Brown ends and it’s also what we’d just done ourselves. I guess there’s something powerful about singing outside in a group.

Saturday

In the morning we got up early, ate breakfast, and packed up the house. The kids and I went down to the ocean and put our feet in the water—theirs were bare, I wore boots—to say goodbye to it. In the car afterward, Noah said, “I can’t feel my feet.”

“Neither can I,” North said.

“You usually can’t feel my feet,” he observed and North half-laughed, half-groaned.

About seven and a half hours later, at five p.m., we carried Noah’s things up to his monkishly austere third-floor dorm room and said goodbye to him, not lingering so we could drive our way out of the storm’s reach. It seemed too soon, but I reminded myself again, Christmas is sooner than it feels.

All For The Love Of You

A Chronicle of Suburban Lesbian Family Life

Category Archives: Holidays

Go Beach: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 27

Once in a Very Blue Moon: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 25

Things Frightful and Hopeful: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 24

Surprisingly Okay: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 23

A Goodbye: Coronavirus Chronicle, Part 13

Fallen: Coronavirus Chronicle, Part 9

Happy in Winter

Walkin’ Around the Christmas Trees

All is Calm, All is Bright

Eat, Shop, Sing