Comings and Goings

Posted on July 9, 2024 by Steph

North Comes Home

After that first weekend, North managed to come home the next two as well, by volunteering to be a bus counselor. Saturday of their second weekend home it was very hot, the first hundred-degree day of the summer. We spent it thusly: Beth was up shortly after dawn to go kayaking, I went swimming at Piney Branch pool, the kids watched the last two episodes of Dr. Who, Beth and North had lunch at Cava, everyone went to see Inside Out 2, Noah and I roasted zucchini, tomatoes, and feta for dinner and everyone went out for ice cream at Everyday Sundae in the District. It was on that list of twelve best places to get ice cream in the D.C. metro area that has been guiding our ice cream choices this summer. I got blueberry cheesecake. It was good, but not exceptional.

The next Friday, North came home with a sprained ankle and without their phone because they dropped it into a latrine at camp. Because they weren’t up for much walking, we decided not to go to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, which we’d been considering, and Beth and North spent a lot of time while they were home setting up their new phone. For the record, this was the second phone they lost in a month, so they volunteered to pay for half of it and we took them up on it.

That Saturday North also hung out with Maddie, Noah and I roasted radishes and fried tofu for dinner, and we went to Dairy Godmother in Alexandria, Virginia. This was the longest trek we’d made for ice cream so far. This place is famous for its custard (though it also sells sorbet and vegan ice cream), so we thought that’s what we should order. There are only three custard flavors every day—vanilla, chocolate, and whatever the flavor of the day is. My blood sugar was on the low side when we arrived, so I splurged on a sundae—chocolate custard with marshmallow sauce and sour cherries. It was an excellent combination of flavors. I was quite pleased with it. We have now visited all the top-rated ice cream venues—it was a three-way tie—one each in Maryland, the District, and Virginia. This has been a fun project.

The next morning, Beth drove North to the camp bus on her way out of town, because she was off on her own trip…

Beth Goes to Wheeling

Beth spent another week with her mom. She worked, visited with relatives, road-tripped with her friend Michelle to Morgantown, and spent a lot of time in her mom’s condo’s pool. I sent her off with a pint of homemade sour cherry sauce and I got a lot of compliments about it from Beth’s mom and Michelle.

Noah and I were on our own for six days. We worked and watched a few episodes of Angel and Scrapper. I started writing postcards again after a long hiatus. I did a batch reminding Florida voters to renew their enrollment in the vote-by-mail program and another for a school board candidate (also in Florida) who is running against a Moms for Liberty candidate. It soothes my election-related anxiety a little to be doing something, even if it’s for a down ballot race. Because if the unspeakable does happen, who’s in office at the state and municipal level is going to matter. (Well, it always does, but you know what I mean.)

Noah and I Go to a Parade

Noah and I went to Takoma’s Fourth of July parade. We used to go almost every year, but between covid cancellations (2020 and 2021) and travels (2022 and 2023) we haven’t been since 2019. I enjoyed it. I always do—the painted rooster statue on wheels (the rooster is the symbol of Takoma), the papier mâché shark representing a swim team, the UFO and aliens just because, drummers from various cultures (Scottish, Japanese, and Caribbean), and seeing Jamie Raskin, our congressional representative. If you’re not a Marylander and you’ve heard of him, it’s probably because he was the impeachment manager during Trump’s second impeachment. He was one of many local politicians walking the route or riding in classic cars, and all the rest of them got polite applause, but people went wild for Raskin, shouting out “Thank you!” and similar things. He’s a local hero.

One notable event in the parade was that toward the end, a horse who had been in the parade, got loose and ran through the parade, against the flow of the procession. One person was knocked down, but thankfully, no one was seriously hurt.

When it was over I considered the fact that we don’t see as many people we know as we used to at this event. The crowd skews toward families with kids of elementary school age or younger and we don’t know many people like that anymore. In fact, the only people I saw whom I knew were my city council member and her family, who were in the parade. Her son went to preschool with North. The lack of familiar faces among the spectators made me feel a little sad and unconnected, even though a few people I know were there and posted pictures on Facebook. I just didn’t see them at the time.

My melancholy might have stemmed from the fact that I was already missing Beth and North. It just felt odd to be apart on this holiday we’ve spent together so many times, even though we were split up last Fourth of July, too. I guess being in a new place with extended family made it easier last time. But it’s the kind of thing that will happen more and more often, I expect, as the kids move out into the world.

Noah and I had a picnic dinner (on the porch because the evening was rainy). I scaled it back a little, skipping the potato salad and baked beans, because Noah doesn’t like them and they’re not great for me in a meal with plenty of other carbs. We had vegetarian hot dogs, devilled eggs, corn on the cob, watermelon, and ice cream with blueberries and another batch of sour cherry sauce. He helped by shucking the corn and slicing the watermelon while I was out running errands.

Beth Comes Home and North Does Not

Two days later, Beth came home. North did not because there were fewer campers due to the Fourth of July holiday and not enough to fill a bus. (The campers and counselors who were there went on a field trip to see fireworks in a nearby town—so North was the only one in our family who saw any this year.)

I made a blueberry crumble to welcome Beth home. Noah and I made soba noodles with a peanut sauce, cucumbers, green peppers, and radishes and we all ate the noodles and crumble and watched The Death of Stalin, which Noah’s been wanting to watch for a long time. We weren’t all together, but it was still very good to have Beth home.

Willow and Walter Go to the Vet

On Monday, Willow and Walter got the last vaccine they’ll need for a while, for rabies. Beth reports they were not at all freaked out by the car ride or the dogs in the vet’s waiting room. I wasn’t surprised. They were pretty chill at their three-month visit a few weeks ago. They continue to grow. Walter’s just over five and a quarter pounds and Willow is just over four pounds.

They also continue to be very energetic and mischievous. They spend a high percentage of their waking hours wrestling, chasing each other, or finding things to knock off other things. Willow likes to get up on high things and pounce on her brother from above. Every day I find them in funny places—in the dishwasher, the recycling bin, batting each other through the holes in a laundry basket, drinking from the toilet. Walter is particularly fond of sitting on the printer. Sometimes they sit on the coffee table in front of the television and watch along with us, Walter occasionally batting at the screen if there’s something enticing like race cars. They love ice cubes and come running whenever they hear the dispenser on the freezer door. Then we must give them one and let them bat it across the kitchen floor.

So that covers our comings and goings from the past few weeks. I hope yours have been festive, relaxing, or whatever you want out of these mid-summer days.

Summer’s Coming Around Again

Posted on June 19, 2024 by Steph

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Here now summer’s coming around again
Every year it seems to come in this way

From “Summer’s Coming Around Again,” by Carly Simon, James E. Ryan, and Paul Glanz

North finished a week of staff training at camp. They got certified for CPR and passed the swim test. Sunday, they welcomed the first group of campers and escorted them to camp on the bus. They were home for a day and two nights before that. They didn’t expect to come home so soon, but the camp asked volunteers to be bus counselors and a ride home two days prior was part of the deal, so they took it.

Here’s what we were up to while they were gone and while they were home and then after they left:

Takoma Pride

Takoma Pride was a week ago Sunday. Beth and I dropped by in between a visit to the farmers’ market, where we got strawberries, cherries, and a dill plant, and the Fulfillery, where we got some small cloth bags. We looked at the booths, watched the family parade go by, chatted with a friend, and got our picture taken by the flowery Love sign. Takoma Pride is small but spirited, and I always enjoy it.

Adventures with Bees

The next day a beekeeper came to the house. Why would we need this service? A couple weeks earlier Noah was moving one of our outdoor chairs so he could mow the lawn and he got stung on the face by a bee that emerged from the stuffing of the chair. It turned out there was a whole nest of bumblebees living in there. We were all puzzled because we were under the impression bumblebees don’t sting. As there was also a tiny wasp nest in the eaves, we considered the possibility that Noah was coincidentally stung by a wasp as he moved the chair, but soon after North was walking by the same chair which was inconveniently located right outside the back door and they got stung, too. And they saw the stinging insect and insisted it was a bumblebee.

We consulted with our pest control company agent who told us bumblebees don’t sting and recommended getting a beekeeper to come remove the nest. We did just that because we didn’t want to kill them (though we did have the pest company take care of the wasp nest). It took a while to get the beekeeper to come, but he does it for free, so we can’t really complain. He told us bumblebees do sting on rare occasions when their nest is threatened. Then he got into his suit, enclosed the chair cushion in a garbage bag and took it away to release the bees into the wild. A few must have been outside the nest when he did it because we saw them flying around the area looking for their home for several days afterward.

The irony of this whole adventure was that when Noah set out to mow the lawn it hadn’t been mowed in almost two months because in April and May it’s covered in buttercups and asters and I like to leave it as a little meadow until they’re done, partly because it’s pretty and partly for the pollinators. And then they go and sting my kids. No good deed goes unpunished.

Mini-Kitchen Renovation

We’ve been doing a partial kitchen renovation, little by little. We had it painted in January 2023 and then we got a new induction stove this April. Last week we had a new back door and kitchen flooring installed. The old door didn’t fit quite right in the doorframe, and it used to blow open on windy days if it wasn’t bolted shut and the pest control company cited it as a possible entry point for mice. We had mice for years and we’ve only been mouse-free for several months, so we did not want to extend an invitation for them to return.

I’m not sure how old the floor was, but it was there when we moved into the house in 2002 and it was badly chipped. The old pattern was white with little black diamonds. I liked it a lot and wanted something similar, at least something black and white and geometrical. This was surprisingly hard to find. Almost all the options for the kind of interlocking tiles the contractor suggested had a wood, granite, or marble pattern and I didn’t want flooring pretending to be something it wasn’t. I had to look at eight hundred patterns—really, no exaggeration—to find the big black and white checkers we ended up choosing, but I really like them. I didn’t even remember this until Beth mentioned it, but it looks just like the floor in our D.C. apartment where we lived from 1991 to 2002. Maybe that’s why it speaks to me. North is not pleased that the floor looks “different.” I get it. Change can be hard, maybe especially in your childhood home.

Weekend Visit

Speaking of North, they came home Friday evening and stayed until Sunday morning. When they got home, they hugged the kittens first, then Beth and me, and then Noah, who said on seeing them, “I have a job.”

“I do, too,” they replied.

North’s first night home we had homemade pizza with vegetarian pepperoni and olives for dinner and watched All of Us Strangers, which was moving and well-acted. Saturday morning, they had brunch with El in the city.

That afternoon we drove all the way to Rockville for ice cream. We did this because the weekend section of the Post had a feature about the twelve best places to get ice cream in the DC Metro area and we all thought it was incumbent on us to save the article and sample ice cream from at least four places, with each of us getting to choose one. North thought we should start right away and since they won’t be home every weekend this summer, we let them choose first. They noted there was a three-way tie for first place and went with Sarah’s Handmade Ice Cream and Treats because it had some tea-based and floral flavors and they found that intriguing. It was also ranked the best ice cream in Maryland, the other two winners being in the District and Virginia.

On the drive there, I was wondering if it was silly to drive so far for ice cream, when ice cream is widely available closer to home, and I’m not an ice cream connoisseur. It’s not like I’ve ever gone out for ice cream and thought “Yuck!” but I have to say it was a fun outing. When we got there, we recognized the shopping plaza as somewhere we’d once stopped to use the restrooms on a road trip, though none of us was sure exactly when. The flavors were indeed interesting. North got lavender-honey and Thai iced tea. I got apricot-pistachio. If you’re local, we give it four thumbs up.

North got a migraine after we got home and used the new nasal spray for the first time. It didn’t eliminate the headache, but it quickly took the pain down to a manageable level. However, they said it stung and then it dripped down their throat and tasted bad. “But it’s better than a migraine, right?” I said.

“I guess so,” they said, but it wasn’t a ringing endorsement. They went to lie down for a little while but then they got up and were able to carry on with the evening, so I count it as a win. When I wrote about this earlier, I didn’t realize that as with their most effective med, there’s a limit on how many times they can take it, five times a month. So that gives them meds for roughly three days a week, up from two, which still falls short of what they need, but it’s an improvement. They took the spray to camp with them when they went back.

That night Noah and I made enchiladas using cilantro I’d grown from seeds harvested from a previous year’s cilantro plants. This isn’t the first time I’ve managed this feat, but I was fishing for compliments on my gardening prowess when Noah said it practically qualified me to be a tradwife, which wasn’t exactly what I was going for. We did also make the sauce from scratch, but not from our own tomatoes or poblanos, so we’re not quite suburban homesteaders yet.

That night we watched a couple episodes of Grownish and the next morning the kids watched an episode of Dr. Who before North left for camp. Noah agreed to get up at 7:30 to do so, which was unusual for him any day of the week and it was a Sunday. He did note he needed to shift his sleep schedule when he started work on Tuesday, but on Saturday he was still asleep when I left the house at eleven to go swim, so I was kind of surprised he managed it.

North said goodbye to everyone (except Beth who’d gone kayaking and said her goodbyes the night before) and called a Lyft. They said before they left that they were nervous but excited to meet the kids. Their group this week is in a theater-based program, and they were happy about that. They will probably be back home next weekend.

Kitten Update

So, I promised a kitten update in the comments section of my last post. They turned three months old on Monday. No surprise, they continue to be very cute. When we first got them, they did everything together. If one of them went to the water bowl, the other would drink, too. They would use the litterbox at the same time. They slept together and played together whenever they weren’t sleeping. It’s been almost four weeks since we got them and they still do all these things, but they are spending a little time apart now. One evening Willow slept on Beth’s stomach as she lay on our bed, while Walter was camped out on me on the living room couch, and this went on for at least an hour. Willow has the habit of trying to suckle on Walter’s belly, which apparently kittens sometimes do with their siblings after they’ve been separated from their mother. He is very patient with this behavior, though sometimes he looks a bit puzzled by it.

I didn’t expect personality differences to emerge this early because Matthew and Xander were very similar as kittens and quite different as adult cats, but it does seem as if Walter is going to be the more laid-back, easy-going one and Willow is more daring and adventurous. She will climb a window screen in pursuit of a fly and is a little more intense in their wrestling matches and chasing games. She also likes to play “monster under the covers,” which is what we called it when our first cat, Emily, used to chase our feet under the covers. (Emily enjoyed this game her whole life.) Walter will sometimes join in if he sees her doing it.

We took the cats for their three-month checkup and vaccines on Monday, and they are healthy. As we suspected, Walter is growing a little faster than Willow. Willow has gained a pound since we got her and now weighs in at three pounds. Walter has gained a pound and a half and now tips the scale at four pounds. The vet says they’re both in a normal range for their age. The vet put their picture on the office Instagram. Check out Takoma Park Animal Clinic if you want to see it.

Working Man

Noah started his job on Tuesday. For now, he’ll be in the office on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, and either working from home or off on Mondays and Fridays. Based on the total number of hours he’s supposed to work between now and November, I suspect the work will ramp up over the course of the next several months and will be more than full-time by the end. Another hint that hours may get long: he was told that closer to the election, the company will provide lunch.

He seems to like the office. There’s another seasonal employee he says is about his age. He spent his first two days sorting through stock photos and trying to find out which ones were shot in the United States, because candidates want images made in America in their ads. (It’s always interesting to me to learn the things people do at different jobs that you’d never realize have to be done.)

So, another summer is coming around. It will be a summer unlike any other we’ve had thus far, with all four of us working. I was all alone in the house Tuesday and much of Wednesday because Beth had to go into the office and then to a Juneteenth event. This is pretty rare since Beth’s office is still hybrid and she usually works at home, and even when she does go to work, for the last year or so, one or both of the kids was usually home. It’s a change, but despite North’s reaction to the floor, not all change is bad.

Sunrise, Sunset

Posted on May 25, 2024 by Steph

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Yesterday was a big day around here, full of endings and beginnings. North has finished high school (though graduation is almost two weeks off) and we adopted two kittens.

Penultimate Week of School

“I am never going to high school on a Tuesday again,” North informed me on the second Tuesday in May when I got back from voting in the Maryland primary. Public schools were closed because some of them were polling places, so North had the day off. They had already voted by mail, so they ordered pizza and watched two horror movies back-to-back—Halloween and Bodies, Bodies, Bodies. “Are you living your best life?” I asked them and they said yes. The reason they’d have no school the following Tuesday was that it was Senior Skip Day, and I did end up saying yes to that.

Last Weekend of the School Year

The following weekend Beth and North went cabin camping. They took some hikes, including one along the Susquehanna River, where they saw a lot of herons, and they explored antique stores in Havre de Grace, where North bought some penguin earrings. On Saturday North fed most of their school papers for the year into a bonfire, which has been a May-and-June camping trip tradition for both kids over the years. (They had to save a few papers because there was another week of school left.)

Last Week of School, Monday

On Monday, North went to school in pajamas because it was Pajama Day for Senior Spirit Week. They were also lugging a tote bag filled with apple juice, pineapple juice, paper cups, and a bag of Sour Patch Kids. This was their contribution to their AP Lit class’s end-of-year party. In law, they started watching Legally Blonde, and they didn’t expect to have to complete any assignments on it. They reported that they were doing math games in their IB math class and regular work was continuing in Sociology and Mythology, but things were definitely winding down.

The next day was Senior Skip Day. This was also the day we met the kittens (virtually). But let’s back up a little here, so I can tell you about a different cat, because he was an important part of how we got here.

The Original Conjuring Cat

If we’re friends on Facebook, you’ve probably seen pictures of our next-door neighbors’ very friendly cat, Uno. I haven’t asked, but I assume his people named him that because he’s blind in one eye. Uno’s family moved in back in December and sometime in February he started to expand his territory to include our yard. He rolls around and naps on our grass, occasionally climbs a tree, and winds around my legs while I come outside to put compost in the bucket or hang laundry on the line. If I stop petting him before he thinks I should, he knocks the socks off the drying rack or bats at my ankles to get my attention. Sometimes when someone opens the back door, he will come inside and explore. We are all smitten with this cat.

The first week in May, Uno’s people went away for a few days and North cat-sat for him. He must have missed his family because for a few days he came inside our house more often than usual and stayed longer. He actually jumped up and sat on my lap while we were watching television one night. Everything about this experience, his weight and warmth in my lap, the way he purred and licked my hand, was deeply comforting. It was that night I felt something shift in me and I realized, more than a year and a half after Xander died, that I finally felt ready to have cats again. Like Mr. Mistoffelees, Uno had performed a conjuring trick on me and melted that frozen, cat-shaped part of my heart.

I decided not to say anything to Beth or the kids for a week, just to see if the feeling stuck. It did and ten days ago (in our family therapist’s waiting room) we started looking at kittens available for adoption at various rescue organizations’ websites. The next day, Thursday, we put in a request to meet two male kittens. We heard back from their foster home on Sunday that they were no longer available, so we chose another pair of kittens, one male and one female, from a litter of four, and we heard back that same day that they were available. We made an appointment to meet the man who was fostering them virtually on Tuesday morning, knowing that North would be home for Senior Skip Day.

The Naming of Cats

Before the meeting, we talked a lot about cat names. I am the one who cares the most about names, the one who regularly posts comments on Swistle’s baby-naming blog, and the one who has a list of cat names saved up for future cats that is longer (by far) than the number of cats I am likely to have in the rest of my life, unless I become a crazy cat lady. But I also like the serendipity of cats who come with good names already. Matthew was just such a cat. Xander came to us with the name Spanky, so obviously that had to be changed.

When we were waiting to see about the two male kittens, I wavered between their shelter names (Oliver and Enzo) which I liked, and the names I’d picked years ago for two male kittens (Jonas and Ezekiel, from the Indigo Girls song). Everyone seemed willing to let me decide. But when we learned they’d already found a home and we were considering the male-female pair, I was lukewarm on their names (Dawson and Darla), but I didn’t have go-to set of names for a mixed sex pair.

I did have one for a gray female, though, Willow. My logic was pussy willows are gray, and I also liked the idea of another name from Buffy, the Vampire Slayer because it is my all-time favorite television show. We had a brief discussion about how the kitten in question might be more of a gray/brown mix, the kind that’s often called a brown tabby, but Beth reassured me that pussy willows are gray and brown if you include the stem. I’d been considering giving any cats we adopted middle names to honor Matthew and Xander and when I put Willow and Alexandra together, it sounded perfect. Willow Alexandra… isn’t that lovely?

My girl cat name list was longer than my boy cat name list. In fact, the only other male name I could remember was reserved in my mind for an orange cat, so I asked if anyone else had ideas. North brainstormed a few: Charlie, James, Leo, and Walter. I liked most of those and threw Jonah and Zachary into the pool, but I wasn’t set on any of them. Then I remembered Graham, which I’d completely forgotten was on the list. (I never wrote any of this down.) We decided we should wait to meet the kittens and see what fit.

Last Week of School, Tuesday (Senior Skip Day)

Tuesday morning, we chatted with the man fostering the kittens while we watched them play with toys and tumble around on the floor with the other two kittens in their litter. We learned all four were getting spayed or neutered the next day and after that, they would be ready for adoption. We requested the forms for the next step.

When we got off the call, Beth said very sternly, “We can’t have four cats,” but no one had said anything about that, so I think she might have been speaking to herself as much as to us.

After the meeting, North and I walked to Koma, a coffeeshop that opened in our neighborhood last winter. We got coffee and split an apricot Danish. I dropped them off at home and continued my morning walk. When I got home, Noah and North were watching Dr. Who. I set North to work organizing and culling a drawer full of free greeting cards we get from charities. (We get more of these than we can use, and the drawer is stuffed).

In the mid-afternoon El came over to watch Fear Street 2 with North and they stayed for dinner. North had wanted them to come earlier, saying it was kind of missing the point of Senior Skip Day to come after school had already let out, but they weren’t really put out. Beth had asked them earlier in the day how their skip day was going, and they said, “Good. I’m not at school,” which I think was all that was required.

Last Week of School, Wednesday

We picked North up at school Wednesday afternoon because we had an appointment, and they had a gift bag. Four of their friends who are juniors had bought them a teddy bear wearing a mortarboard, a box of Sour Patch Kids, and a card. They seemed quite touched by this gesture.

The Naming of Cats, Part 2

That same day we heard from the shelter than Dawson had been adopted so we said we’d take one of the remaining female kittens in the litter and I immediately switched gears to my female-female name pairs. There were three: Amelia and Chelsea (after my two favorite Joni Mitchell songs), Chloe and Olivia (after a line in a Virginia Woolf essay), and Ruth and Naomi (after the Biblical characters, who are sometimes read as lesbians). North didn’t like any of them. But it turned out not to matter, because soon after we got that news, the man who was fostering the kittens said it was a mistake on the shelter’s part, that someone had considered Dawson but not taken him, so he was still available.

Last Week of School, Thursday

North left for school wearing a senior class t-shirt for Senior Spirit Week. They came home and reported they had successfully returned their chrome book and confirmed they had no outstanding debts to the school so they could graduate, after waiting in line for over an hour to do so. There were cupcakes in their math class.

After school, Beth and North went to PetSmart and came home with all manner of pet toys, including some from the Pride display. There was a rainbow-colored tunnel, three interlocking rainbow-striped arches made of cardboard for climbing and scratching, a ball track, and worms that dangle from a stick because the man who fostered them said it was their favorite. They also got the kind of food they’ve been eating and litter. We also ordered a cat tree with platforms and a cave and a ball on a string to bat.

Friday: Last Day of School and Kittens’ First Day Home

North wore their Oberlin t-shirt to school on the last day of school. In the early afternoon we had a phone call with the shelter to finalize the adoption paperwork and an hour later, we were picking North up at the bus stop, so we could go pick the kittens up from their foster home in College Park.

In the car North reported on their last day of school. Nothing academic happened except in Mythology, where they listened to the teacher read them a story about Gilgamesh. There was Italian ice in math class. They liked seeing where people were going to college on their shirts.

The kittens came right to us when their caregiver brought them out. They were curious and friendly, not shy at all, and they went into the carrier without much fuss. We marveled at how tiny there were. Matthew and Xander were twice as old (four months) when we got them, and they grew into very large cats, so they were big for their age and already looked half-grown when we adopted them.

I hadn’t gotten much work done that day but once we were home it was impossible to work. Obviously, we had to sit in the living room and watch the cats for the rest of the afternoon. They explored the living and dining room, jumped up onto whatever surfaces they could, nosed around under furniture and came out with dust on their whiskers. They liked all the toys and played energetically with them. They pounced on each other and wrestled and didn’t seem at all sore from their surgeries two days prior. When they discovered the basement steps they raced up and down them. (We’d wondered if they would be able to manage the stairs when we first saw them, but that worry was put to rest. It’s relevant because it’s where their food and litter will go, though we started off with it upstairs.)

After a few hours with them we decided Walter was the name that fit best. It was the only one that was either first or second on everyone’s list. I am pleased with how it alliterates with Willow, and I also like that it could be after Walt Whitman, since our first cat (who Beth got in college) was named Emily, after Emily Dickinson. I told the kids that Whitman and Dickinson were the two best nineteenth-century American poets. “And that’s a fact, not an opinion,” which made them both laugh.

“You have strong opinions about poetry,” North told me. But why wouldn’t I? I spent a big chunk of my twenties and thirties studying and teaching literature.

As for the final piece, Walter’s middle name is Matthias for Matthew. So, the names are Willow Alexandra and Walter Matthias. Willow is the one with the white markings. She looks a lot like Emily as a kitten and a bit like Uno, too, who is a tabby with a white chin, chest and feet.

Around five-thirty Beth drove North to school for Senior Sunset. It’s an end-of-year tradition that, along with Senior Sunrise, bookends the year. The kids sat out on the football field, socialized, signed each other’s yearbooks, and watched the sun set. Pizza, chips, and snow cones were served. It sounded like a nice, low-key event. North said it was fun, and they hung out mainly with other kids from the GSA.

The cats have been here for a full day now. They seem quite at home, not unsettled by the move at all. They will cuddle with us, but only briefly (unless they fall asleep) because they are quite busy playing with their toys and running around like maniacs. They are starting to meow more after being almost silent yesterday. From the night Uno sat in my lap to the day they moved in with us it was only two and a half weeks. And in less time than that, North will be leaving for the Girl Scout camp where they are spending the summer as a counselor. Part of the reason we hurried once we’d made a decision was so that they would have time to bond with the kittens before leaving for most of the summer.

So, all in one day, there was ending, of our time with kids in K-12 public schools, and a beginning, of our time with these kittens who will eventually be our empty nest cats. It makes me wonder about the future, what North’s college years will be like, what’s in store for Noah, and what the kittens’ adult personalities will be like.

Sunrise, sunset
Sunrise, sunset
Swiftly fly the years
One season following another
Laden with happiness and tears

Three Years, Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 79

Posted on March 16, 2023 by Steph

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Well, here we are three years after the world changed. With every update I do (and here are a few), covid impacts our everyday life less and less, though of course, it’s still with us. As of Sunday, the death toll in the U.S. is up to 1,119,000 (it’s almost seven million worldwide) and 2,000 Americans a week are still dying from it. The death rate has been very stable for over a year. Does that mean it’s endemic now? Apparently not, but it’s trending in that direction.

Falling Sick

The diminishing presence of the idea of covid in our lives makes it a little ironic that it was in this tail end (fingers crossed) phase that we actually got covid. North, Beth, and I all had covid in November—two years, eight months into the pandemic. You can read about that here and here if you missed it. North had it first, testing positive two days before Thanksgiving. We all had mild cases, though North’s was the worst, about like having the flu. Mine was like a cold and not even a bad one. We had a trip planned to Rehoboth for Thanksgiving and we went anyway, keeping to ourselves in the rental house, cooking, ordering takeout, and taking walks on the beach and boardwalk. Beth and I didn’t test positive until the day after we got home.

Traveling Further

Even though we got sick, in the past six months, our world has opened up considerably. We’ve traveled more widely than any time since the Before Times. Noah spent the fall semester in Australia, and I spent a week in Oregon while my mom was recovering from knee surgery in September. It was the first time flying since covid for both of us.

And there’s more travel on the horizon. Noah is looking for an internship in Los Angeles and he’s bought an airline ticket for three days after he graduates in late May. (A one-way ticket! I don’t even want to think about the implications of that.) North and I will be visiting family in California and Oregon in early July and Beth will be heading to Saint Louis for a convention while we’re gone.

Continuing Precautions

We still take precautions, though. We’ve all gotten the bivalent booster (Beth and North in September, me in November, and Noah in January). We test when we feel ill, and when required, though that doesn’t seem to happen as much as it used to earlier.

Of the four of us, Beth is the strictest about masking, as she always wears K95s in public buildings, whereas North and I often wear cloth or surgical masks. North still masks at school every day, one of a shrinking minority. Noah doesn’t mask at school, but he did when we went to the play last Saturday.

At the beginning of the winter, I started wondering when I would stop masking, but since there were big spikes the past two Januarys, it seemed prudent to wait until the end of the winter and see if it happened again this year. Well, it’s mid-March now and there hasn’t been a spike, so I’m thinking more seriously about it. I still notice when people are masked when they’re not and it can affect my behavior. Here are some examples. In this one I was trying to decide whether to go to book club shortly after having covid:

12/4

The average age of members is probably around seventy and some of them are in their eighties and frail, plus masking in the group has gone from almost universal to about fifty percent, just in the past few months. It didn’t seem responsible to go, so I stayed home.

The last time I went to book club, last week, I was the only one in the room wearing a mask.

Here I was picking Noah up at the airport:

12/23

We had some trouble finding the driver and when we did connect, the driver was irritated with me and rude and accused me of wasting his time. Then in the car when I cracked the window because he was unmasked, he rolled it back up. Also, he was vaping the whole time. It was the first time in my many times in a Lyft I didn’t tip the driver…

Speaking of tipping, when I get takeout coffee, I am still more likely to tip a masked barista than an unmasked one. And speaking of restaurants, eating inside them is another tough call. We don’t in general, though we make occasional exceptions, as you know from my last post. Here’s the dilemma: Right after we let North eat in a diner with friends in November, they brought home covid. Then when North ate in a café with friends in February one of the friends got covid, although they didn’t. It can be hard to balance caution with letting them have a more normal teenage social life. North’s birthday party is going to be in a restaurant that’s usually crowded but if the weather’s nice, we’ll have it outside.

Experiencing Normalcy

One time I especially appreciated not being in the grip of the worst days of the pandemic anymore was when Xander died in October. He got to die at home and had a much more peaceful passage than his brother.

10/17/22

When Xander’s brother Matthew was paralyzed by advanced heart disease three months into the pandemic, he was euthanized in the parking garage of the animal hospital and only one of us was allowed to be with him. This was much nicer and more peaceful. We were all petting Xander and talking to him, and he wasn’t scared. The vet was gentle and respectful. It’s some small comfort that his end was quick enough that he didn’t suffer much but not so sudden we didn’t get a chance to say a proper goodbye.

This used to happen more often, but occasionally something still happens for the first time since Before. The biggest one in the past six months for me is that I am back to swimming weekly.

1/31/23

I went swimming on Saturday afternoon at the pool where I used to swim weekly before it shut down first for the pandemic, then for extensive repairs. It re-opened in late November, but between being out of the habit, being salty about the fact that they were not honoring pre-pandemic punch cards, and the pool’s erratic schedule (it’s always been prone to unannounced closures and still is), I didn’t manage to show up at a time it was open until this weekend.

2/15/23

You may recall I finally got the Piney Branch pool to agree to honor my pre-pandemic punch card, but I wasn’t sure it would actually work until I successfully used it on the first Saturday in February. I am pleased about this, as I had $25 worth of swims left on the pass. It should last me the rest of the month and a week into March if I go every weekend. I’ve been swimming three Saturdays in a row now and it’s nice to be doing it again after an almost three-year-long break.

Turns out my pass lasted a little longer than that because in late February the boiler broke and the pool was closed for a week, but it opened again the first Saturday in March, and I used up the pass last weekend.

Another normal thing that happened at North’s school was that the Winter One Acts were put on… in winter.

1/18/23

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

Questioning Normalcy

Sometimes it can be hard to know if things that didn’t happen did not happen because of covid or some other reason, as when I was trying to figure out whether there would be a Visitation Day at North’s school in on Columbus Day, like there used to be at every other MCPS school my kids have attended. (The answer was no.)

10/20/22

That made me think, okay, maybe this school has never done this, and it wasn’t a casualty of covid until another senior parent posted, no, visitation day did happen the last year before covid, so now I don’t know what to think about the past or the future, but it didn’t happen this year.

And it can also be hard to know if covid has caused things. At one point, I thought the leg cramps I started experiencing in late November could be an after-effect of covid.

12/11/22

We got back home just in time for me to attend a virtual meeting with my own health care provider about some mysterious leg cramps and pain I’d been experiencing. It had been worst while we were at the beach and right after and seemed to be resolving by the time I saw her, but I kept the appointment to talk about what to do if it comes back. I’m wondering now if it had something to do with having covid, because of the timing.

I do still have hints of them, mostly in the car, but they are much improved since I started taking magnesium for them, so I don’t question their origin as much.

Imagining Other Pandemics

In 2020 and 2021 I read a lot of books about real and fictional pandemics—the plague mostly, but also polio and the flu. By 2022, I guess I was over it and didn’t feel the urge to read any more. (Or maybe I just switched to pandemics on screen. Noah and I watched Station Eleven during his spring break last year and over the summer we watched the first couple seasons of The Strain. Earlier, in 2020, we watched Counterpart.)

My interest in reading about pandemics was piqued again as the third anniversary of covid approached. In February I read Hamnet and Love in the Time of Cholera (which has less to do with cholera than I expected) and I’m currently reading Sea of Tranquility. I don’t know if I’m finished with this particular obsession or not. Time will tell.

As for depictions of this pandemic, we only recently got up to the part of Blackish that portrays it.

1/18/23

[W]e got to the midpoint of season 7 of Blackish. We’ve reached the covid era episodes and while the first couple about it were excellent and very evocative, I was disappointed that it basically fell out of the plot after that, as if it barely happened and didn’t deeply alter our lives for years.

We’re still in season 7, up to the episodes aired in February 2021, and it continues to surprise me how the characters seem to be living in a parallel universe in which it’s not pre-vaccine (for most people) covid times.

How does covid still affect your day-to-day life? Or does it?

All The Very Best Cat Things

Posted on October 17, 2022 by Steph

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On Wednesday morning I was leaving for a walk, and I texted Beth: “Xander came out with me and seems happy in the sun so I’m not putting him back inside. Could you check on him in a half hour or so? He’s currently in the front yard sidewalk.”

We’d been having a warm, sunny week after a long stretch of rain earlier in the month and I was thinking since it might be too chilly for sunbathing soon, I wanted him to enjoy this opportunity. I’m glad I left him out there because as it turned out, it would be his last time soaking up the sun.

That afternoon I was at my desk working and Beth was on a call when I heard him make loud and distressed noise. I went to see what was wrong and he was vomiting in the hall, which was nothing unusual. But when he was done, his breathing was labored. We’d noticed he’d been breathing more heavily recently, but this was different. Beth called our regular vet practice to see if they could see him that day and they said no, so we called the animal hospital and they said to bring him.

We drove to the hospital and sat in the waiting room for a while he was examined. A vet took us into an office to talk. She said he had a mass in his throat, probably cancer, that was making it hard for him to breathe. She speculated that when he vomited, it caused it to shift into a more obstructive position. We opted against surgery because of his age (nineteen and a half) and frailty. Xander used to be a very big cat, big in all the ways possible for a cat to be—big boned, muscular, plump, and fluffy. He was once capable of staring down small dogs. But he was down to less than half his peak weight and he’d lost three pounds in the past year alone.

The vet wanted to keep him on oxygen overnight and see if steroids would reduce inflammation enough so that he could breathe unassisted. She asked if we’d like to give a DNR order for him, which was startling, but we said yes. I couldn’t imagine someone doing CPR on his fragile body. I also learned in this visit that CPR rarely works on cats anyway.

By Thursday morning the steroids had worked well enough that he was breathing better, enough to come home for however much time he had left. He spent most of the day resting more or less comfortably, though we did notice he didn’t seem to want to put his head down and he’d doze half lying down, half sitting up. We suspected he couldn’t breathe well enough when his head was down. He drank and peed in the litterbox, but he didn’t eat all day, not even the cat treats he loved, and he hadn’t eaten for most of the day before either. We all spent a lot of time petting him and telling him what a good cat he was.

We let him sleep in our bed that night, between us. It was kind of like co-sleeping with a toddler because he couldn’t get comfortable and was quite restless. He was also behaving strangely. He kept going into the bathroom, hopping up a stool, and putting his paws in the toilet, which he’d never done before. If he was thirsty, his water dish in the kitchen was more accessible than that, but I wondered if he was getting confused and had forgotten where it was.

On Friday morning, we decided it was time. The vet from the animal hospital had referred us to a company that will come to your house and euthanize your pet. A vet came soon after we called. We all sat on the living room couch with Xander between me and North. We’d given North the choice to say their goodbyes and leave the room or stay and they chose to stay.

When Xander’s brother Matthew was paralyzed by advanced heart disease three months into the pandemic, he was euthanized in the parking garage of the animal hospital and only one of us was allowed to be with him. This was much nicer and more peaceful. We were all petting Xander and talking to him, and he wasn’t scared. The vet was gentle and respectful. It’s some small comfort that his end was quick enough that he didn’t suffer much but not so sudden we didn’t get a chance to say a proper goodbye.

On Saturday a bouquet of roses and other flowers arrived. It was from some of Beth’s colleagues, who had often seen Xander in the background of Beth’s Zoom calls over the past two and a half years. He was a friendly cat who charmed anyone he encountered—North’s friends all loved him—and this was proof his charm extended to online appearances.

RIP Alexander Fionn
Circa February 14, 2003-October 14, 2022

Xander was a beautiful, good-natured cat who lived a long, happy life. In his later years, he went partially deaf and, in his determination to be heard, he just meowed louder and louder. When I posted an album of pictures of him on Facebook, mostly of him snuggling with various members of the family or sitting on diverse perches (a pile of clean, folded towels, my open laptop, an air conditioner), one of my friends commented that it looked like he’d done “all the very best cat things.” He really did. We all miss him terribly.

p.s. If you weren’t reading this blog in 2013, I recommend this post about the time Xander went missing for several days and where we found him. There’s a good twist at the end.

For Our Lives: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 74

Posted on June 13, 2022 by Steph

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It was potentially quite a busy weekend. North had a lot on their social calendar and there was a March for Our Lives rally in response to the mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde on Saturday afternoon and it was Pride all weekend. In DC, there was a parade on Saturday and the street festival was Sunday, plus our little town was having its first-ever Pride festival on Sunday.

Beth, Noah, and I were all going to the rally and Beth, North, and I were all considering going to some Pride activity, but at the beginning of the weekend we hadn’t decided which one(s).

Friday: Prelude

North’s friend Ranvita came over for our weekly pizza-and-movie night. Over pizza and mozzarella knots, North and Ranvita talked about the dialogue they needed to perform for their theater class the next week and whether or not they were going try to get off book. (Apparently, there was an option not to, but you couldn’t get an A on the assignment if you chose not to memorize the lines.)

Beth was working late, so it was just Noah, the two high schoolers, and me. We didn’t want Beth to miss one of the movies we’d communally selected to watch together as a family so we needed to pick a new one. We have a complex nomination-and-veto system for choosing movies and having to pick a new one that four people could agree on made me reflect on the genius of having an orderly system because picking a movie four people can agree on is hard. Well, it was really just three people because I think Ranvita was a little overwhelmed by us and she kept quiet. It was mostly North putting ideas out there and me rejecting them because they were unrated and it was too hard to know what objectionable content they might contain or Noah rejecting them because their Rotten Tomatoes score was too low.

Finally, we settled on one of Noah’s choices, Perfect Blue, an amine thriller that was rated 16+ on Common Sense Media. By this point, we’d spent so much time trying to decide on a movie that I didn’t look carefully at the details of the reviews and if I had, we might not have watched it with North’s friend who’s a year younger than they are and whose parents I don’t know at all. I liked it—it was very twisty and played with reality, fiction, dreams and hallucinations in an interesting, artsy way—but it was also quite violent and sexually explicit and some of the violence was sexual. But I do tend to be stricter about media than most of North’s friends’ parents, so I hope it didn’t scar her. She did keep saying, “That was not what I expected” afterward as we all tried to figure out the plot together.

After the movie was over and Beth had gotten home, but before Ranvita left, I saw Xander in the kitchen, dragging one of his back legs behind him. It seemed like he couldn’t move it at all. I alerted Beth and she pointed out that something like this had happened to him last summer and it only lasted about a half hour (the vet couldn’t explain it), so we waited and sure enough he made a full recovery. It’s worrying, though. As Beth said, having an elderly pet “is not for the faint of heart.” Someday it won’t be a false alarm, but that day was not this weekend.

Saturday: Protest

Beth, Noah, and I left for the rally late Saturday morning. I’d gone through the hand-painted signs we’ve kept from previous marches and rallies and found some gun control ones we could re-use. I hesitated over the more all-purpose “America Is Better Than This,” sign I made for some early Trump administration protest (I think it was immigration and the Muslim ban). I’d actually made it thinking I would re-use it, but I never did. The sad truth is while I got to fifty years old believing that, at fifty-five, I don’t anymore. Too many of my fellow Americans, including members of my extended family on both sides, watched the cruelty and corruption of the Trump years and didn’t flinch. But I do still believe in the power of protest and the ballot, so that’s why I still go to rallies and write get-out-the-vote postcards.

Beth wore an orange top and I thought about it, but even though I have two, they are both short-sleeved and the day was drizzly and unseasonably cool, so I went with a long-sleeved shirt that says Love is Love is Love on the front. It occurred to me that someone seeing it might think I was heading to Pride. We saw people obviously going to one event or the other on the Metro. In fact, in the Takoma Metro parking lot, we saw a woman I thought was probably going from the rally straight to Pride because her outfit was mostly orange, but she had a rainbow flag draped over her shoulders like a cape.

We arrived at the rally around 12:15. There was a timer at the bottom of the Jumbotron screen indicating the speeches had been going on for ten minutes or so. We missed X González but we heard plenty of speeches. We heard two sons of an eighty-six-year-old woman who died in the supermarket in Buffalo, and we heard the mayor of DC, and two young people, one who introduced and praised the mayor for her efforts on gun control and one who criticized those same efforts.

The most powerful speech, of those we saw anyway, was David Hogg, of Marjorie Stoneman Douglass. He’s an electrifying speaker. What I appreciated most about his speech was his focus on the many state-level gun control victories there have been since the Parkland shooting, including some in Florida. It’s so easy to think nothing has changed and despair, but there has been incremental progress. It made me think I really should get back to my postcard writing, which I’ve let lapse a bit. When he finished I was thinking of visiting the line of Porta-potties because I didn’t think it was going to get any better than that, but Representative Cori Bush was next with a gripping account of being a survivor of gun violence in the context of domestic violence, so I was glad I stayed for that.

During her speech, the timer stopped at 78 minutes and after she’d finished, it was announced that was how long it took for police to stop the gunman at Robb Elementary. It was an effective demonstration of how long that must have felt to the terrified children, teachers, and staff inside the building.

There was a moment of silence, but suddenly in the middle of it, people started running away from the stage. We hadn’t seen or heard what sparked it, but we ran, too, until someone from the stage implored people to stop running and said there was no threat. I didn’t find out what had happened until later, but apparently, a counter protester (I hadn’t even seen there was a counter protest—we must have been too far away) had jumped over the barrier, yelled, “I am the gun!” and threw something into the crowd. He was detained by park police and the speeches continued after that, but I saw several people crying immediately afterward and I noticed they were all kids or teens. It made me think how a lot of kids my kids’ age are traumatized by the ever-present specter of gun violence, as we hear about school shooting after school shooting. (I guess the equivalent for 80s teens was nuclear war. I was pretty much convinced there was going to be one when I was in high school, but the obvious difference is we never did have one.) It actually made me glad North did not attend the rally because two summers ago witnessing a car crash into our fence as they stood just feet away was one several factors that may have triggered their functional neurological disorder and left them partly paralyzed for months.

We didn’t stay much longer after that, because Beth needed to get back home and drive North to their friend Marisa’s birthday party. We took pictures by a field of bouquets of white and orange flowers, each of which presumably stood for some number of lives lost to gun violence. Part of the way to the Metro station, Noah and I peeled off because he wanted to stop for lunch. I’d eaten before we left, but I accompanied him to Corner Bakery and got an iced latte and a cookie—I ate half of it and saved the rest for later—and he got a sandwich, chips, and a muffin. The restaurant was filled with people in March for Our Lives t-shirts and others in rainbow gear.

If North hadn’t had a birthday party to attend it might have been nice to go from the rally to the Pride parade and meet up with them there. Pride was cancelled the past two years because of covid, but the two years before that we went to the festival and I thought the parade would have been a nice change of pace.

Noah and I came home and made a soba noodle-vegetable salad with peanut sauce for dinner together. North came home in time to watch half of O Brother Where Art Thou, after they plucked the index card with its title from the pile of approved films.

Sunday: Pride

Sunday morning, we were still undecided about Pride. Thunderstorms were predicted and Takoma Pride was postponed for two weeks hence. North was all for going to the DC festival, which had not cancelled, but Beth and I were unenthused about the idea of going to Pride in a downpour and she had work she needed to do, so she and I stayed home and North went alone to meet up with their friend Sol there. North has the same Love Is Love Is Love shirt I do (they were Christmas gifts from my mother years ago) and they actually did wear theirs to Pride.

As it turned out, it never stormed and they were able to stay a few hours. Apparently the kids had trouble finding it, initially going to the right address in the wrong quadrant of the city, but they managed on their own without calling for adult backup. North was using their wheelchair that day, as was Sol, which makes that feat more impressive. They said they had fun. They didn’t bring home too many tchotchkes, but they did pick up a tube of lip balm that looks like a tampon (which they are quite taken with it) and a new button.

I’m glad they went and I hope to go to Takoma’s smaller Pride celebration in two weeks. It’s another way of witnessing and standing up for our lives.

On the Horizon: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 66

Posted on February 28, 2022 by Steph

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Spring is on the horizon. There are crocuses and snowdrops in abundance down by the creek and elsewhere and I’ve seen aconite, winter jasmine, and one clump of daffodils in neighbors’ yards. Our own daffodils poked their heads out of the ground a few weeks ago, but have yet to open. The cherry tree at the end of the block that always wants to get the party started well before the other two dozen or so nearby trees are even thinking about it has swelling buds.

I moved the rosemary and parsley plants that have been living in a sunny spot in Noah’s room/Beth’s office back outside this weekend because I think they need the sun more than protection from the cold at this point. It still goes below freezing most nights, but not by much and they’re hardy enough for that. I’ll move them back inside if we have a cold snap.

The spring musical opens in a few weeks and North is costumes manager again, so they have rehearsal most days after school. It’s also the time of year when we start making plans for spring break and summer.

Travel News

The school district announced its snow day makeup plan and they scrounged up the necessary days by turning a teacher planning day in April into a half day and by adding two days to the end of the year. This is the very outcome I was hoping for because it leaves spring break intact. Now we just need to keep our fingers crossed it doesn’t snow again, but even if it does MCPS’s message implied any further snow days will be either remote instruction days or the district will apply to the state for a waiver.

It gave us enough certainty to plan our April trip to Michigan to meet one of North’s half-siblings from their donor’s side. The kids have been in touch since we got North a membership to the Donor Sibling Registry for their birthday last spring. Avery is a senior in high school, has two moms, and like North, identifies as non-binary. On the way to Ypsilanti we’re going to stop in Wheeling to see Beth’s mom, and then in Oberlin for North’s first college tour. It should be a fun trip.

And then this summer we’re going to the beach twice. Noah doesn’t know how long he’ll be home because he’s planning to spend the fall semester abroad and some of the programs he’s considering are summer-and-fall programs (or actually winter and spring since it’s Australia). This means he could be leaving any time between mid-July and late August. We need to go to the beach early in the summer if we want him to come. But my sister’s family is moving from Ashland, Oregon to Davis, California in June or July and they can’t come until the move is complete, so we need to go late in the summer if we want them (and my mother, who is still recovering from her broken neck and will travel with them) to come. I still have some of the long-belated inheritance money I got from my father last summer, after putting most of it away for retirement and giving some away, so my elegant solution was two beach trips, one with me, Beth, and the kids the week of July 4th, and one with extended family in early August. We booked houses in Oberlin, Ypsilanti, and Rehoboth just this week. Having this settled is a relief because it was all up in the air for a while and I was anxious about it.

The one thing I wish I knew about the near future that I don’t know 100% for sure is whether Noah is coming home for all, part, or none of his spring break, which is in just two weeks. He’s directing a film for his advanced cinema production class and he was hoping if he could get a crew and actors to agree to stay on campus, filming during break would give them a solid block of time when no one has class. This made perfect sense and part of me hoped it would work out for him, but there’s no denying I would have been sad not to see him until May if that’s how it shook out, and the uncertainty was driving me more than a little crazy. Just this morning when Beth texted him about buying a bus ticket to come home, he said he probably would.

Medical News

In other news, I recently finished a program for newly diagnosed diabetics, consisting of two calls with a nurse and six Zoom sessions with a coach spread out over four months. Afterward I went in for bloodwork, and my A1C, a measure of average blood sugar from the past three months, is at the bottom of the prediabetic range, just a tad over normal. That’s with medication, of course. It doesn’t mean I don’t have diabetes any more but that between diet and the meds, my blood sugar has improved well beyond my primary care provider’s goal for me, not quite six months after diagnosis.

I’m still not happy with the reliability of the sensors I wear on my arm, which I sometimes test against a glucometer with finger pricks, and I go back and forth about whether I should give up on them and just use the blood method. The sensors, when they’re working, have two advantages, though. You don’t have to stab yourself with a sharp object several times a day and the app creates a graph that shows you when your blood sugar peaked and approximately how high. When you use finger pricks you have more accurate data points, but without much idea how they connect. I am trying to be at peace with the sensors’ erratic performance and not give up on them and take them off so soon. When it all starts to stress me out, sometimes I take a day off checking either way, and just try to eat intuitively.

Another piece of good news is that the hives I’ve had since last summer seems to be tapering off. On the allergist’s suggestion I started taking the antihistamines every other day (instead of every day) in mid-January and I noticed I wasn’t getting hives too often, so I stopped entirely the first week of February. Now I just take one when I have a breakout, which has only happened four times this month. The last time was in mid-February and three of the four times, the hives were very faint and not too itchy. Fingers crossed, maybe it’s over. We never did figure out what was triggering them.

Speaking of skin, Xander’s skin infection is back. It’s confined to a small patch on his stomach and because we caught it early, the medicated wipes seem to be stopping it from spreading, though it’s been a few weeks and it’s not getting better either. It doesn’t seem to be bothering him much, but he’s a good-natured cat, arthritis, deafness, irritated skin and all, so it can be hard to tell. He turned nineteen the week of Valentine’s Day, and after his health scares last summer, we’re all happy for all the time we have to cuddle on the couch and bed with him (and to give him a small fraction of the cat treats he requests).

One last medical update—as I mentioned above, my mom is still recovering from breaking her neck in October. She got her brace off in mid-January and is in physical therapy. She has some lingering pain, especially late in the day, and she has a limited range of motion in her neck, which impedes her ability to drive. That’s why she needs to travel with Sara and Dave.

It feels odd to have a roundup of medical issues and not mention North, but they’re pretty stable right now. They still have pain, but they’re able to get around where they need to with their cane most days. The pain psychologist they were seeing ended up not being a good fit, so after a few sessions, we decided not to continue. They’re happy about this, because they’d rather just get on with their life, without talking so much about this aspect of it.

And there’s a lot for them to get on with, the play, their birthday next month, a road trip to meet a new relative, and two beach weeks with kin they’ve known all or much of their life.

Twenty Halloweens: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 55

Posted on November 1, 2021 by Steph

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You’ve probably guessed I’m here to tell you about Halloween and I am, but first a few non-Halloween-related items.

Assorted October News

Noah’s fall break was a little two weeks ago. It was just a four-day weekend, too short to justify his spending two of those four days in transit to come home and go back to school, so he stayed put. Two years ago we all met up in Hershey, which is in between Takoma Park and Ithaca and we went to Hershey Park in the Dark, which was a lot of fun, but that wasn’t feasible this year because Beth’s union’s online convention was the week after his break and Beth was absolutely swamped with work. But a candy-themed amusement park would be a diabetic challenge, I suppose, so maybe it was for the best.

The week after his break I finally stripped off the sheets that had been on Noah’s bed since he left in August and washed them. I thought replacing them with flannel sheets for when he comes home at Thanksgiving would cheer me up, but in mid-October Thanksgiving was still seeming pretty far off, so it didn’t. Now that it’s November, it’s seeming less impossibly far away.

Around the same time, the skin infection on Xander’s stomach came back, though this time it was not as extensive as it was in the summer. He has a bald spot there that was bright red a couple weeks ago. We’ve been treating it twice a day with leftover medicated wipes and it’s gotten much better, a very pale pink that might be his natural skin color. It’s hard to say as under ideal circumstances, you don’t see a cat’s skin.

In more serious medical news, my mom had a bad fall almost two weeks ago. She was hiking in Olympic peninsula with her gentleman friend Jon, and while climbing up a staircase to see a waterfall, she slipped off it, and tumbled fifty feet down a hill until she ran into a tree, which broke her fall. It also broke her neck. She fractured five vertebrae. She had to be airlifted to Seattle, where she’s been in the hospital ever since. Apparently when the EMTs told Mom they were going to put her in a basket to get her into the helicopter she said, “Does this mean I’m a basket case?”

She had surgery the next day to fuse three of the vertebrae and she’s in a neck collar. Jon stayed as long as he could, but he has health issues of his own and he had some medical appointments he couldn’t miss, so he had to travel back to Oregon alone. My sister flew out to Seattle to take his place and when Mom is discharged, which is supposed to happen tomorrow, she’ll drive her back to Ashland. Jon’s going to move in to Mom’s house for a while, and her friends have organized a meal train, and she’s found a home health care worker, so the pieces seem to be falling into place for her recovery, which is supposed to last two or three months. It’s times like this I wish we all lived closer to each other.

Halloween #20

Back in Maryland, on the second to last Saturday in October, we went to the farm stand in Northern Virginia where we always get our pumpkins. We’ve been going there since some time in the 1990s because it’s run by the family of a friend of ours from college. There was bad traffic on the way there so the drive was over an hour and we arrived three minutes before the stand closed at four o’clock. But the woman staffing it seemed laid back and didn’t hurry us. In fact, she took another customer who arrived after we did. We didn’t linger, though, as we picked out pumpkins for jack-o-lanterns, a pie pumpkin for soup, decorative gourds, cider, salsa, and some produce.

We usually have Chinese food after this outing, but it was early for dinner, so we had a walk in Meadowlark Botanical Gardens, where there were quite a few different groups having professional photos done, families, and a group of teenagers. Beth thought the teen group might have been having homecoming pictures taken, but is that even a thing, homecoming photos? It’s not like a wedding, or even prom. Anyway, some of the girls were in heels so high and dresses so short walking over a short bridge was a serious challenge. It was kind of nerve-wracking to watch. I was afraid one of them would fall.

Eventually, we got takeout and ate it at another park. Eating Chinese when you can’t eat soy may be an even more serious challenge than walking outside in stiletto heels. (I couldn’t say for sure, as I’ve never tried the heels.) I had to skip all the fun fake meat I like at this particular restaurant—the shrimp is really good—and I decided for this evening only I’d have a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy for soy sauce. Based on taste, I think the spring rolls and seaweed-mushroom soup didn’t have it anyway, but the sauce on my eggplant dish probably did.

On the way home, we stopped for frozen yogurt. North wanted dessert and I suggested Sweet Frog since it’s serve yourself, and I could choose the original tart flavor and get a small portion. I did try some sugary toppings, mostly brownie bits and crushed Oreos, and I added whipped cream. It didn’t feel too austere and my blood sugar didn’t go out of range, so I think it was a successful dessert experience.

The next night we carved our pumpkins. Beth did the gargoyle, I did the spider, and North did the face with the knife. I had some tricky moments with mine, but I think they all came out well and North’s was particularly impressive. After carving, we watched It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. It felt odd to do these things without Noah, as we watched the show with him every year before college, and in Hershey two years ago, and a year ago he was home to watch it and carve a pumpkin. Of course, I’m glad and grateful he’s at school and having an almost normal semester, but it’s still hard to have him gone sometimes.

Three days before Halloween, I led my book club’s discussion on The Haunting of Hill House. I used to teach this book in class on genre fiction, so you think it would be pretty easy to pull together a presentation. But I haven’t taught it since 2004 and while I did find my teaching notes, they were pretty cryptic, as I wrote them a few days before teaching, not expecting to need to make sense of them seventeen years later. So I was very stressed for a while because I love this book and I wanted to do a good job and I was worried I’d forgotten everything I used to know or think about it. But I re-read a Shirley Jackson biography and I had extensive underlining in the novel and my teaching notes did remind me there’s some criticism of Hill House in Stephen King’s Danse Macabre, which I had on hand, so I was able to cobble together an outline of what I wanted to discuss.

And… it wasn’t a disaster. It actually went really well. Book club only recently started meeting in person again this month and attendance has been sparse. Five people came, which is about how many came for the last session (on Vanity Fair) but people were engaged and I had just about the right amount of material and I came home so buzzed I couldn’t get to sleep for a long time. In fact, though earlier in the day I’d been thinking I will never volunteer to do this again, on the drive home I was wondering how it would be to do Frankenstein or Dracula.

North went to school in costume on Friday. They went as a drowned person this year, with pale green face paint, and seaweed and skeleton hands on their shirt (which are supposed to be pulling them down). The GSA had a party after school they called Homo Hoco, a sort of alternative homecoming, so North got to wear their costume to that, too.

They actually designed the costume with Takoma’s Halloween parade and costume contest in mind, but they found out just a few days ahead of time that Saturday afternoon’s parade conflicted with a mandatory play rehearsal, so they had to miss it. If you’ve been reading this blog a while you know how important this contest has been to both of my kids since they were little, so that was a blow.

I was sad for North but also myself because I love the parade contest and we’ve had kids in it eighteen of the twenty Halloweens we’ve lived in Takoma (the exceptions being the first year when it was cancelled because of the DC snipers and last year when it was cancelled by covid). Even when the parade was rained out, the contest always went on, inside an elementary school gym, and we were always there. Before my mom moved out West, she often came for a Halloween weekend visit and marched in the parade with us.

And then I realized we could go, even without North. I proposed it to Beth and she seemed a little surprised, but then she agreed. We walked down to the community center, which was the end point of the parade, so we could watch it go by and then stay for the judging. The parade was cancelled last year so it’s been a couple years and what struck me was how few people we know were there. Noah’s peers are off at college and North’s have either decided they’re too old for the parade or, like North, have extracurricular obligations. Even Keira, who’s a year older than North, a many-time contest winner, and the only teen I know to take the contest as seriously as my kids, wasn’t there.

I saw only two adults I knew– a member of my book club who was there with his elementary-age sons, and the mother of three boys, the older two of whom used to wait at elementary and middle school bus stops with my kids, who was there with her youngest (who marched in his soccer uniform). When she saw us, she said she’d been looking all over for North because she wanted to see their costume and she was sad to hear North wasn’t there.

There were a lot of nice costumes, as always. I especially liked the toddler in a homemade owl costume with many felt feathers, the tiny boy dressed as the Swedish chef from the Muppets, the boy dressed as a gumball machine, the girl who was a bookshelf, and the two wizards pulling a papier-mâché dragon on wheels. The owl, Swedish chef, and the dragon won prizes in their age groups, but the gumball machine and the bookshelf didn’t. Beth also thought the woman who walked the parade route dressed as a scarecrow on stilts deserved a prize for her efforts. We paid careful attention to the scariest prize for teen and adult, because that would have been North’s competition. Beth correctly guessed it would go to the boy in the red-splattered t-shirt, gloves, and hockey mask.

As the winners were announced, Beth took their pictures and texted them to Noah so the two of them could judge the judging. This is also a family tradition. Beth and I have often thought that since we have such firmly held opinions about costumes, we should volunteer to be judges once our kids are finished participating in it. If we’d known North wasn’t going to be in it earlier, I would have volunteered this year. I have a vision of us being old women who’ve been judging the contest for decades, but Beth thinks they might not let us do it after the first year because of the intensity of our opinions.

As we left, Beth mentioned that Noah did not even ask why we were even watching the costume contest judging if North wasn’t in it. In our family, it’s not a question that needed to be asked.

On Halloween proper, North made baked apples and we ate them while we watched The Bad Seed, or North and I did—Beth got her fill of mildly scary movies when the three of us watched Nightbooks earlier in the weekend. While we were watching the movie, Beth was putting the finishing touches on the yard. Here’s a video she took once it got dark:

After the movie, North heated up and ate a frozen burrito for dinner, applied their makeup for just the right deathly pallor, put on their costume and left for Zoë’s neighborhood where a big group of friends and friends of friends were going trick-or-treating. The group included Zoë (who went as Mr. Clean), Norma (grim reaper), and North’s elementary school best friend Megan (witch).

[Aside: It makes me glad North is able to socialize more. I remember last fall them saying all they wanted was to go to a movie with Zoë and Norma, “and have them tell me why it was bad even though I liked it.” And two weekends ago, they did just that, meeting up in Silver Spring to see The Addams Family 2, and then Beth picked them up and brought home two pizzas from Little Caesar’s and they stayed for a couple hours. I don’t know if Zoë and Norma ragged on the movie or not, but the whole event left North almost radiantly happy.]

Staring just before six, when two boys dressed as praying mantises came up to our porch, Beth and I took turns sitting on the porch and handing out candy. We bought less candy than usual so not to have a lot of leftovers and—wouldn’t you know it?—we had more trick-or-treaters than usual. After a half hour or so, I started emptying the festive gift bags Beth had assembled into the bowl and telling kids to take just one piece each, as we were running low. Most of them listened so we didn’t run out and we finished the night a little after nine o’clock with one last duo of un-costumed preteens and just six pieces of candy left.

As always, we got many compliments on our decorations. Our around-the-corner neighbor said it was “the best house in the neighborhood” and one kid said, “I like your decorations… No, I love your decorations.” One parent commented, “I guess you guys are really into this holiday.”

Yes, we are. We’ve enjoyed our twenty Halloweens in this house and look forward to all the ones to come, whether we’re judging the contest or marching with our grandkids in the parade.

After the Beach: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 48

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Steph

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Going Home

So for some reason we didn’t decide to squat in the beach house and we drove home from the beach. On the way out of town we stopped at the Crocs outlet and Beth, North, and I each got a pair. Beth’s are gray and mine are black with a white band, which I thought was kind of daring, as I’ve always had navy blue ones, but North got a pair of black, glittery platform Crocs with spikes on them. They are the most unusual pair they’ve had since they were five and had a pair of glow-in-the-dark unicorn Crocs they adored. So in case you were wondering how long it takes to go from unicorn to Goth-themed footwear, the answer is a decade.

We went out for pizza and salads at Matchbook in Silver Spring, near YaYa’s hotel. In the morning, Beth helped YaYa with her new phone, then she brought her by the house so everyone could hang out in the back yard a bit, where we showed her our garden and said our goodbyes before Beth drove her to the airport. We were all sad to say see the last member of the beach house crew leave.

Post-Beach Weekend #1

But one of the nice things about a Friday-to-Friday rental is you still have the whole weekend when you get home, so you’re not spending it all doing laundry (me) or grocery shopping (Beth). We had time for two outings, first to an outdoor screening of Cruella and then to a park to walk around a lake and fly Noah’s drone.

Mike (the filmmaker who sometimes employs Noah) and his wife Sara (the Secretary-Treasurer of the union where Beth works) hosted a backyard showing of Cruella the Saturday after we returned. Because Mike’s a filmmaker, it wasn’t projected on a sheet or the side of the house, but on a portable movie screen, as big as you might see in a small theater. They provided popcorn, candy, and drinks, and showed Warner Brothers cartoons before the feature presentation. I didn’t know too many of the people there other than Mike, Sara, and their three girls, but it was a fun event. My assessment of the movie (and Beth’s, too) is that was enjoyable and the performances are good (especially Emma Thompson as the Baroness), but it doesn’t really do the work of a prequel because it’s hard to see how Cruella’s character arc leads to her character in the original. For what it’s worth, Sara argued that it’s supposed to cause you to see the original Cruella in a new light, but I’m not sure about that.

Sunday afternoon, Beth, Noah and I went droning. Noah had some trouble with his drone the last day we were at the beach and he’d made some repairs to it at home, but since you can’t fly a drone as close to Washington D.C. as we live, he wanted to go to a park where he could test the repairs. We went to Centennial Park in Howard County. We’d been there once last summer, in early August, just a few weeks into North’s paralysis. I was surprised how well I remembered the path around the lake. We even saw a heron by the same little bridge where we’d seen a heron the year before. Because we weren’t pushing North in a wheelchair this time (North wasn’t there at all, having elected to stay home), we walked further this time, all the way around the two-and-a-half-mile lake loop, and off a little spur to see a pond. Noah flew in a few places and the drone functioned perfectly. As we often did last summer, we got Starbucks on the way home. Sipping my pink drink evoked that odd summer and all its twists and turns.

Last Week of July

Neither of the kids had camp, a volunteer gig, or work the next week, but North had an appointment at the pain clinic, an orthodontist appointment, and a therapy session, and Xander had an appointment with a veterinary cardiologist. Only the therapy was online, so Beth was busy driving the kid and the cat around. (Noah had a drum lesson, too, but gets to the music school by himself on the bus.)

Monday we went to the pain clinic at Children’s National Hospital for a follow-up visit about North’s chronic pain. The doctor thought their gait looked good, and we ended up with a prescription for six sessions of physical therapy, probably starting with aqua therapy to see if that can help them walk longer distances and with less pain. North will also be seeing a pain psychologist in the fall to work on coping methods. North’s not super excited about another round of physical therapy.

Wednesday North and I went to the Crossroads farmers’ market and got pupusas for lunch. This walk is not quite three-quarters of a mile each way and that’s in North’s comfort zone, but this time they did it with no crutch and in platform crocs to boot, so it must have been a good day for them.

That same day Noah and I finished reading The Gods of Jade and Shadow and watching the first season of The Leftovers. We’re hoping to get one more season in before he leaves for school in mid-August. (People in various combinations that include Noah have also met summer goals of finishing season 2 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and season 4 of Blackish, and the whole family is closing in on season 2 of Dickinson.)

On Thursday, Beth took Xander to see a veterinary cardiologist, on our vet’s recommendation. I would have gone in case there were any hard decisions to make at the appointment, but they are only letting one person per animal in the clinic. And the upshot is his heart looks surprisingly good for a cat his age, whose littermate died of a blood clot. His blood pressure is good and he has some mild to moderate thickening of his heart muscle. We’re supposed to give him aspirin hidden in a cat treat, more because of his brother’s medical history than anything the cardiologist saw on the scan, and if we want we can get him re-assessed in six to nine months. The vet thought when he seems to lose control of one or both his back legs (and this happened again the day before the appointment) it’s his arthritis acting up.

I’ve thought he might be having a life-threatening emergency three times now this summer, so this is a relief. We considered boarding him at a kennel when we went to the beach, but we decided to have a cat sitter check in on him every day and I’m glad now that’s what we did because being boarded would have been stressful for him.

Post-Beach Weekend #2

The big event this weekend was a trip to Butler’s Orchard. We’ve been to the farm market a couple times this summer, but we hadn’t picked anything ourselves. The weather was lovely, low eighties and not that humid, and three kinds of berries were in season, so it seemed like a good time to go. We got two quarts of blackberries, a quart of blueberries, and two pints of raspberries. Blueberry season is almost over so there weren’t many people in that field, but there were more folks among the blackberry canes and I could hear parents of small children saying things like: “Now we’re only going to pick the black ones, not the red ones. No, not the red ones. That one’s not ripe yet. We’ll go to the raspberries later, that’s where we pick the red ones.” Let’s say it was evocative of berry picking in my children’s younger days. I appreciate not having to say anything like that or having to worry about either of them running into the path of an oncoming farm truck.

There’s a sign as you leave that says, “Have a Berry Nice Day” and, as I usually do, I asked if everyone had, and Beth said yes. I did, too.

When we got home I froze half the blackberries and half the raspberries, and today I made a blueberry kuchen and there’s raspberry ice cream in the freezer that North made. Sometime in the next couple weeks I’ll use some of the blackberries in a peach-blackberry cobbler, so I think we shouldn’t have any trouble enjoying the fruits of our labors. Now that it’s August, I can feel the end of summer on the horizon, which makes me happy and sad for the obvious reasons. I hope your late summer days are happy and fruitful.

Like the Fourth of July: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 45

Posted on July 6, 2021 by Steph

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You just gotta ignite the sky, and let it shine
Just own the night like the 4^th of July

From “Firework,” by Tor Erik Hermansen, et al. Performed by Katy Perry

We had a nice Fourth of July weekend. I hope you did, too, or a nice Canada Day weekend for the Canadians among you. But before I get to that…

An Update on Xander

Just five days after we took him to the animal hospital for his skin and ear infections, he gave us another scare. Wednesday morning right after Beth gave him his medicine, he fell down and seemed to lose control of his back legs. Well, this is exactly what happened to Matthew the day he died (and they were brothers), so Beth and I feared the worst.

Beth had been scheduled to go into her office but she let her colleagues know she wouldn’t be in and we were packing for a day in the animal hospital garage and debating whether we should wake the kids and ask if they wanted to come, when, after about a half hour of partial paralysis, Xander got up and started walking around as if nothing were wrong. Beth called and left a message for the animal hospital, explaining what had happened, and asking if we should bring him in. The answer was no, though of course, this doesn’t seem like a good sign for his general health. He had an appointment already scheduled at our regular vet’s office Friday, so we’ll see what the vet thinks then.

Meanwhile, almost a week has passed and he seems in good spirits. The infection on his stomach seemed to clear up, then it relapsed a little, but it still looks better than it did originally. The eardrops make his ears so greasy, it’s hard to tell if the crud is gone. He’s able to jump on and off the bed and climb stairs. He’s been going out into the yard occasionally to enjoy the sun and soaking up all the extra love and attention everyone is inexplicably bestowing on him. He’s always been an easy-going cat and he’s not letting the indignities of old age get to him.

Kayaking

Beth had a three-day weekend for the Fourth. She took up kayaking this spring and on Saturday morning, Noah and I went with her to Black Hills Regional Park to try our hands at it. Partly that’s because Beth wants to go on a dolphin-watching kayaking tour of the Chesapeake Bay when we’re at the beach later this month and I was unsure, having never kayaked, or maybe we did just once in our twenties or early thirties. Beth thinks we went canoeing on the Potomac. I thought it was kayaking on the C&O canal. Our youth is shrouded in mystery. The point is, if I’d ever been in kayak at all, the last time was more than twenty years ago. Noah decided to come along, too, but North opted out. They attended a kayaking-and-canoeing themed week at Girl Scout camp when they were nine and thought they remembered it well enough.

It was a beautiful morning, sunny and remarkably mild for July, in the high seventies. The little lake was very busy with people in kayaks, canoes, rowboats, paddleboats, and paddleboards. It turns out Noah is a natural at kayaking. He got the hang of it right away. It took me longer. I found it tiring, and I was much slower than Beth and Noah, and I kept drifting to the right and needing to correct course.

We slipped through a tunnel under a berm to emerge in a smaller area where there were no other boaters. There were a lot of turtles, however, swimming and sunning on logs, and a family of geese, two adults and five half-grown goslings. There were also a lot of tree trunks poking up out of the water, because it’s an artificial lake that was flooded around thirty-five years ago. I think it would look eerie on an overcast day.

After we’d explored that area, we crossed back to the other side to go down a fork of the lake where Beth had seen a beavers’ dam on a previous outing. I was worn out, though, and didn’t think I could make it that far so I decided to rest at the mouth of the fork while Beth and Noah went ahead. (Neither of them ended up making it to the dam this time.) The wind sent me drifting further down the fork than I meant to go and I started to worry how I’d paddle out against the current, but when I turned around and started back, something clicked into place. I sat up straighter than I had when I’d been using the backrest and I found it easier to paddle. We were out of time, though, having rented the kayaks for two hours. I decided I’d like to come back and try it again before hitting the Bay in a kayak.

After we left the lake, we had lunch at Noodles & Company, and then ran a series of errands, including but not limited to stopping at Butler’s farm market for fruit, vegetables, pasta, and pastries, going to the animal hospital for a refill on Xander’s eardrops, and picking up my newly resoled Birks. It was a very nice outing.

Fourth of July

Sunday was the Fourth. For the second year in a row there was no parade and no fireworks in Takoma. It was actually the third year for no fireworks because there have been renovations going on at the middle school that usually hosts the fireworks for that long and there’s no comparable open space anywhere in town. I wasn’t sure why the parade was cancelled, because our vaccination numbers in Montgomery County are very good—98% of seniors and 88% of everyone age twelve and up has had at least one shot. But Beth pointed out, the parade probably takes a long time to plan and when the call needed to be made, it wasn’t clear what things would look like in July. And of course, there are the under-twelves to consider.

However, there were fireworks in D.C. (There were fireworks there last year, too, but it seemed inadvisable to go to the mall.) So our plans for the day included a picnic dinner in our backyard and a trip downtown. There’s a good view from the roof of Beth’s office building and it was open this year, so that’s where we went.

Until dinner, the day was a pretty normal summer Sunday. Beth went grocery shopping and I put the groceries away. Beth worked in the garden, putting our zinnia seedlings and watermelon vines into the ground, and assembled most of the picnic dinner, while I made the deviled eggs and the sour cherry sauce for ice cream. We all missed Takoma’s quirky and spirited parade. Beth said it didn’t feel “like the Fourth of July” without it.

We left for the fireworks around eight. On the drive there I observed people having cookouts in tiny yards in front of rowhouses, and large groups of twenty and thirty-somethings walking to the mall, which reminded me of when I was a twenty and thirty-something who lived within walking distance of the mall.

When we got to Beth’s office building we had a choice of two different levels and we chose the lower one. The penthouse deck has a portico design and Noah thought the columns might block our view. All the other CWA employees and their families chose the higher level, though, so we had the lower deck to ourselves. We got our chairs set up and Noah took pictures of the Capitol. We could see fireworks from various suburban municipalities and D.C. neighborhood displays all around us in a sort of panoramic effect.

The official D.C. fireworks began at 9:08, right on schedule. When they were in smiley face patterns the little kids up on the penthouse deck exclaimed and when they were in heart shapes they just about lost their minds. During some of the classic circle displays, one of them said, “It looks like the coronavirus” and then I couldn’t unsee it. Fortunately, the next few looked less spiky and more like dandelions. The display lasted about twenty minutes. On our way out of the building, I asked Beth if it seemed more like the Fourth of July, now that we’d seen fireworks, and she said yes.

On the drive home, we saw quite a few more neighborhood fireworks, and as we drove down North Capitol Street, we could see people setting them off on a side street. Noah played his Fourth of July playlist. It starts with Katy Perry’s “Firework,” but it grows every year. Beth and I sang along with Springsteen’s “Independence Day,” which may have been added for our benefit. Traffic wasn’t horrible, so by the time the playlist ended we were just blocks from home.

Date #4

There was one day left in the weekend, so Beth and I had a date that lasted from late morning to late afternoon. We went to see the Rita Moreno documentary at AFI, which I recommend, and then out for arepas. The original plan was tapas, but that restaurant wasn’t open for lunch. We got tequeños (because Beth loves the cilantro-garlic sauce that comes with them) and two arepas to share, one with avocado and cheese and the other with black beans and cheese. I tried the sugar cane juice, which was very sweet. I probably wouldn’t get it again, but I was glad to have satisfied my curiosity.

We swung by the house so I could cycle laundry and then we went to swim at Long Branch pool. We invited the kids along to this portion of the festivities and while we weren’t surprised Noah said no, we were surprised when North did. They are usually up for a trip to the pool. But since we were alone, I guess it was an extension of the date, though we were separated for most of it, as I was swimming laps.

Later I posted on Facebook that it was our first date since the pandemic started, but then I remembered we went out for pizza one night in late May when Noah was at YaYa’s and North was sleeping over at Zoë’s and that was definitely a date, so I corrected the post to say second.

But it made me wonder exactly what constitutes a date? How about the picnic of takeout Greek food we had on under a park shelter on a rainy day in late March on our way back from being vaccinated in Western Maryland? Or the walk through the snowy woods in Blackwater Falls State Park on Christmas day? My cousin Holly, who’s widowed, said those both count, so I will take her word for it. But I draw the line at counting the trip to Ikea we took a couple weeks ago. However many dates there have been, I’m optimistic they will become more frequent in the months to come. And that’s a happy thought.

All For The Love Of You

A Chronicle of Suburban Lesbian Family Life

Category Archives: Pets

Comings and Goings

Summer’s Coming Around Again

Sunrise, Sunset

Three Years, Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 79

All The Very Best Cat Things

For Our Lives: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 74

On the Horizon: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 66

Twenty Halloweens: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 55

After the Beach: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 48

Like the Fourth of July: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 45