Report from the Fourth Quarantine: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 19

Posted on August 23, 2020 by Steph

After the first forty days of our new pandemic lives, and then again after eighty, I wrote posts marking off each traditional forty-day period for a quarantine with lists of forty things. I skipped one hundred twenty days because that was the week after North stopped walking and was hospitalized and it wasn’t a good day for me to write or for Beth to post. (It’s true—I am so tech-challenged I don’t post my own blog.)

I missed the one hundred sixtieth day, too, but it was only yesterday, so I’m plowing ahead with forty things about the past week:

On Monday, North and I made an unbirthday cake because it wasn’t anyone’s birthday. I did this five years ago on a whim and North still talks about it so I thought it might be cheering to do it again. The cake was red velvet with cream cheese frosting.
There wasn’t room for the leftovers in the fridge, so I left the partially eaten cake in the oven and forgot it was there while I was preheating it the next day to roast eggplant, but I remembered pretty early in the preheating process and the frosting just got a little runny.
However, the next day when I was preheating the oven again for roast cauliflower, I left it in longer. The crumbs on the empty part of the pan burned, but the cake didn’t, and the frosting actually acquired a pleasant toasted marshmallow taste, so all was not lost. I do think it’s a good demonstration of how preoccupied I am these days. Fortunately we finished the cake on the third night, or who knows what would have happened to it?
Tuesday we got notice that Ithaca College is going completely online for the fall semester. This wasn’t a complete surprise, given what’s going on at other colleges and universities that have opened for in-person classes and had to shut down. I’m not critical of the school’s decision, but I am sad for Noah.
He’d been tracking Maryland’s numbers, which have been trending in the right direction to get off New York State quarantine list, so I think he was hoping to be allowed back on campus. We all have mixed feelings, of course, but it seems no matter what, he isn’t going to have a normal college experience, at least not in the first two years.
On Wednesday North had their longest seizure ever. It lasted more than an hour and a half and sent us to the emergency room.
For several days before this, they’d been having one to three of what we now think of as the medium-length seizures a day, the ones that last around five minutes. (Since then they’ve increased and yesterday they had six.)
When I got home from my morning walk a little before eleven, Beth was sitting with North, whom she’d found seizing. When it had been going on for at least ten minutes (North later told us it was closer to twenty or thirty) we called 911, for the second time in a week and a half.
When the paramedics got there, one of them remembered North. This isn’t something any mother wants.
This time we didn’t get a choice of hospital—we went to the closest one. Given that the last time we called 911, the paramedics weren’t even sure we should go to the hospital, this made it seem more serious.
As we did last time, I rode in the ambulance, but in the front this time, not because I asked to, but because there were a lot of medical personnel in back with North. Meanwhile Beth followed us to the hospital in the car and waited outside. North got two anti-convulsant shots in the ambulance.
When we arrived, there were so many people crowded around North in the tiny exam room that there wasn’t room for me and I had to stand in the hall answering intake questions for people with clipboards.
Eventually, people cleared out. When I got in the room, North had an IV with a different kind of anti-seizure medicine, and eventually they started to recover, though they’d intermittently slip back into smaller seizures. It was sort of like a series of aftershocks. It was 12:20 by the time they stopped all together.
Beth brought North’s stuffed monkey Muffin from home and had a nurse bring it to them. He was conscientious about wearing a mask.
North got their second covid test of the summer and it was negative.
We were there until three o’clock and several times various people told us we would probably be transferred to Children’s. As bad as the experience was, Beth, North, and I were all thinking that maybe it could be the impetus for more timely scans. We already had an EEG scheduled for the first week of September, but we were all hoping for answers sooner.
ER visits have a kind of rhythm to them, in my experience, and once it seemed we were in the wait-alone-a-long-time part, it was hours past lunch time, so I decided—with North’s encouragement—to go see if I could find us some food.
It took me a while and a number of redirects from passersby but eventually I found the coffee shop where I bought yogurt, grapes, Cheetos, and an iced latte. The cafeteria was in sight of the coffee shop but I was in hurry to get back because North was alone so I thought we could get by with what I bought.
I got lost again getting back to the ER and had to exit the building because some doors are blocked off now to stop people from circulating as freely through the building as they did pre-covid. I ran into Beth, sitting outside the main entrance, so I gave her an update. (Of course, we’d been texting the whole time.)
Beth had North’s phone she’d brought from home and she let me know that Zoë, who was supposed to come over that afternoon and had knocked on the door only to have no one answer, had been calling. Beth filled Zoë in.
When I got back to North’s room, they had a balloon and a teddy bear and some hard candies, which had been delivered by a social worker. The balloon looked like a cookie and said, “One Tough Cookie.” Apparently the first words the social worker spoke on entering the room was, “I hear you’re one tough cookie.”
This whole interaction reminded me of the volunteers with the heart-shaped balloons in The Hostile Hospital (Series of Unfortunate Events, book eight), but Beth said, even if they had no way of knowing it the balloon’s message is true of most patients, in North’s case, it is.
Shortly after this the doctor came back and told us North was being discharged, not to Children’s but home. We were surprised, and frankly disappointed not be able to get more answers that day. He also advised us not to come back to the ER, but to ride the seizures out at home, no matter how long they are. He seemed to be of the opinion that it wasn’t any of the medication North received that stopped the seizure but that it had burned out on its own and he said medicating a non-epileptic seizure could do more harm than good.
All the medical professionals we’ve seen suspect North’s seizures are non-epileptic, which seems to cause a lot of them to lose interest. Beth really had to advocate to get the EEG we do have scheduled. When telling us North wasn’t being transferred to Children’s, the doctor actually said “It would be a waste of a transport.”
The next day Beth went to work trying to get an EEG before September. Both our pediatrician’s office and North’s psychiatrist have been working their contacts to find us a bed at either Children’s or Georgetown. We’ll take whatever we can get first. Among other reasons, we need an official diagnosis before the school system will even begin to talk to us about accommodations and it’s clear North is going to need some.
In the meantime, we made some changes at home. We stopped leaving North alone except to go to the bathroom and they’ve been sleeping in Beth’s and my bed with Beth while I sleep in their bed. They are not crazy about the lack of privacy. (And today we relented a little, leaving them in alone in a safe position in our bed for a half hour or so. They did have a seizure during that time, but they didn’t fall off the bed so I guess the experiment was a success.)
So, life goes on. Thursday it was North’s turn to pick the weekly after dinner family activity so we had a faux campfire, with microwave s’mores, votive candles on the patio table, what stargazing was possible on a cloudy night, and a chorus of crickets and cicadas.
Friday in physical therapy North walked 185 feet with a walker, surprising the physical therapist.
After North got back from PT, my friend Megan and her daughter Talia came over for a socially distanced backyard visit.
We all met twelve years ago when North and Talia were in preschool together. Megan is one of my best friends and North and Talia stayed in touch throughout elementary school because they were on the same rec league basketball team—the Pandas, as long-time readers will remember. After attending different elementary and middle schools, they will be at the same high school, and North thought it would be nice to get re-acquainted.
It was nice. I positioned chairs in the backyard in pairs far away enough from each other so that the adults and the teens could have separate, private conversations. This was only my second get-together with a friend since March and it was good to talk in person to an adult other than Beth. It turns out I had a lot to say. I think I monopolized the conversation, but I’m guessing Megan will forgive me.
As for the kids, North said it wasn’t awkward, even though they haven’t seen each other in a few years. Also, we prepared Talia for what North’s seizures are like, but they didn’t have any more than a few seconds long during the visit.
While Megan and Talia were over, we got a phone call from our pediatrician letting us know they were getting closer to scheduling an EEG, and they thought they could get one early next week. Fingers crossed.
Saturday morning, Beth, North and I had a telemedicine appointment with North’s therapist and at the end he offered to write his own letter to the school, in support of accommodations: we want North to be allowed to have their camera off so they’re not seizing online, extra time on assignments if they seize during one, and no penalties for not participating orally if they’ve just seized and can’t speak.
That afternoon we went for an outing at Downs Park in Anne Arundel County. We got Chinese takeout and ate it at a picnic table in the park, then we went for a walk. North alternated between using the walker and the wheelchair. I’d say they walked about half the time, which was encouraging to see.
The park had nice views of the Bay, some wooded trails, an aviary with a red-tailed hawk, a Great Horned owl, and turkey vulture, all injured. The vulture was being rehabilitated to be released, but the other two were permanent residents. (The owl only had one eye so probably didn’t have the depth perception to hunt, Noah guessed.)
While we were there we found a moss-covered stone bench with a plaque saying it was a wishing bench, so of course, we felt compelled to sit on it and make wishes.
I won’t tell you what I wished for because everyone knows if you tell a wish it doesn’t come true. But if I’d had a second wish, it would have been less personal and more political. I bet you can guess what it is.
And speaking of politics, we haven’t been to as many protests as I thought we would this summer, for reasons that are probably obvious, but I’m sorry we weren’t able to make one in support of the post office this weekend. Did you ever think we’d need to protest for the post office? But that’s where we are. For now I’ll have to content myself with writing postcards to voters. I mailed my six hundredth one today, in another batch encouraging Democratic voters in Florida to enroll to vote by mail.
Keep doing whatever you’re doing to help our country weather this dangerous passage and if you have any wishes to spare, send a few our way.

A Plane to China: Coronavirus Chronicle, Part 18

Posted on August 16, 2020 by Steph

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If we’re friends on Facebook you may remember that a little over a week ago, I had a dream about being on a plane with North that was mostly about the logistics of getting them settled into their seat until I went to the restroom and returned to find North missing and searched the plane frantically until receiving a text from North saying they’d slipped into another dimension and were now on a plane to China.

Beth said that’s exactly what the past few weeks had felt like. And we’ve had a lot of ups and downs medically speaking, since the dream.

But before I go into any of that, though, I want to mention a few nice things that happened that have nothing to do with North’s medical condition. First, about a week and a half ago, we had a family friend over for iced mint tea, which I made with mint from the garden. Becky was North’s preschool music teacher and her daughter used to babysit for us so we stayed in touch and she and I became friends. Although North’s been seeing friends occasionally, I haven’t since March, and just sitting in the backyard with Becky for an hour was really nice, so I resolved to have another friend over soon.

The second thing was an outing we took to Centennial Park in Howard County last weekend. Noah flew his drone, we hiked on an asphalt path that goes around the reservoir taking turns pushing the wheelchair, and we saw a blue heron, which was North’s symbol in preschool, so it always makes me happy to see one (or a painted turtle, which was Noah’s symbol). It also made me happy to see Noah running downhill holding onto North’s chair and making them laugh. If Maryland’s statistics improve and he does go back to school sometime this fall, we will all miss him. As I told Beth, “I want him to go and I want him to stay.”

The third thing is that my resurrection lilies bloomed. They bloom so consistently during the last week of July or the first week of August that when it took until the second week of August I was convinced they’d died, but then they popped out the ground and shot up, as they always do, their cheerful pink blooms atop their tall, fragile stems. It could be a lesson in patience, I suppose, if one was inclined to look at it that way.

Now back to the medical report… Two Fridays ago, in physical therapy North was able to stand about a minute holding onto a bar, and to kick a ball. Both were big breakthroughs. North’s progress has been of the two-steps-forward-one-step-back variety. Just a day after that PT session was the last day they were able to stand for almost a week, but when they were able to do it again, they could do it for around the same amount of time with no support at all and they were able to lift their feet one at a time. So they are inching forward and getting stronger. That’s the plus side.

Meanwhile, this week was bookended by an ER visit and a much longer, more complicated seizure than North had ever had. The ER visit was last Monday evening. At dinner that night, North complained of throat irritation, and a little bit later while Beth and North were sitting out on the porch, watching the rain, North started to experience difficulty breathing and was unable to speak.

We waited a few minutes to see if it got better or worse and when it got worse, Beth called 9-11 and soon there were five or six paramedics on our porch. They took North’s temperature and attached a pulse oximeter to North’s finger and found both their temperature and their oxygen saturation were normal. Listening to their breath, the paramedic didn’t hear any wheezing. He said it was up to us whether to go to the hospital or stay home. We asked North what they wanted, and they indicated they wanted to go, so we did.

North and I rode in the ambulance and Beth drove behind. Because only one parent is allowed in Children’s at a time, Beth had to wait outside the ER the whole time we were in there. Meanwhile, I had gotten motion sick in the ambulance because the passenger seat faces backward and that always makes me sick. I managed to get to a bathroom to throw up once we were inside, but a few times in the ambulance, it was a close thing. I think the paramedic who was riding with us knew because in between asking me and North questions for the forms she was filling out she kept apologizing for bumps in the road and saying she sometimes got sick, too.

Once I’d finished filling out intake forms, we went to a room where North was hooked up to another pulse oximeter and a heart monitor and various medical professionals came and went. On the other side of the curtain, there was a Latino boy, maybe preschool age, who was there for gastrointestinal bleeding. There was an interpreter, so I heard all about his upcoming colonoscopy in English and Spanish and then he piped up that he’d had one before. When you’re in a children’s hospital, there are always reminders that things could be worse.

Eventually North had a chest and neck x-ray so the doctors could look for any obstructions, but they didn’t find any. About ten p.m., two hours after we’d arrived, a respiratory therapist came by and North got a nebulizer with a saline mist in it. The treatment lasted about ten minutes. Communicating with thumbs up or down in response to my questions, they indicated that initially it felt cool on their throat and eased the irritation but didn’t help their breathing. When it was finished, I asked again and they said they were breathing a little better. And then a few minutes after that, they started to speak again and said they were “a lot better.”

We discussed possible causes with a doctor. I mentioned North had felt a stinging in their eyes while they were taking thyme leaves off the stem for me as I was making dinner and then had a scratchy throat after eating. I added I’d never heard of thyme being an allergen and also mentioned it’s a herb I frequently use—I grow it in the garden– but the doctor said it was a possibility. Shortly before midnight, we were discharged with a prescription for an epi pen.

Having done some reading since that night, though, we’re not really sure it was an allergy. Thyme is a very rare allergy, and the symptoms aren’t typically respiratory. It seems like it could be part of the Functional Neurological Disorder, another thing their body just stopped doing well. Still, with everything we have going on, it seems simpler to treat it like an allergy just in case, rather than getting dragging North into another doctor’s office to get tested. (It’s something we might like to do eventually, though.)

Two days later, North had an appointment with the Physical Medicine department at Children’s. This was the next stop after Neurology decided they couldn’t help. It was a disappointing meeting. Both Beth and North came out of it feeling like there was no solid plan going forward, other than continuing physical therapy and waiting weeks to see a psychologist. PT is helping with their leg strength and function, but it doesn’t address the seizures and it doesn’t get at the root cause of whatever is causing the whole disorder. North is supposed to see a psychology fellow at Children’s sometime in September (it’s not scheduled yet) and we also have a late September appointment for psychology intake at a clinic associated with Johns Hopkins. We are trying to get into the system at both institutions at once to see how each one goes because it takes so long to get an appointment.

North had their first aqua therapy appointment later that day. We’d been hoping this would be as helpful as it was with their chronic pain last year, but North had a seizure in the water and the therapist wasn’t sure we should continue with more appointments, for safety reasons. So that’s up in the air.

Speaking of seizures, North had a big one on Friday night. They were in the living room, reading pages off our mystery calendar. This is a bedtime tradition. It’s one of those page-a-day calendars, each one describing an unsolved mystery. We’d gotten several days behind and North had five pages to read. They had several seizures while reading—the kind they’ve been having all along—they slump over for up to thirty seconds and their eyes roll back, their limbs sometimes shake a little, and then they’re back to normal. During the last page, they had a new kind. It was like the short ones, but it went on much longer. And it kept seeming to end and North’s eyes would look aware and then it would start up again. This went on for five or ten minutes and when it was over it was an hour or so before they could speak.

That very day North’s physical therapist had suggested reducing North’s screen time to see if it helped with the seizures, and we’d resolved to try to get them down to two hours a day. I used to be really strict about media limits but around the time North started middle school, we were having a lot of conflicts about it and I decided it wasn’t the hill I wanted to die on. We switched to a system in which they had to complete schoolwork, a chore, and a wholesome activity and after that I wouldn’t ask how long they were spending on their phone. It worked okay when school involved going somewhere for seven hours a day and they had extracurricular activities and saw their friends often. During the pandemic, it’s been working less well. According to the stats on their phone, they’re on it six hours a day on average and that doesn’t count watching television. So, we’re trying to put the genie back in the bottle.

It’s only third day and North is having a difficult time trying to figure out what to do with themselves. So we’ve bought them a new card game with a solitaire option, a new perplexus ball, and I ordered a graphic novel from the library (which is now doing curbside pickup) as this is the kind of book North likes best.

But we are limiting any kind of reading in the evenings because on Saturday evening, while we were playing Cards Against Humanity, they had a series of short seizures and we wondered if reading late in the day could be a trigger. It might not be, though, because this afternoon North had another long seizure (about five minutes) while they were in the car with Beth. Like the other one, it was followed by about an hour of mutism. And during dinner, they had a series of medium-length ones. They weren’t reading before either of these episodes.

And in between these seizures, they walked several feet with the walker we bought in Ithaca when all this started. Steps backward, steps forward…

A New Routine: Coronavirus Chronicle, Part 17

Posted on August 2, 2020 by Steph

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The week after we got back from the beach was a flurry of medical appointments. There was a meeting with the Neurology department at Children’s on Monday, which both Beth and North found discouraging because having found no organic cause for North’s troubles, they seemed to be washing their hands of them. Responsibility for North’s case seems to have been transferred to the Physical Medicine department, which as far as we can tell, handles less clear-cut cases like North’s, but the first appointment there isn’t until the week after next.

In the meanwhile, they do have a diagnosis, Functional Neurological Disorder, also called Conversion Disorder. If you read through the description, you’ll notice migraines are a risk factor, and also that it sometimes take the form of the inability to speak, which did happen to North for about a month and a half in third grade.

Tuesday, North saw the orthodontist, where they switched out their yellow braces for purple, and on Wednesday, they had physical therapy at the rehab hospital in the morning and a pediatrician appointment in the afternoon. It was a long overdue regular check-up but what got us into the office was the fact that we needed a signature for an application for a temporary handicapped parking permit. Surprisingly, when North was discharged from the hospital, the nurse said it couldn’t be a doctor at the hospital who signed it—it had to be North’s pediatrician. (I couldn’t believe it, so she offered to go back and double check, but she came back with the same answer.) Anyway, that’s another appointment off the to-do list.

Thursday we had a telemedicine appointment with Psychiatry at Children’s. We know the doctor; we’d seen her a few times through the gender clinic. We discussed various stressors in North’s life that they might be somatizing. The psychiatrist seemed to find the car accident North witnessed most interesting. She had no interest in Matthew’s death, though that was a lot more proximate (a little over a week before North stopped walking, as opposed to a month and a half before).

Finally, on Friday, North had their second physical therapy appointment of the week. At this one, they stood, holding a bar for several seconds at a time, a few times. Beth was really excited about this and I was, too, when they came home and North demonstrated at the kitchen sink.

Despite this progress, the whole experience has been pretty hard on North. That’s why I was glad that for three evenings that week (Tuesday through Thursday), North’s sleep-away camp had what they are calling “Intermission,” virtual evening meeting so campers who won’t see each other in person this year can re-connect. There was a virtual campfire, with campers encouraged to bring their own S’mores; a discussion about values and ethics, which is something they do daily at camp; and a talent show. I hope this helped bolster North. North was also able to meet up with Miles and Jay at a park and hang out awhile Thursday afternoon.

As another way of reducing their stress, on Wednesday, we agreed to let North drop the remaining half of their Foundations of Tech class. They were having trouble finding assignments (and the messages from their teacher about the missing assignments) and/or submitting assignments they had completed on the portal and they’d gotten very behind. They had no hard copy or electronic record of the missing work they thought they had turned in and it just seemed too difficult to sort out, especially in an accelerated summer course. Something similar happened fourth quarter in their English class, but in that case, we didn’t find out until their report card arrived with a nasty surprise on it. This is concerning because North’s classes will be all online through the end of January at the earliest, but we’re going to try to be more proactive about making sure they’re getting all their work done. Right now, it’s just too much to deal with, for a required class they just wanted to get out of the way early.

This weekend we got North back in the water, this time a swimming pool. Beth made reservations at Long Branch pool for the three to five p.m. slot on Saturday. This pool is actually two pools (plus a baby pool, which was closed). In addition to limiting how many people are allowed in the pool at once, they’ve taken away all the chairs, though you’re allowed to bring your own. We didn’t, though, which was just as well, because North wanted to spend as close to two hours as they could in the water and we needed at least one parent to stay in arm’s reach. (I spent about forty-five minutes of our pool time swimming laps, my first time since March. For the rest of the time, the three of us were all together in the water.)

Both pools have wheelchair lifts, so we had our pick. We went with the smaller one, which is shallower. While in the water, they were able to dog paddle using just their arms, hold onto the side of the pool and put some weight on their legs, to stand away from the wall while holding Beth’s hands, and even to take a few steps.

They also had three seizures while we were there. I haven’t mentioned the seizures, have I? They last about thirty seconds during which North goes limp and their eyes roll back in their head. They don’t lose consciousness and they’re aware of their surroundings, but they can’t speak. I’d never seen it happen before, but Beth had, as did North’s friends Miles and Jay two days earlier. These kind of non-epileptic seizures are also part of Functional Neurological Disorder.

This coming week will be less busy, with just three medical appointments instead of six. North will go to the dentist and to physical therapy twice. I also hope to get back into swing of some of our pandemic routine that went by the wayside during our travels and while North was in the hospital, and in this hectic week. For a couple months, on Tuesday evenings Beth and I had been alternating between playing Settlers of Cataan with Noah, or listening to a teen gay romance on audiobook (You Know Me So Well) with North. But this week I had a deadline for a technical brochure on B vitamins and needed to work Tuesday evening, so we skipped it. On Thursdays we have an all-family activity and it was North’s turn to choose, but we didn’t remember it was Thursday until shortly before dinner and North, who often choses something that requires preparation, like the pop-up café in May and the scavenger hunt in June, didn’t want to come up with something on the fly, so we decided to defer their turn a week. Finally, we didn’t go to a park to fly Noah’s drone this weekend, partly because he didn’t ask, but partly because it’s a more complicated outing now that North can’t be left at home alone. (They opted to skip most of the drone-flying expeditions in the past.) I think we’ll keep doing it, but maybe not as often.

We’re all getting used to a new routine, at least for the time being, and learning how to incorporate the old routine into it.

Green Light for the Beach: Coronavirus Chronicle, Part 16

Posted on July 27, 2020 by Steph

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The first day North was out of the hospital, Beth texted me from their physical therapy appointment: “Green light for the beach.” Apparently, the therapist thought it would be fine to go.

So we went.

Saturday

We got a late start out of the house at 2 p.m., two hours later than we intended, and then there was a lot of traffic before the Bay Bridge, so it was almost four-thirty when we stopped at our traditional lunch spot, the Taco Bell and Dairy Queen right past the bridge (and yes, we did wait that long to eat lunch, snacking on garlic rye crisps and dried apricots in the car).

We stopped at our favorite farm stand and got a lot of produce, and arrived in Rehoboth around 7:30. We were all charmed by the house, which was nicer than it looked in its online pictures. It was wood-paneled with a soaring ceiling over the dining room and a sort of indoor veranda over the living room. The kitchen was a cheerful aqua color and spacious. There were two screened porches, a big one, and a little one with a desk I used as a writing table to write a lot of this post. It was also more house than we needed—five bedrooms. It’s harder to find little two or three bedroom cottages than it was in the nineties when we started vacationing in Rehoboth. Sadly, a lot of them have been torn down and replaced with larger houses. But the space allowed us to spread out. Noah and I used one of the extra upstairs bedrooms as a reading room, and all week I kept imagining how we’d assign the rooms if we had our mothers and my sister and her family with us. We missed them a lot.

The only two drawbacks of the house were that 1) it wasn’t particularly accessible (we’d rented it back when North was on crutches, but not in a wheelchair) so we had to lift that chair up and down the front and back steps over and over, and 2) when we got there the thermostat was in a lockbox and set to 73 degrees and for the first couple days we were freezing, until we got the realty to open the box and let us set it.

The main reason we’d chosen this house was that it was a block from the beach, and we imagined North would be able to get to the beach on their own and would spend hours every day swimming. Clearly, that plan would have to be adjusted.

After unpacking the food, Beth, North, and I slipped down to the boardwalk. We were near the south end of it (we usually stay further north). There was an accessible path made of woven plastic that extended a little ways down the beach, close enough to see the water, so we wheeled North down it. We returned to the boardwalk, found the nearest beach wheelchair shed (five blocks away and closed for the day) so we’d know where it was, and then we peeked into Funland to see what their safety procedures looked like, but most of the entrances were blocked off and we couldn’t really see. Beth did manage to talk to an employee and ascertained that the Haunted Mansion was accessible. I don’t think North would want to go if they couldn’t do that.

We opted to turn around there because the crowds were getting thicker and not as many people were wearing masks as I would have liked (maybe half). Besides, it was getting late. We had a cold supper of cheese and crackers and fruit, as late as Europeans, Beth said. (It was past nine.) Then North did their physical therapy exercises and I cleaned up the kitchen and we turned in late (for us—it might have been eleven).

Sunday

Beth went out in the morning to get some breakfast groceries and we all ate and Beth and North went for another stroll on the boardwalk while I was still eating. When they returned they reported the crowds were sparser and a higher percentage of people were wearing masks in the daytime. I hit the beach around ten. It was a warm, muggy, foggy day. I could see the lifeguards from the water so I assumed they could see me, but the next lifeguard stand to the north was shrouded in fog and I couldn’t see the one to the south (which was further away) at all. The houses up on shore were partially obscured. It was kind of an eerie swim, but good to be in the water.

I swam about forty minutes, then took a short walk and returned to the house so Beth and I could menu plan and make a grocery list. Once that was done, she left to go shopping, and I had lunch, read with Noah in our reading room, and then put the groceries away when she came home, and made lunch for North.

Around three, the kids and I left for the beach. The sky was darkening as we walked to the beach wheelchair shed and many more people were leaving the beach than arriving. This seemed like a bad sign, but I called for the beach patrol to unlock a chair for us. Someone arrived pretty quickly and soon we were rolling North down to the water. Their goal was to sit on the wet sand and feel the water on their feet and legs. It’s such a nice service that these chairs are available for anyone who needs them for free, but just as the big, puffy wheels hit the wet sand, the lifeguards heard thunder and blew their whistles and everyone had to get out of the water. So North’s vision was not realized that day. I was hoping to salvage the outing by asking if they wanted to stroll down the beach in the chair, or maybe just stay where we were and watch the waves, when a lifeguard came over and explained we had to leave the beach, not just the water.

We returned the beach wheelchair, got North back into the regular wheelchair, and pushed them up to the boardwalk. It was nice to have Noah’s help whenever he came to the beach. (And I would like to have the upper body strength of a nineteen-year-old boy who doesn’t even work out.) I eyed the boardwalk, wondering if a consolation prize of a trip to Candy Kitchen was feasible, but everyone who had left the beach seemed to be on the boardwalk now, plus the people who’d already been there, so we turned back. The storm never materialized.

Back at the house, Noah and I watched The Magicians while Beth and North watched The Fosters and then I blogged on the writing porch, while Beth made a dinner of veggie burgers and hot dogs, corn on the cob, potato salad, and watermelon.

After dinner, we ventured out to see if the boardwalk was less crowded on a Sunday night than a Saturday night. The answer was not really, but by ducking down side streets and looping back, we avoided the biggest crowds, and we got ice cream on Rehoboth Ave. We also got a better look into Funland. What I saw in terms of distancing and masks was encouraging. We returned to a less populated part of the boardwalk to eat our ice cream and I stayed a bit after everyone else had gone home to watch the sky over the ocean get pinker and then grow dark.

Monday

I was on the beach by 9:45, leaving North and Beth at the dining room table, attending their online summer school course and working, respectively. It was a hot, sunny day so I went straight to the water where I swam for almost an hour. I saw pelicans and dolphins and only left the beach, reluctantly, at 11:15 because I didn’t want to get too much sun.

At the house I made lunch for myself and North, who had just finished class, then I read with Noah, and wrote some get-out-the-vote postcards for a special election in Tennessee. Beth drove me to the post office to mail them so I could get North to the beach sooner.

This time the day was sunny, with no hint of lightning or thunder so we got the beach wheelchair down to the water and I eased North out of it so they could sit on the sand, with the water running over their legs and sometimes covering them as high as their chest. I noticed when the water moved their thighs they were able to move them back into position without using their hands. They said it was partly being able to move better in the water, and partly the water itself, changing direction and pushing their legs back.

I texted Noah to come because it was almost time to return the beach wheelchair. Getting North down to the water was doable (but difficult) with one person, but getting back was definitely a two-person job.

We got Grandpa Mac (build-your-own-pasta-bowls) delivered for dinner and watched Babette’s Feast, after a half-hour negotiation about what to watch. I hadn’t seen it in decades, but it holds up and the kids liked it, too, especially North.

Tuesday

I took North to the beach in the morning. North thought they’d try sitting in the chair, pushed a little bit into the water because the man who checked out the chair said you can do that and North thought they’d get less sand in their suit that way. But even with the brake set, the chair crept forward when the sand under its wheels eroded in the waves and I was struggling to control it when three beachgoers ran to help. After that, I parked it on the dry sand and North scooched down to the water again. While we were in the water, we saw dolphins and pelicans but the most exciting thing I saw was North kneeling, sometimes holding my hands, but sometimes unsupported when the water got deep enough around them. Beth got to see it, too, because she’d come to help get North off the beach. (Unfortunately, they felt weaker the next day and attributed it to overexertion and were never able to do it again.)

Noah and Beth usually do a puzzle on vacations and this year they had a challenging one to tackle. It was a Frank Lloyd Wright design meant to evoke saguaro cacti and cactus flowers. North got it for Noah for Christmas. Beth and Noah started it Tuesday after lunch.

While they were getting started, I ventured to Candy Kitchen and made a big purchase because we’d decided to limit ourselves to one trip this year instead of a few. I got fudge, sea salt caramels, gummy pizza slices, truffles, and a few other things. The boardwalk wasn’t crowded at all and when I arrived I was the only one in the store. Beth and I decided, based on patterns we’d observed, that from then on we’d only go the boardwalk on weekdays, during the daytime. Other than Candy Kitchen and the grocery store, we also kept out of the indoor stores we usually visit—the tea and spice shop, our favorite coffeeshop, t-shirt shops, the bookstore, the crocs outlet on the highway. We also skipped the water park, not that North could have gone this year anyway.

After I got back with the candy, Noah and I took a late afternoon trip to the beach. He brought his drone and got some great footage. While he was filming, I had a nice swim. It was sunny and the surface of the water was silvery, with all the little ripples sharply defined. It was clearer than usual, too, and I could see a little fish about the size of my finger swimming near the surface. I also saw a couple of jellyfish but I didn’t see the one that stung the inside of my wrist. It left a red mark, but it faded quickly and hurt less than a bee sting. (I was in a good position to judge because the prior week while waiting for a bus to go to the hospital, I was stung by a bee and the memory was fresh.)

Beth made her traditional beach week meal that night—gazpacho, salt-crusted potatoes with cilantro-garlic sauce, and a spread of fancy cheeses. This year she added watermelon agua fresca to the meal. (North chopped ten cups of watermelon for it.) We called it Beth’s Feast and before we ate, Noah said, “Not a word about the food.” (This is a line from Babette’s Feast.)

While I did the dishes, Beth and Noah watched The Mandalorian, then we all played Cards Against Humanity and then Beth and North went for a walk while Noah and I watched The Magicians.

“We did all the things,” I said to Beth as we went to bed, but despite our busy evening, I couldn’t sleep that night, so I slipped down to the beach after Beth had fallen asleep, to stand on the sand and watch the heat lightning.

Wednesday

I woke up stiff and sore from pushing the beach wheelchair uphill the day before, but a morning swim, followed by sitting in a beach chair in the sun watching the waves, helped loosen me up. After lunch, we all headed to the boardwalk for treats. Noah and I shared a paper cup of fries, and North and Beth got gelati (a parfait of soft serve and Italian ice). I wanted funnel cake but I didn’t think it would be wise to eat it right after fries, so I decided to wait.

Noah went home while the rest of us went to the beach. With two adults, we could let North go a little deeper into the water as we each held one of their hands to stabilize them as they sat in the water. Some of the waves were big enough they could duck their head under them. Before we left, I had a brief swim. It was another sunny day with calm water in blue, green, and brown sections.

After we returned the beach wheelchair, Beth and North headed home and I got my funnel cake, which I ate very slowly in the shade of the porch of the restroom pavilion next to Funland. I only ate half of it—those things are enormous.

Next I came home and made dinner (a cucumber salad with yogurt-dill dressing and hard-boiled egg grated over it). It was ready early so Noah and I read before dinner and then after dinner Beth and the kids played a game they found in the house, while I blogged.

Thursday

Beth and Noah were out the door by eight the next morning. He wanted to fly the drone on another part of the beach, over some of the more iconic boardwalk businesses before many people were there. He flew over the Dolles sign and some dolphins, (but from pretty far away because he didn’t want to disturb them). Here’s about five minutes of his footage from both drone expeditions.

North got up twenty minutes after they left, just as I was about to wake them for their 9 a.m. Foundations of Tech class. (They decided later that day they wanted to drop half of the class and do the equivalent of a semester instead of a year over the course of five weeks because they were finding it more difficult than expected and they would have a lot going on with doctors’ appointments once we got back home.)

I made them breakfast, then headed to the beach, where I spent an hour and forty-five minutes at the beach, swimming and watching the waves from the sand.

I returned to the house, showered, read with Noah, and then we all walked down to the boardwalk again to have lunch at the crepe stall in an alley off Rehoboth Ave. It was while we were eating lunch that I finally agreed to North’s plan to go deeper in the water inside an inflatable ring with a mother on each side. (I was surprised they got Beth on board before me, as she’s generally more cautious about this kind of thing.)

Beth went to a 5 & 10 to purchase the ring, while I secured the beach wheelchair and then we all met up. It was tricky getting into and out of the water, but in between North had an experience more like swimming and they didn’t drown, so we considered it a success.

We couldn’t stay in the water too long, though, because North and I had reservations at Funland, which is operating at 20% capacity, with distancing on the rides and masks required. As a result of the reduced crowds, there were no lines to speak of, and people were pretty good about distancing. Not all of the rides are accessible, but two of North’s favorites, the Sea Dragon and the Haunted Mansion, were so they rode them three times each. I accompanied them in the Mansion and having never done it three times in one day before, I can now tell you on the second ride you notice little details you missed the first time, but by the third time it’s pretty much given up all its secrets. North also rode the helicopters twice and the bumper cars once. They were a little frustrated by a few rides that would have been accessible if not for one step up.

“Today was fun,” they said as we proceeded down the boardwalk toward home, where penne with a tomato-mushroom sauce Beth and Noah had made awaited. We ate dinner listening to a presentation about the fall semester at Ithaca on a laptop. Then after I did the dishes, there were games, and work on the puzzle, and blogging. But sadly, Beth was up late working, for the second night in a row.

Friday

I woke already sad to be leaving in a day. Sometimes at the end of beach week I feel peaceful and satisfied, but sometimes I’m just really sad and I already knew what kind of departure this was going to be. Rain was predicted in the morning, so we spent it inside. Noah and I read and watched the season four finale of The Magicians while rain pelted the windows. It was over by lunchtime, so we all went to the beach and North got to try out the ring again. We never really mastered getting in and out of the water. It’s a terrifying process actually when the waves are deep enough to go over your child’s head, but not deep enough for them to float in the ring, though North seemed pretty unfazed by it. And then Beth got knocked down by a wave on the way out and skinned both her shins. But in between, we spent a nice hour in the water and it made North very happy.

The sky was all kinds of sky at once, part overcast, part sunny, with dark gray storm clouds out at sea. These had black strands hanging down Beth thought might be rain. When we got out, Beth and the kids went to the boardwalk for treats, but in a last-day calculus, I decided I’d rather have more beach time than ice cream so I stayed. A big pod of dolphins showed up and started fishing in front of me, splashing, and flipping their tails out of the water. (I saw the back third of one of them all the way to the tip of its tail.) They were there for a half hour. It was kind of magical. I also saw osprey soaring over me with fish in their talons. I’d been seeing that all week, the fishing seemed better than usual for them.

When my family returned, just missing the dolphins, we walked toward home, but as we got close I realized I wasn’t done yet, and I split off again to return to the beach just in front of our block, where I rested on my towel and then sat up and watched the ocean, and then had my last swim in the golden early evening light. The water was calm, as it had been all week, so I floated on my back and looked at the cottony clouds and a gull circling over my head.

Back at the house, we had pizza delivered and ate it on the screened porch, and talked about how we’d missed being with our usual beach crew of extended family. Then I cleaned the kitchen, Beth and Noah finished the puzzle, we all watched an episode of Speechless, and started to pack up the house. We knew from our experience trying to get on the road a week earlier, it takes longer now that North can’t help as much and there’s more equipment to fit in and on top of the car.

Saturday

As a result of doing a lot of leaving-the-house chores the night before we got out of the house pretty smoothly and close to on time. Beth drove to the realty to return the keys while the kids and I went to the boardwalk to say goodbye to the ocean. This ritual had to be revised because it wasn’t worth the hassle of getting North down to the water, so instead we brought the water to North. We left the chair at the end of the plastic path where North could see us and we stood with our feet in the water for the requisite twenty waves, then filled a plastic water bottle with ocean water, came back and poured it on North’s feet.

And with that, our strange week at the beach was over.

Clues: Coronavirus Chronicle, Part 15

Posted on July 24, 2020 by Steph

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When you last left us, almost two weeks ago, North was sitting in the shallow water at the edge of Cayuga Lake, in Ithaca, New York, and they were unable to stand, even with support. They’d lost control of their thigh muscles, though they had some strength in their hips, glutes, calves, and feet. Though a combination of pushing with their lower legs and us guiding them they could scoot on their bottom and we got them to the picnic table just feet from the water where we’d eaten lunch, though the pebbly incline was a challenge.

North had been complaining of occasional muscle weakness prior to this incident, but nothing on this scale. We hoped it would pass, like the other times, which never lasted more than a half hour, but in the meantime, we needed to get them back to the house. The car was parked in a lot that was in sight, but with North unable to walk, it might as well have been on the moon. There was a service road that came close to the table so Beth went to ask the staff at the park entrance if she could drive on it, but they weren’t authorized to let her (they were young and seemed afraid to break rules).

Beth returned to the table just as a park police officer drove by and after she explained the situation, he (rather reluctantly) said she could drive on the road. Here Beth got annoyed because he wasn’t a teenager with a summer job and he didn’t have to make it hard. Anyway, we got North from the table to the car—I honestly don’t remember how—and drove back to the house.

After some time passed and North’s condition did not improve, we had to decide whether or not to go the ER. You may find it strange that we didn’t for another two days, but we’ve been through a lot of mysterious maladies with North and Beth and I both thought it would be better to get home and take them to Children’s where they’ve been going since they were eight years old. The doctors in neurology and at the pain clinic have the big picture—the month and a half of not speaking (third grade), the year of broken bones (fifth grade), the complex migraine that left their hands and feet paralyzed (also fifth grade), the fracture that left them on crutches for nine months (seventh to eighth grade). We wouldn’t have to try to explain the whole saga to someone new. Also, having had two overnight ER visits with North over the past few years, no one was eager to repeat that experience.

So that’s why we decided to stay at the house. We switched beds so Beth could sleep with North in our bed and I slept in North’s bed. The next day, North still couldn’t move their legs. Beth went to a medical supply store (two actually) while North attended the first and second sessions of an online summer school class they’re taking. Beth returned with a walker, the kind with a seat, that we could use to transport North to restrooms on our drive home. The car was too packed with the contents of Noah’s dorm room to fit a wheelchair.

We left our AinBnB in the early afternoon. “Goodbye, Ithaca. Hope to see you again soon,” Beth said, as we pulled out of the driveway.

“Goodbye, Ithaca,” Noah said, sounding wistful.

A quick diversion on that topic: since we left Ithaca, Maryland has been put on the list of states from which New York will not accept visitors unless they quarantine for two weeks on arrival. Ithaca College’s current policy is that students from these states cannot return to campus until their home states come off the list, which now consists of thirty-one states. I wonder if the list continues to grow if Ithaca will go entirely online for the fall, but as of right now the plan is still a rolling schedule of arrivals from early September to early October, and hybrid classes you can attend in person or remotely. (And while we’re talking about school, our K-12 school district is completely online at least through late January, we recently learned.)

But back to this story… We got home Monday evening. While we were driving, we’d gotten a call back from the doctor who manages North’s case at the pain clinic, or rather a call from someone else saying she was in surgery and couldn’t call back until the next day.

When she did call, late Tuesday morning, she said to go to the ER at Children’s rather than get an appointment at the pain clinic. Beth and North went and to our surprise, because it’s never happened before when we go to the ER, North was admitted. They got a COVID test (negative) and a series of exams and around eight p.m., they got a room. It was a really nice room, spacious because it’s usually a double, and with a view of the Washington monument and the Capitol. Beth came home to get some things for North and then she returned and spent the night in a fold-out chair in the room.

All the next day, North saw more medical personnel and had more exams. I got to the hospital just in time for the MRI. Only one parent per patient is allowed in the hospital at a time and I’d come to relieve Beth. To get there I had to take public transportation (a bus, a train, and a shuttle), which I hadn’t done since March (well, until the previous day when I’d taken a bus to go get some groceries from the Co-op in Beth’s absence).

The MRI took a long time because it was actually two MRIs, one with contrast and one without and they had to change North’s IV in between because it wasn’t working. It was freezing cold and very loud in the room, but North didn’t complain and it was much louder (and hot) in the machine, so I won’t either.

After the MRI, North felt a migraine coming on, probably from the noise, and because it took an hour and a half and two requests to get a nurse to come with painkiller, it developed into a full-blown one, which I haven’t seen in years. (They’ve gotten very good at detecting them and heading them off.)

After they’d recovered, we had dinner in the room and played Sleeping Queens until Beth came to take me home and then return to the hospital. She said as I’m the lighter sleeper I’d never get to sleep with all the lights and noise of a hospital, which was generous of her.

Wednesday was also the thirty-third anniversary of our first date, which we usually celebrate, but we didn’t really this year. As she was leaving the house either the first or second time she went to the hospital that day, Beth said it was not the anniversary either of us would have envisioned, but then she paused and noted we were talking about kids pretty early on in the relationship (even though we took a long time to have them) so maybe it was appropriate.

We found out the next day the MRI hadn’t turned up any physical reason for North’s immobility. This didn’t surprise us or the neurological team. They concluded it was a similar to the misfiring that causes North’s chronic pain, but this time in response to stress, rather than an overreaction to a physical injury. Possible stressors include: the pandemic, the physical and psychological toll of being in pain since February, the car that crashed into our fence in late May (North was just a few feet away), and Matthew’s death.

That all seemed to make sense on the surface, but as North pointed out, when it struck, they were swimming, and actually feeling pretty relaxed, as any kind of water is their happy place. I find it interesting that it’s their legs that are affected because that’s what happened to Matthew and North was the one who found him half-paralyzed. The doctors (who are not literature Ph.Ds) find the symbolism less compelling. More to the point, they think that physical therapy can get their brain and their legs communicating again. If that happens, all the clues and theories don’t really matter.

Beth and were texting and talking about all this on the phone all day. When I returned to the hospital in the afternoon, not much was going on by that point, except people coming to take North’s vital signs and a social worker who dropped by. We played Clue and Sleeping Queens again and were just about to try ordering dinner again (the line had been busy earlier) when a nurse came by with discharge papers. We were surprised as we didn’t think that was even on the table until the next day, and last we heard, the neurological team was debating discharge to home or to a rehabilitation hospital. Also, we had a prescription for physical therapy (starting the next day) but not for a medication that had been discussed. And we didn’t have the signature we needed for a handicap parking permit. But we were all eager to have North home and Beth had already acquired a wheelchair, a grab bar for the shower, and a shower stool. So we decided to call with our outstanding questions the next day and just get out of Dodge. (We did order and eat our dinner while we were waiting for some more paperwork.)

Weighing on our minds all through this was the fact that we had a house in Rehoboth one block from the beach rented for a week, starting Saturday. We decided Beth would discuss it with the physical therapist the next day and I joked we were a flight risk. “We are so a flight risk,” Beth said. That evening, with North in our custody, it was starting to seem possible we would actually go.

To be continued…

Somewhat Normal: Coronavirus Chronicle, Part 14

Posted on July 17, 2020 by Steph

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Pirates of Penzance

On the second Wednesday of July, North knocked on the door of Noah’s room, where he and I were reading in the air conditioning. When I yelled, “Come in,” they lunged into the room brandishing a wooden sword they’d just finished covering in aluminum foil. It was a prop for their role as Frederick, the reluctant pirate in a half-day, outdoor drama camp production of Pirates of Penzance.

The camp was two weeks long and held in a park, with socially distanced blocking and choreography. Because there was only half the time as usual to prepare for the show, campers were making some of their props and costumes at home and the performance would be more of a revue of selected songs than a shortened version of the play.

There were contingency plans for rain, including rescheduling camp hours during the weekend or on July 3 (which they had off because it was a federal holiday), rehearsing in bathing suits, or rehearsing at home on Zoom. However, there was no morning rain the first week and this pattern held for most of the second week. By Wednesday evening, however, the director, Gretchen, had become concerned about forecasts for all-day thunderstorms on Friday, performance day. After hurried consultation with all the families of the campers (half as many as usual to keep distancing manageable), she settled on a plan of having an extra rehearsal late Thursday afternoon and to perform Thursday evening, rather than Friday morning.

This meant North was at camp from nine to noon, at a physical therapy appointment in the city at 1:45, then at another camp session that started at five and lasted until the performance began at seven, which was followed by a distanced cast-parent pizza party in the park. This is a normal level of activity for North in non-pandemic times, but quite unusual these days.

At showtime, the audience set up our blankets and chairs in family groups. The show began with a song with complicated choreography using parasols. All the actors were double-cast as daughters of the Major General and as pirates. I was glad the kids and I had watched a 1983 film version of the show—with Kevin Kline as the pirate king, Angela Lansbury as Ruth (the lady pirate), and Linda Ronstadt as Mabel—the night before camp started because I had no familiarity with the show and otherwise I would have had trouble following it.

There were nine actors, aged thirteen to sixteen, and two were Gretchen’s daughters. Gretchen used the fact that the sisters could stand next to each other to help fill in holes in the blocking in more natural-looking ways, to the extent anything in a show like Pirates is natural. (Gretchen had them work on operatic gestures and other techniques of melodramatic acting.) Here’s a clip of North’s first scene as Frederick, reassuring the frightened maidens that he’s no longer a pirate and therefore not a threat.

The scene that got the most laughs was probably the one in which the pirates are hiding behind rocks and there was one pirate left without a rock and when he tried to share one, the other pirates whipped out their swords and admonished, “Six feet!”

It was a fun show and pleasant to watch outdoors as the heat of the day began to ebb. One of the moms had organized a big pizza order and it wasn’t until shortly before it arrived that Beth and I realized we each thought the other had conveyed our order to her. So Beth had to place a separate order for us and go get it, but we were eating pretty soon after everyone else. We were seated within conversational distance of the mom of a girl North’s known since preschool and Zoë had come to watch the performance, so we all had people to talk to while we waited.

Something Gretchen said while she was introducing the play stuck with me. She was talking about the camp experience and how nice it was to have “a little semblance of something somewhat normal.” That’s why we let North attend this camp, though so much time unmasked and with other people, even standing far apart, did make me nervous.

Ithaca

We did another somewhat normal thing the next day—we set out on a summer road trip. The official purpose of the trip was to clean out Noah’s dorm room (which he finally had permission to enter) but we decided to make a long weekend out of it.

Beth was scheduled to work Friday morning because we’d expected North to still be in camp, so she did, and we left around noon. We had a picnic lunch about an hour north of home and arrived in Ithaca about 7:30. At the house we met the two friendly resident cats, a calico named Opal and an orange tabby named Leo. By the time we’d unpacked, procured some pizza, eaten it at the house, and cleaned up from dinner, it was time for bed, past time actually. We were up until about eleven, which for me is late. We’d had a longish wait in the rain outside the pizza place, but while we were waiting a passerby informed us and the other little clusters of people that it was “the best pizza in town,” so that was encouraging.

No one slept well because it’s an odd feature of the AirBnB that none of the windows had any dressings except blinds in the bathroom and a sheer bit of fabric on our bedroom window. So we were mostly up with the sun.

We had breakfast in the house and in the late morning Beth and Noah headed to his dorm, while I had a nap. Only two people per family were allowed in and the appointments were spread out so they didn’t see another family the whole time they were there, except one heading into another dorm. (Noah did hear one on another floor of his dorm.) When they came back to the house, Beth said the whole process was “easy peasy.” They brought take-out back with them and Noah was so happy to be reunited with his camera that he started taking pictures of North eating their lunch before he had his.

We spent the afternoon in a series of parks. We hiked part of the trail to Taughanook Falls, but North got tired, so we turned back and drove to the overlook instead. Before we left the trail, though, we waded into the almost dry river, scrambling over the pocked riverbed, full of puddles.

At Ithaca Falls, there was deeper water to wade and swim in so we stayed there a long time. This was the third or fourth waterfall of the day and it was here Beth said, “There’s another beautiful waterfall around every damn corner.” It’s true. Ithaca is ridiculously lovely. There a reason they said “Ithaca is gorges.” (I swear I’m going to buy that t-shirt someday.) There was a conveniently located log in the water that afforded a nice view of the waterfall so we sat there awhile and Beth said, “This is the best log I have ever sat on.”

We went back to the house where Noah showed us his photos of the trip so far and he and I read a chapter of Homeland. Then we got sushi and ate it at Stewart Park in a pavilion with a view of Cayuga Lake. On the way home we picked up ice cream from Purity, Ithaca’s most famous ice cream parlor and a family favorite.

Everyone slept better because we draped a quilt over the curtain rod in our room and piled pillows in front of the windows in the kids’ room. We had another outdoorsy day planned, but first we fortified ourselves at Waffle Frolic, which is the sort of restaurant where you can get ice cream, Nutella, or frosting on waffles. There are also healthier options, but that’s what we went with, though we did use buckwheat waffles as a base and added fruit and eggs on the side, so the meal was not devoid of nutrition. There were outdoor tables and it was our first time eating at a restaurant during the whole pandemic. It was hard to hear the staff calling out names to pick up food at the counter, but once we got our food it was quite pleasant.

We visited the Ithaca farmers’ market and the food co-op where we gathered food for a picnic. The farmers’ market is under a long wooden roof, with built-in stalls. It’s less extensive than the Takoma Park farmers’ market in terms of produce on offer, but there were more craft stalls. It’s always interesting to see another town’s market.

Next we drove around looking for a place we could swim. It had rained hard the night before so a lot of swimming places were closed because of presumed poor water quality. We ended up at Long Point State Park, also on Cayuga Lake. When we entered the park, and we asked if swimming was allowed, the young man in the booth said, “We can’t say you can, but we can’t say you can’t, and we won’t come get you if you do.” This was a surprising response, as we’d gotten a clear-cut no at the last park we’d tried. A little ominous, too, given what happened later, but we decided to go for it. We ate our lunch at a picnic table and then swam in the pebbly-bottomed lake, ringed with ridges of evergreen trees.

As at all the parks, Noah took a lot of pictures. I’d been thinking about how film and photography help him to connect to nature. In other words, it answers the question “What is the purpose of this activity?” he asked us at this very lake about a year ago.

We’d planned to move on to another park, one where drones are allowed, so around two p.m. North and I started to get out of the water. (Beth and Noah were already out.) Once I was out, North called me back to the water, to help them get to their feet, but when I pulled them up, their legs wouldn’t hold them.

To be continued…

A Goodbye: Coronavirus Chronicle, Part 13

Posted on July 6, 2020 by Steph

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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.

A Protest and a Park: Coronavirus Chronicle, Part 12

Posted on June 25, 2020 by Steph

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Well, I ended my last post saying I imagined the summer would hold more protests and drone-flying excursions and that seems to be how it’s going. Last Friday we went to a slightly bigger Black Lives Matter protest in Silver Spring and then Sunday we drove out to the Chesapeake Bay to swim and fly the drone.

Earlier that week North had an in-person appointment at the pain clinic, as a follow-up from the telemedicine appointment. The doctor ordered an MRI, to check for any issues with their spine as a precaution before they start another round of physical and possibly aqua therapy. It was the aqua therapy that really seemed to turn things around last time, so we’re hoping the pool at the rehabilitation hospital has re-opened or will soon. Anyway, the MRI and their physical therapy intake appointment are both next Monday.

Black Lives Matter

We didn’t have much information about the protest before we went. I’d seen a notice on Facebook a while back and I’d picked it because I thought at a kneeling protest it might be easy to keep your distance from people. You could select a spot and stay there and everyone else would stay in their spots. I also like the idea of a reflective, silent tribute. But then a day before the protest I couldn’t find any information about an action going on at the time, place, and date I remembered (5 p.m. Juneteenth, Silver Spring Civic Building plaza). There was one there at 3 p.m. on that day and one at 5 p.m. the next day. Living where we do, you really don’t have to look too hard to find a protest. But I wasn’t sure if I’d misremembered the time or the date or if the kneeling protest had been cancelled because neither description I found said anything about that. Beth and I decided on the Friday afternoon one because it seemed like it would be less crowded than the Saturday afternoon one. We invited the kids and Noah said yes, while North declined, possibly because we were pretty short on details and they wanted to know what they were getting themselves into.

When we arrived it was raining gently. There was a crowd, but the plaza wasn’t packed and virtually everyone was wearing a mask. The crowd was mostly teens and adults, but some people had brought younger kids. We tried to keep to the edges, which meant when the speeches started, about 3:20, we couldn’t hear much. The march organizers were young, probably high school age, and there were a half dozen of them standing in a line where the skating rink is in the winter, near a big Black Lives Matter banner, handing the microphone back and forth. There’s really nothing like young activists to make you feel hopeful for the future, even when you can’t actually hear what they’re saying.

Eventually people starting moving and it became clear there was going to be a march. For about twenty minutes we filed through the streets of downtown Silver Spring, chanting the usual chants. Noah commented that he’s always thought “No justice, no peace!” is an odd thing to chant at a peaceful march. It was harder to keep our distance here, but at least we were passing people and they were passing us, so we weren’t in close contact with the same people for long.

When we returned to the plaza it was announced everyone should sit or kneel for nine minutes, the length of time the police officer who murdered George Floyd knelt on his neck. So we had shown up at the right protest, more or less by accident. It was what I wanted but I also had a little trepidation. I’m fifty-three years old, heavyset, and I injured my left knee badly several years ago and it has never been right since then. But just in the past few months it’s been bothering me noticeably less. I have no idea why. I suggested to Beth we move back to the benches because wood isn’t quite as hard as brick. I got up on the bench and tried kneeling. It wasn’t what you’d call comfortable, and it got worse with time, but it was doable. It was conducive to reflection as well.

When the nine minutes was over, the protesters began drifting out of the plaza. We went to Cold Stone, thinking it might be crowded but we were the only ones there. (Maybe the other rain-soaked protesters wanted some less chilly snack.) We took our ice cream back to the parking garage and ate it in the car.

Bay

Two days later, all four of us took a day trip to the Chesapeake Bay. It was North’s first time on a drone-flying expedition, but this one held the promise of swimming, Taco Bell, and Dairy Queen, and this combination proved enticing. The park was just past the Bay Bridge. With no traffic, this would be about an hour from our house. It was a summer weekend, though, so we weren’t expecting no traffic. And as it turned out, there was an accident on the bridge so it was actually two hours before we got to the park.

It was a short hike through marshland and woods to get to the beach. The ground was soft and it was hard going for North in places, but we got to the water. The beach was narrow but long, so people were able to stretch out along it pretty well. We were there around two hours and I didn’t see a single person wearing a mask, though Beth said she saw a few. North and I were in the water most of the time we were there and Beth and Noah joined us at the beginning. Then the two of them got out of the water and he took some footage with the drone on the beach then they took a walk toward the bridge. They found a little creek running into the Bay and he shot some footage. Here’s a compilation he made.

When they came back, I’d just gotten out of the water and we watched North. They’re always in their element in the water and it was good to see them so happy and active.

“We have to get them to the beach this summer,” I commented to Beth.

By this time it was mid-afternoon and we hadn’t had lunch yet, so we left the bay and got drive-through Taco Bell and Dairy Queen and ate it at the tables outside the Dairy Queen, which we had to ourselves. (We reminisced about Noah’s twelfth birthday and how we had cake and ice cream at those very tables while en route to Rehoboth for the weekend and how hard it was to keep the candles lit so he could blow them out.)

Looking Ahead…

Noah finally got time slot to pick up his things from his dorm room, where his camera and most of his summer clothes have been awaiting his return since early March. It’s a few weeks from now. We’re going to make a long weekend out of it, staying a couple days in Ithaca to splash in some of the abundant waterfalls and eat take-out from some of the many excellent restaurants in that foodie town.

It will be the first time we’ve been on an overnight family trip since we went to Berkeley Springs in February, but we’ll be hitting the road again less than a week later because after going back and forth for months about whether to go to Rehoboth this summer, we finally decided we would, but not as the big extended family gathering it usually is. We’re thinking of it as moving our bubble to the beach—a mere block from the beach as it turns out. We decided to prioritize proximity to the ocean, so North can spend as much time in the water as they like. We’re not sure what else we’ll do and what we won’t while we’re there. We’ll have to assess how crowded our other usual haunts are and what conditions in Delaware are like in mid-July. But North said if they could go to the beach and get takeout from Grandpa Mac’s and Grotto that would be enough for them, so I think we can swing that.

School’s Out: Coronavirus Chronicle, Part 11

Posted on June 14, 2020 by Steph

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School’s out for summer
School’s out forever
School’s been blown to pieces…

Out for summer
Out till fall
We might not come back at all

From “School’s Out,” by Alice Cooper

Thursday: Last Day of School

North was promoted from middle school, virtually, on Friday evening, so I guess it’s summer break now. It may be hard to tell the difference, as North’s schoolwork had been pretty minimal since it went online, but it’s a milestone nonetheless. They finished their last assignment, a short essay on the role of slavery in the Civil War, on Thursday so they could relax and celebrate all day Friday, or “North Day,” as Beth dubbed it.

We also had a telemedicine appointment Thursday at the pain clinic, with the doctor who helped set up North’s physical and aqua therapy for their last bout of chronic pain, the one that lasted from February of seventh grade to November of eighth grade. Because North mentioned some intermittent muscle weakness and that’s a new symptom, the doctor wants to see them in person, so we made an appointment for Monday. (I can’t go because only one parent is allowed to accompany kids to the National Children’s Medical Center right now, and since Beth drives, she’s the obvious choice. I’ve been avoiding both public transportation and ride-sharing services since March, which has really curtailed my transportation options.) As much as we all wish we weren’t in this situation, it’s a good thing to be on a path to a treatment plan.

Thursday is North’s cooking night and it was also their turn to choose our weekly family activity evening, so they made cucumber-tofu sushi and then organized a scavenger hunt. Because it’s Pride month, we were searching for little colored pieces of paper in arc shapes. (They printed a rainbow and then cut it into bands and then cut each band into several short strips.) They hid them around the house and yard while Beth was sequestered in our room on a work call and Noah and I went for a short walk so we wouldn’t see them hiding the papers. When we got back, they directed the hunt from the living room couch, where they issued occasional clues. The hunt was supposed to end when someone found strips with all six colors, but time ran out and as I had five at the end, I was declared the winner.

Friday: North Day

On Friday, Beth took the day off and wore her “Let Summer Begin” t-shirt. At lunchtime we got takeout from an Italian deli and Starbucks and we all had a picnic at Wheaton Regional Park. We also let North choose the venue for takeout pizza that night (they chose Roscoe’s) and Beth made a cake—chocolate with a raspberry filling between the layers and white chocolate frosting. We stuck the numeral nine candle in it because they are now a ninth grader. When we lit the candle, I put on Elizabeth Cotten’s “Graduation March,” but because it wasn’t the more familiar “Pomp and Circumstance,” and because there was cake, the kids decided we needed to sing “Happy Promotion” to the tune of “Happy Birthday” so we did that.

When we presented North with a promotion card and gift—an iPad, with a keyboard and pencil— they were really surprised because they weren’t expecting anything. I have to admit, I felt some retrospective guilt about the fact that we didn’t get Noah anything for eighth grade promotion—and he worked so hard in middle school!—but it’s kind of late for that now. And he did get a class party on a riverboat and an in-person promotion ceremony, while North’s class trip to Six Flags was cancelled, so maybe this evens things out.

The prerecorded promotion video was supposed to be available at 6:30, but there were technical difficulties and it was 8:30 before we were able to view it. After we’d been waiting a while we started to watch The Way, Way Back, which Beth or North found in a list of coming-of-age films. (They were both looking for one because North thought it was an appropriate genre for the evening.) When we finally got the message that the promotion videos had gone live, we paused the movie to finish the next night.

The virtual promotion was a lot like an in-person promotion. There was music from the school orchestra, speeches from the principal, faculty, and students, and awards for various virtues (Caring, Thinker, etc.) Then the names of the roughly four hundred eighth graders scrolled down the screen. Finally, there was a slideshow of photos students and parents submitted. I sent in photos of North at Outdoor Ed in the fall of sixth grade, and in chorus concerts, plays, and coffeehouses. The teacher who organized it (North’s Spanish teacher) picked four of them and Zoë sent in a few pictures of North, too, so they were well represented. I hadn’t told North I sent in pictures, so that was a surprise, too, and they seemed pleased. I think North Day was a success.

First Weekend of Summer Break

The only thing on the agenda North didn’t get a chance to do on Friday was get their head shaved, which we’d promised them they could do once the school year was over. They’ve been wanting to do it for months, but first I was making them wait until after my sister’s wedding in July and then when the wedding was postponed until next summer I proposed after promotion as a good time for it, so they could mark the end of middle school. This was back in May and they wanted to do it right away and grumbled a bit, but Beth advised them to “take the win,” and they must have seen the wisdom in that because they stopped complaining. But by the time we’d watched the promotion on Friday night, it was dark out and all quarantine hair cutting has been taking place in the back yard, so they had to wait another day, but on Saturday morning Beth shaved their head, as promised.

Today North and Zoë got together to wade in the creek and they painted their faces to mark the fact that today was supposed to be D.C. Pride, before it was cancelled. I’m glad North is able to socialize in person with Zoë now and that it’s motivating them to move a bit more, since they have to meet outside.

Summer and Fall

North will be free for a while. Starting in July, they’re going to take an online summer school class in computer science to get their tech requirement out of the way and to give them a little something to do, as other than a two-week, half-day socially distanced drama camp, also in July, they don’t have many plans. It’s unclear if they will be going back to school in person in August. We got a message from the school district just today informing us that no decision has been made and if we’ve heard anything one way or the other, it’s just a rumor.

As for Noah, we got his academic calendar a few weeks ago. Because his college is starting in early October and ending not much later than usual, it’s compressed—with no fall break and shortened Thanksgiving, winter, and spring breaks. Students are encouraged not to go home during either the Thanksgiving or spring breaks, but that’s not mandatory. Of course, this is all assuming these plans go as currently scheduled. The School of Health is openly lobbying for a different plan for fall semester—a hybrid one in which the students start online classes in August, switch to in-person classes for October and November and then finish up at home in December. This disturbs Noah because he’s applying for summer jobs and internships and he’d like to know the exact length of his break.

Parks and Protest

Speaking of Noah, Beth and I continue to go on weekend outings with him to fly his drone. (It was probably on one of these rambles that Beth got bitten by a tick. She was diagnosed with Lyme Disease on Monday. It was her second go-around with it, so she was able to recognize the symptoms and get on medication quickly.) A week ago we went to Quiet Waters Park in Anne Arundel County, which is on the South River. The name is something of a misnomer, because there are a lot of powerboats in the river and there’s a dedicated dog beach, which is a great idea for dogs and their people, but it’s not exactly quiet. We did find a nice open field in front of a stage and a little botanical garden, though, and these were good places for flying. Then yesterday we went to Rockburn Branch Park, in Howard County, which was notable for the fact almost no one was wearing a mask, so we gave everyone a wide berth. There are some historic houses and barns in the park and Noah flew around and over them, then we walked along some trails, and by the numerous sports facilities (baseball diamonds, soccer fields, tennis and basketball courts, and a mountain biking skills course).

We also went to a youth-organized, socially distanced march in Takoma Park a week and a day ago. I’ve been skittish about protesting, because of COVID, but this seemed like a good starter march because the crowds would not be as big as downtown and it was going to be mostly kids and their families so I thought there would be a focus on safety. The route was pretty short and close to home, so we thought North could manage at least part of it and it would be pretty easy to get them home when they were done. I also like to support youth activism in these days when we need it more than ever.

There was a good turnout (including several families we know), nearly everyone was masked (with the exception of the guy standing on the corner yelling about how Jesus was the solution) and for the most part, folks kept their distance. “Black Lives Matter” was the most popular sign, but we also saw “Stop Killing Black People,” “No Justice, No Peace,” and “Say Their Names.” I saw the younger sister of one of North’s friends carrying one that said, “My Friends’ Lives Matter.” We carried the sign North made that says “All Lives Can’t Matter Until Black Lives Do,” taking turns with it.

North walked several blocks and then wanted to sit on the curb, so I stayed with them while Beth and Noah went on. After they decided they were done and not just resting, I went to try to catch up with Beth and Noah with the plan we’d all meet back where North was waiting for us. It took a while to find each other, as the march went off-route at the end, and I went with it while Noah and Beth stayed at the official end point. But eventually we reunited. I went to the farmers’ market to get strawberries and Beth drove the kids home. The march went well enough that we feel ready to tackle another protest next weekend in Silver Spring. This one is a kneeling protest, so I’m hoping people will stake out their spots and stay put, minimizing close contact, but we’ll see.

I imagine there will be more protests this summer and more drone-flying expeditions and I hope, more physical activity for North.

Until (40 More Things): Coronavirus Chronicle, Part 10

Posted on June 4, 2020 by Steph

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Until the killing of black men, black mothers’ sons
Is as important as the killing of white men, white mothers’ sons

From “Ella’s Song,” by Bernice Johnson Reagon

It’s been another forty days since my last “40 Things” post. It was my intention to mark our eightieth day of semi-quarantine with another list of forty things and I seem to be going through with it, though I really wasn’t expecting a nationwide wave of protests to be added to a pandemic when I was first thinking about writing this.

I could write about how hopeful the slow ebb of the first wave of the coronavirus made me feel, how things suddenly feel different than they did forty days ago, even though I’m pretty much counting on an eventual second wave. But that feeling’s been largely overshadowed by current events, so maybe I should write about my horror at the death of George Floyd, the sheer sadism of it, and my anger at how the protests have been met, especially those in D.C., because I call the D.C. metro area my home. But I could also write about the less consequential things we’ve been up to since Memorial Day because I do want these posts to be a chronicle of what everyday life was like for us during these strange times. I’m just going to do all three, in roughly chronological order.

On Memorial Day, George Floyd was murdered. You know the circumstances. What strikes me about it is how long it took. This wasn’t unconscious bias causing someone to make a terribly misguided split-second decision. This decision was made over and over again, to keep doing it, to keep killing him, despite his pleas and those of onlookers.
Protests spread across the country and were met with violence almost immediately. Even journalists are getting harassed and injured. I find this stunning. There’s no free society without a free press.
Two days after Memorial Day, Noah cast his first non-municipal vote (in the Maryland primary). I know a woman who made a cardboard voting booth for her eighteen year old daughter to use to fill out her ballot at home. I didn’t go that far, but I did take his picture at the mailbox, because it felt like a milestone.
And while voting itself isn’t going to solve everything, it’s part of the solution. That’s why Noah has applied for summer/fall internship at When We All Vote.
That same day, the death toll for covid-19 reached 100,000 in the United States. I knew it was coming because I watch those numbers pretty carefully, but it shook me anyway, all those deaths, so many of them avoidable, and resulting from the incompetence and indifference of our national leadership.
Thursday of that week there was a car crash outside our house. The car ended up on its side on the sidewalk in front of our house. Fortunately and surprisingly, no one was seriously hurt, but it took out part of our retaining wall and fence and a decades-old butterfly bush, which may seem like a trivial thing to be upset about right now, but I was.
North was in the yard at the time and very shaken up. They didn’t see what caused it but they did see the out-of-control vehicle speeding toward them.
Noah made his first 911 call to report it. I am aware of the irony of calling the police this week, but it didn’t seem like a situation that was likely to get anyone killed.
And then an old colleague from my teaching days offered me a replacement butterfly bush she’s digging up from her yard. I was touched by this, as we don’t know each other too well. Thanks, Phyllis!
That night it was my turn to pick our weekly family activity and I chose a walk to Starbucks, but it turns out it closes at 2 p.m. these days so I proposed a short walk around the neighborhood instead. I chose this activity because I’ve been trying to get North to be more active. We strolled about fifteen or twenty minutes, and I was glad to see North walking that long. The combination of their pain and not really having anywhere to go has led to them rarely leaving the house.
My mom pointed out this is a role reversal because Noah, who tends to be a homebody, has wanted to go on frequent outings so he can fly his drone.
On Friday morning I was going to take the kids on the delayed Starbucks run, but about three-quarters of a block from home, North decided it was going to be too much, so we went back home. One step forward, one step back…
Later that day North was ambulatory enough to participate in our annual porch swabbing. This is a chore the kids actually enjoy. We take everything off the porch and they pour buckets of water on the dusty floor and sweep it off with a push broom. Then we scrub the bikes and porch furniture and other things we keep on the porch and haul it all back up.
They also do this every year.
https://youtu.be/KpYCiK6zmZo&rel=0
The next day was Saturday and we went strawberry picking at the farm where we go blueberry picking almost every July. We’ve been going there for years but we’d never picked strawberries because they ripen before school’s out and Noah always had too much homework for an outing like that.
This was fun and because the berries grow close to the ground North spent a lot of time sitting on the straw between the rows and didn’t have to wrangle crutches and a basket at the same time.
We reminisced, as we always do when picking berries about how much harder it was with little kids, especially when we overheard parents saying things like “Remember, only the red ones” and “We don’t really need any straw in the basket.”
If you’re local and wondering what it’s like to pick strawberries in a pandemic, I was very impressed with the way everything was thought out and organized. You have to make reservations ahead of time online and you can pre-order anything you want from the farm stand for curbside pickup. The signage made it clear where you were supposed to go and people in the field were good about distancing and wearing masks and there was a drive-up stand where you could get strawberry slushies and warm doughnuts and kettle corn, so of course, we did. (We ate the doughnuts at a picnic table at a nearby park.)
If you’re local and you have time to do something besides protest this weekend, it’s probably the last weekend of the season for strawberries.
We came home laden with vegetables, ribbon noodles, a strawberry-rhubarb pie, and four quarts of strawberries. (We restrained ourselves from picking more than we could eat.)
I used some of them to make strawberry soup, which was basically like a smoothie in a bowl—I even put whipped cream on top—and much to my surprise, neither of the kids seemed to think it was a proper dinner, even with accompanying cheese and crackers.
That same day North’s new adult-sized forearm crutches arrived. They like having taller crutches, but they lament the lack of bright colors in the adult sizes. There’s a little purple on the new ones, but they’re mostly black.
North also met up with Zoë for the first time in two months late Saturday afternoon. A couple days in advance of Montgomery County entering Phase 1 of its reopening, we said they could go for a walk on Sligo Creek Parkway, which is closed to traffic on weekends and wide enough for a socially distant walk. Not seeing any friends for months has been tough on North, so I’m glad they got to see Zoë, walk together, and then soak their feet in the creek.
They’re planning to get together again next weekend and roast marshmallows at Zoë’s family’s fire pit.
North will have another opportunity to interact with their peers for two weeks in July because the director of their cancelled drama camp reconfigured the camp as an outdoor, socially distanced version of itself, and it’s back on. It will only be a half day and I’m really not sure how the kids are going to be able to project well enough to be heard in masks and all far apart from each other, but I trust Gretchen to make it work. The camp is not run out of the recreation center anymore and it’s by invitation only and North keeps saying, with some amusement, “I got an invitation for a private camp.”
On Sunday, Beth, Noah and I went to fly the drone at Savage Park in Howard County. As we travel into the outer suburbs it’s interesting to see how many people are wearing masks. To me it looked like fewer than in Montgomery County, but more than in Anne Arundel.
We walked over a very cool railroad bridge that spanned the Little Patuxent River, near the historic cotton mills, and then into the park. We went first to a big field with four baseball diamonds and a lot of green space in between. The dirt on the diamonds was neatly raked, with only a few footsteps. I wondered a little sadly how long it had been since anyone played ball there.
Beth tried her hand at flying the drone.
Next we took a path through the woods and down to the river. Noah flew over the water and I waded into the water, partly because I’d stepped right into a patch of poison ivy and the leaves had brushed my bare ankle and I wanted to rinse it off, but also because it’s pleasant to sit on a rock in a river on a day that’s warm but not hot, with your feet in water that’s cool but not cold. Beth sat on a dead tree that had grown in a shape very much like a bench before it died.
After we’d been there quite a while, Noah said, “Look at the snake” and he pointed to the tree branches over Beth’s head and there was a big, black snake there. Then we watched as very, very slowly, it made its way into a surprisingly small hole in the dead tree. It was quite the tight fit at the snake’s middle portion, but it got inside the presumably hollow tree.
The next day was Monday. I always mail work-related clippings to Sara on or near the first of the month. In April and May I just put stamps on the envelope and dropped it in the mailbox, but I decided to mark being in Phase 1 by going to the post office in person and running some errands in town. Beth drove me to downtown Takoma and I walked home because I’m still wary of public transportation.
None of the places I went—the post office, Takoma Beverage Company for an iced latte, or CVS—were places you couldn’t go before Monday, but I hadn’t been to any of them since March so it felt celebratory. I bought a spare pair of reading glasses and some treats and it felt like such a luxury, especially when I walked to Opal Daniels Park, which was nearly deserted, and sat on a bench and drank my coffee and dunked Oreos into it.
That evening peaceful protests in front of the White House were broken up with tear gas and rubber bullets, twenty-five minutes before the 7 p.m. curfew so the President could pose in front of St. John’s Church with a Bible. The hypocrisy of this is just astounding, especially when you consider that parishioners and clergy can’t even use the church now, as it’s inside the new security perimeter.
People are still demonstrating, however. Families we know have been there, with kids. It feels really important, but it also feels dangerous, not just because of the police/military, but because of the crowded conditions. So far, we haven’t gone. But Beth, North, and Noah have all contributed to bail funds. (They all decided to do this independently of each other.) And we’re considering going to a smaller protest in Takoma this weekend.
People are helping other people, too. The man who took in the protesters fleeing police lives just several blocks from the apartment where we lived before Noah was born and during the first year of his life.
The day after the protests were violently quelled was the first day the Post reported fewer than five hundred deaths nationally and fewer than twenty-five in Maryland. Not long ago, figures twice that high would have seemed like a good day, so it was a welcome reminder that we seem to be slowly turning the corner on that front, at least for now.
The next two days, though, figures were much higher, close to one thousand each day.
North made sign that says “All Lives Can’t Matter Until Black Lives Do.” It remains to be seen if it’s a yard sign, or if we’ll take it to a protest.
They also painted a background of vines on their backyard mural. They’re going to add flowers next, because we still need art and beauty.
And this shouldn’t need saying, but it still does: Black lives matter.

All For The Love Of You

A Chronicle of Suburban Lesbian Family Life

Category Archives: Pandemics

Report from the Fourth Quarantine: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 19

A Plane to China: Coronavirus Chronicle, Part 18

A New Routine: Coronavirus Chronicle, Part 17

Green Light for the Beach: Coronavirus Chronicle, Part 16

Clues: Coronavirus Chronicle, Part 15

Somewhat Normal: Coronavirus Chronicle, Part 14

A Goodbye: Coronavirus Chronicle, Part 13

A Protest and a Park: Coronavirus Chronicle, Part 12

School’s Out: Coronavirus Chronicle, Part 11

Until (40 More Things): Coronavirus Chronicle, Part 10