Ten for December

Posted on December 10, 2024 by Steph

The Trouble with Christmassing

Last week, Swistle wrote a blog post, called “Having Trouble Christmassing” that really hit home with me. A lot of you have already read it, but for those who haven’t, here’s how it starts:

I am having some trouble Christmassing. Which is not surprising, given the state of Everything, and really I am doing better than I did in 2016. But: I am having trouble. I have a to-do list that gets longer every day. I feel as if I might genuinely not be ready in time, and also that I am highly likely to feel regret that I didn’t enjoy this last holiday season enough before it was bleak, bleak, BLEAK late January, which is scheduled to last for many years. I have not started the Christmas cards. I have not been listening to Christmas music. I have not brought down the Christmas dishes, or put up any decorations except for the tree, which I was highly motivated to get up and decorated while the twins were home for Thanksgiving. I have bought very few presents. I am getting that quiet, dazed panicky feeling I get when I seem to Simply Not Be Doing something that needs to be done.

When Swistle posted this, we’d completed our Christmas card photo shoot, Noah had edited the finalists, and I’d written the text, but we had trouble making a final decision about the picture and the project stalled. I had only bought gifts for one person. The only decorations I had up were the few cards we had received so far and a green dish towel with a Christmas tree topped with a sea star on it that I hung from the oven door handle.

I’m thinking we may go minimalist with inside decorations this year, not so much out of political despair but because of the kittens, who knock everything off everything else all day long and who are such good jumpers and climbers (especially Willow) that there’s nowhere we could put anything that they could not reach. I am certainly not setting up the Christmas village I inherited from my mother, which has many small, fragile pieces and is important to me. But here’s what we have done in terms of preparation and celebration:

10 Efforts to Christmas

It took me longer than usual to start listening to Christmas music. Beth and Noah wanted to on the long drive from Oberlin to Takoma Park the Sunday after Thanksgiving and I didn’t mind, but whenever it was my turn to choose the entertainment, I went with podcasts. I eventually started to listen to some at home, but until today when I really dove into it, my ratio of Christmas to non-Christmas music was lower than usual. I listened to a lot of music that’s Christmas-adjacent, like the soundtrack to Rent or albums with one Christmas song on them, like Dar Williams’ Mortal City.
The first day we were home from Wheeling, with grim determination to be festive, I put on a pair of reindeer and holly socks, went on a walk, and took pictures of the neighbors’ Christmas decorations. The two skeletons that change costumes with the seasons are a perennial favorite—one has a Santa hat right now and the other one has a Christmas light headband—but I also like the inflatable Santa riding a shark. Who wouldn’t?
Noah left for London the first Wednesday of December. I asked him to send me at least one photo every day and most days he has. Many of them were of Christmas lights in the city. He attended the lighting of the Christmas tree in Trafalgar Square and had this to say about it: “It took forever to get to the tree lighting. People had to sing and play music and give speeches and Jesus and WWII.” If this sounds crabby (especially coming from a musician), it was his first day there and he had barely slept the night before on the plane and because he didn’t check in by the deadline at his hotel, they cancelled his reservation (which was for a whole week!) and gave away his room and he found himself exhausted and without lodging in a strange city. The hotel eventually found him a room in another one of their properties, but he’d had a stressful day.
Before he left, Noah wrapped his present to Lily-Mei, and he found the perfect paper for a preteen Goth—black with gold snowflakes in white circles—in the closet. I wrapped the rest of the gifts in the same paper and mailed them on Thursday. It was pleasing to have one person checked off my list.
Beth and I finally picked a photo for the card—by this point we’d forgotten which ones of the final three the kids preferred, and to make it less complicated, we decided not to ask them to remind us. After all, the four of collaborated in the narrowing down from almost forty to three so everyone had already had a substantial say. Beth designed the card and ordered it.
On the first Saturday of December, Beth and I went to Agricultural History Farm Park. The idea was to take a walk somewhere new and to take in some Christmas cheer. We walked on trails through woods and over a creek and along harvested cornfields in golden late afternoon light. In the barn, there was live music (oddly, someone playing guitar and singing Tears for Fears “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”) and free hot cider and gingersnaps plus more treats for sale. Outside the barn there were people taking a hayride and there were goats in a pen and a man giving a blacksmithing demonstration. (It made me nervous that he was not using any eye protection, and it wasn’t because he was in period costume because he wasn’t.) On the way home, we stopped at a coffeehouse where we got coffee, hot chocolate, and macarons (peppermint for me, chocolate-hazelnut for Beth) and we picked up a wreath at a grocery store. It was a pleasing outing.
That night, Beth and I went over the kids’ lists and decided what to get them and which ideas to farm out to relatives. Over the rest of the weekend, I communicated with my mom and sister about who was getting what. This exchange is still in progress and it’s not Christmas shopping exactly, but it’s a precursor to shopping.
Sunday Beth put up the wreath and started the outside lights, both the candy cane lane and the strings of lights that go in the trees and on the porch. She finished on Monday.
On Monday morning as I was walking in a chilly drizzle, I got a text from North, asking, “Hypothetically, if you were getting an Oberlin ornament,” if I would prefer one of three options. I’d asked for an Oberlin ornament for Christmas, so this was not exactly a surprise, but it was cheering, nonetheless. I chose the white squirrel, which is Oberlin’s unofficial mascot because of its small population of albino squirrels. North had been waiting impatiently to see one and finally did recently. (Before that they saw gray one with a white tail, probably the offspring of a mixed-color squirrel couple.)
Monday evening, in a flurry of focused online activity, I nearly finished my shopping.

So, things are moving along. Cards on are their way to us, most presents have been purchased, decoration is partly complete. When both kids are home later this week, we’ll decide which if any indoor decorations to put out, get a tree, and walk through the lights display at Brookside Gardens.

I’m looking forward having everyone home and to the tree and lights outings. As I prepare for Christmas, I’ve been oscillating between feeling I’m dutifully going through the motions and enjoying the tasks. I think that’s okay. We can’t always feel the same way and sometimes duty slips into merriment when I give it a chance. Either way, we will manage to Christmas.

Waiting for Joy

Posted on December 7, 2024 by Steph

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

Black Friday

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

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

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

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

Small Business Saturday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Advent

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

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

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

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

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

To Be Grateful

Posted on November 29, 2024 by Steph

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Tuesday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I said, “Yes.” And it was.

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

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

Wednesday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanksgiving Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get the Party Started

Posted on November 26, 2024 by Steph

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome Home, Obie

Posted on August 28, 2024 by Steph

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Friday evening to Sunday morning: Wheeling

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

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

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

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

Sunday morning to Monday afternoon: Oberlin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is what Beth wrote on Facebook:

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

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

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

Reunited

Posted on August 13, 2024 by Steph

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First Saturday

En route to her family reunion, Beth and I had a picnic lunch and then a short walk at the Sideling Hill Road Cut, or as we’ve called it since the kid were small, “the stripey rocks.” There was a mountain view from our picnic table, and when we sat down to eat, Beth sighed and said, “I like mountains.” She likes them like I like the beach.

We pulled into Beth’s mom’s condo driveway around five on Saturday and from there proceeded to the cabin in Oglebay park where the reunion was taking place. Cabin isn’t quite the right word, as it was more like a small hotel, with two stories, eight bedrooms, and ample common space, both upstairs and downstairs. The upstairs was quite airy with a soaring ceiling in the main area. We knew what to expect because we stayed in the same cabin at the last reunion. In addition to the people staying in the cabin, there were people staying at the park lodge, and people staying with in-town relatives. It was a big and ever-shifting crowd.

This was the fourth reunion Beth’s mom’s family has had since 2002, when we brought our toddler son to one in a smaller cabin. There was a second one in 2012 and then a third one in 2016. It’s interesting to see how the family has gone through cycles since the first one. Noah was the youngest person in attendance at the first one and there were a bunch of kids older than him. Then at the middle two, our kids were almost the only kids (except a seventeen-year-old boy at the second one, which barely seemed to count to us at the time as our kids were so much younger, and a couple babies at the third one). But at this reunion there were about a half dozen kids who have been born since 2016 and three pregnant women, so the family is clearly in a growth phase, most of which is occurring in Beth’s aunt Carole’s branch.

The attendees were mainly descendants of Beth’s maternal grandparents—Beth’s mom, her three aunts (Carole, Susan, and Jenny) and their kids, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. It was startling to realize that of the four generations present, Beth and I are in the second oldest generation, the one in which many people are grandparents.

When we arrived, a couple people were constructing an easel to display the family tree that Jenny made and there was also a calendar of events and a list of who would be attending dinner each of the first several nights. (The next day Carole’s granddaughter Holly set up a posterboard display of photos from previous reunions.) That night we had pizza and talked to many, many people, some of whose names I learned (or re-learned) and some I never learned. A lot of people asked after Noah and North and we reported on their jobs and North’s college plans.

Many of the people at the reunion were Irish. Carole and husband raised their kids partly in Ireland and most of her kids, grandkids, and great grandkids still live there. The Irish parents were speaking to their kids in English and Irish and Marjorie (who’s Chilean and married to Carole’s grandson Eanna) spoke to her son Santino in English and Spanish.

After dinner, Beth and I took a short walk through the park because I hadn’t walked much during the day and then we had dessert. I had a slice of the blackberry pie we’d bought at a farm market on the drive—the group made short work of it—and Beth had ice cream.

We retreated to our downstairs bedroom a little after nine-thirty. We are early-to-bed people, and we were tired from staying up past our bedtime all week to watch the Olympics and from the drive. I slept all the way through the night without waking, which is quite unusual for me, as I’m a light sleeper. The room was dark and quiet, even with so many people upstairs.

First Sunday

In the morning people went their separate ways. Carole’s grandson Michael went for a run as he did most mornings, Beth and I each took walks, and many people headed to the pool at various times. There were some grocery runs and an expedition to get corn and tomatoes from a farm. I worked on my last blog post and this one, too. After her walk, Beth showed me photos of the morning mist and some cool spider webs she’d seen. She was animated and very happy to be in Oglebay.

My glucose monitor expired on Sunday morning and I’d forgotten to bring a new one. (I realized this about an hour into the drive.) It ended up taking several days to get an early refill approved and what with all the treats in the house, my self-control was not always what it should have been, but you know, vacation. To complicate matters, my Fitbit broke a few weeks ago, while we were at the beach, so while I was still taking a walk every day and trying to remember to get up and move every hour, I did often forget.

In the afternoon, I worked a little. I hardly ever work on vacation, but I have a big set of medical abstracts about probiotics and prebiotics to rewrite into plain English. The project is due in a few weeks, and I wanted to chip away at it. (I ended up working four days, never more than an hour.) Meanwhile, Beth’s aunt Jenny set up a station with white baseball caps and fabric pens for people to use to decorate them. People were doing this throughout the day and evening.

We celebrated Carole’s eighty-seventh birthday that night. It was the biggest gathering of the reunion, with perhaps fifty people. There was Italian takeout and birthday cake and Carol’s grandsons Tristan and Eanna played “Happy Birthday” and then “We Are Family,” on the piano while people sang. This was an appropriate choice with the lyrics “I have all my sisters and me” because Carole’s three sisters were all there. Sean gave a sweet speech he often gives at his mother’s birthday celebrations about how though the family moved around a lot during his childhood (to places as diverse as New York, Montana, and Ireland) that she always made wherever they lived feel like home because “home is where the love is.”

Afterward Carole exclaimed “I couldn’t be luckier” to have so many people she loved gathered in one place.

Sean then gave a half-hour presentation on family genealogy. He started with photos of the four sisters in high school in the 1950s and 60s and then dove into the past—nineteenth-century German immigrants who opened a store in Wheeling, seventeenth-century New England Puritans, and soldiers who fought in wars from the Norman Invasion, through American Revolution and Civil War (on both sides of the latter). The family can trace its ancestry directly to Edward the III and is distantly related to Audrey Hepburn, Charles Darwin, James Taylor, Jane Austen, and Meghan Markle. Sean then distributed bound copies of his research to all four sisters and one of their cousins, who has a particular interest in genealogy.

Monday

I didn’t sleep all the way through the night again, but I did sleep until 7:45, which is quite late for me. Beth did me one better and slept until 8:15. We learned soon after waking that Jenny had tested positive for covid. That was sad because she’d have to stay at home for the rest of the reunion (she lives in town) and she really likes organizing activities. She’d had a tie-dye event planned for the kids. (She sent the materials later in the week and it went on without her.)

That morning Beth and I were both struggling with balky internet (she to work, me also to work and to edit and post my last blog post to Facebook). While we were doing this there was a group yoga session on the upper deck—I was on the lower deck and could hear mysterious thumps as people moved the furniture around—and a bunch of people left for the pool.

Beth and I finished what we needed to do and went for a hike in the woods. The trail was sometimes gravel and sometimes dirt and went along a creek. We had to ford the creek a couple times—no problem as it was low—and cross little bridges or step from tree stump to tree stump that had been set into a path in a marshy area. We saw a couple small waterfalls plus the innards and one leg of a dead deer, so picked apart by vultures (perched nearby) that it took me a few seconds to realize it was a deer. That’s part of nature, too, I guess.

After lunch Beth and I went to the pool, encountering three different groups of people from our party on their way back to the cabin on the path between the cabins and the pool. Beth loves the pool at Oglebay. It’s a large rectangular pool with pretty stone building behind it. It was built by the CCC in that architectural style so common in American municipal and state parks. We talked about what an act of optimism that was in the Depression, imagining people would have the space for leisure in their lives. It’s a real gift from the past.

Beth’s mom worked at the pool snack bar as a teenager, so there’s family history there, too. We soaked in the pool for a while and I tried to swim laps, which involved dodging people left and right because there’s no lap lane. I did about a dozen laps the short way across the pool. It was nice to stretch my muscles and feel the sun on my back, but I gave up it up as too hazardous. Then we lay on towels in the sun to dry off and I read a little.

When we came back, Ailble, Michael’s middle daughter, who’s five, gave Beth a long, complicated update about the Grinch, who had apparently been skulking about the cabin and trying to steal things. The upshot was that she and some of the other kids had put a spell on him, which resulted in him returning a hat he had stolen from her. As she was talking, she saw a doe, got excited and confessed to us that “I have a crush on the deer.” She claimed to have kissed one and then she approached the passing deer, edging closer and closer. Eventually the deer loped away. Deer are everywhere in the park and very tame. Probably too tame for their own good, as the park last fall organized a bow-and-arrow hunt to cull their numbers.

Before she’d finished everything she wanted to say, Ailble had to leave because she was in a group of people who were going paddle-boating. Beth and I helped her mom and Carole’s late husband’s sister Pat shuck corn for that night’s cookout on the upper deck.

There was a huge spread for the barbeque—burgers, salmon, hot dogs, veggie hot dogs, and haloumi—plus many sides. Michael manned the grill and people ate both inside and out on the deck. After dinner there was a sing-along and dance performance. Michael’s wife Orla and their two oldest daughters Aishling and Ailble all took turns demonstrating step dancing, while their youngest daughter Eadadoin and another toddler girl (Fia, Tristan’s daughter) joined in, both clearly understanding this activity involved a lot of kicking.

The singing kicked off with “Country Roads,” because so many people had traveled such a long distance back to their ancestral home of West Virginia. Fia had a look of comic surprise on her face when everyone around her burst into song, but she quickly got used to it.

Over the course of the evening Sean and his sons Eanna and Tristan played the piano, clarinet, guitar, and a small Chilean stringed instrument to accompany the singing, and Carole’s grandchildren Kawika and Holly both sang solos. The singing went on for hours. The songs were mostly in English, but there was an Edith Piaf song in French and another in Irish. One of my favorite moments happened right after we finished “Sweet Caroline” because Fia kept on singing the “Oh oh oh” part. When it was my turn to make a request, I suggested Joni Mitchell’s “Chelsea Morning,” but the musicians asked for another choice, so I chose “Big Yellow Taxi,” which is more sing-along-friendly. I decided to go to bed once we’d all sung “Hallelujah,” because it seemed like a good closer, at least for my part in the event.

Tuesday

The next morning, we found out another member of our party had covid. This time it was Gina, who’s the sister of Aine, Sean’s ex-wife. Gina had traveled from Ireland and couldn’t go home, so a couple people who were staying at the cabin decamped for Carole’s house so bedrooms could be re-arranged to allow Gina her own room where she would isolate. I did wonder at this point if a sing-along in a group of covid-exposed people had been the best idea, even in a spacious, high-ceilinged room, but what was done was done. From then on, I started spending a lot of time outside or in our room. I didn’t avoid other people completely—after all, seeing people is the point of a reunion—but I did try to avoid large groups inside and ate most of my meals outside.

In the morning, while people were leaving for the pool, Beth and I went to her mom’s house for the internet, and during the hour and a half we were there, her mom popped over to Carole’s house (two doors down) and Susan, Susan’s son Scott, and Carole’s daughter Meg all came by. It was like a mini reunion there.

In the afternoon, Beth went back to the pool, and I took a walk around the pond and the gardens behind the nature center and saw people paddle-boating, a lot of ducks, a pollinator garden, and metal sculptures of bugs and animals.

Dinner that night was an Indian feast, cooked by Sean. It’s his signature meal—several curries (most vegetarian), dal, naan, and apricot chutney, delicious as always. He’d been in the kitchen for several hours making it. A large group had gone mini golfing and didn’t get back until 7:40, so we ate on the late side. While we were eating, Ailble informed us she’d been nuzzled by a deer, and she thought she might be the first person ever in the whole world to have this experience and she also thought there should be a celebration to mark this event. Fortunately, there was birthday cake for her grandmother Aine after dinner and after everyone had sung “Happy Birthday” and she’d blown out the candles two cupcakes were presented to Ailble with their own candles to blow out, so I guess that was her celebration.

Beth and I went for an after-dinner walk. We left around nine and there were still streaks of pink in the sky. Wheeling is west of Takoma Park and the sun sets later there. A cold front had come through, though without the expected rain, and it was nice weather for walking.

Wednesday

There were no new covid cases.

This was the designated day for excursions to Pittsburgh and its environs. There was a group that went to a children’s museum in the city, a group that went to Kennywood amusement park, and a group that went to see an evening Pirates game. I think Holly was the only one to go on two of the excursions (the park and the game). Orla stayed behind and had her first child-free day in eight years (!). She spent it walking, swimming, and reading and she said it was lovely. Beth and I went to Kennywood.

This wasn’t the main amusement park of Beth’s youth (that would be Cedar Point) and we never took the kids there, opting for Idlewild when they were small and we were in Wheeling, so I’d never been. It’s a medium-sized park, but when we got there, we realized it lacks some of the attractions Beth likes best—like a Ferris wheel, a mine ride, or an internal waterpark. (There’s one outside the park, but it’s a separate ticket.) We had lunch and rode the carousel together, and then she started waiting for me outside rides. I rode two small wooden coasters (the Jack Rabbit and the Racer), both of which dated back to the 1920s. The Jack Rabbit was scarier than I thought it would be, given the size, but that might be because I was alone in a seat for two without a divider and I felt like I was sliding around in the seat. The Racer has dividers. I was pleased to see so many small wooden coasters—there was at least one more I didn’t ride—because wooden coasters are my favorite and as I get older, I’m not as keen to ride the big ones. I always have to psych myself up to ride the even smallest ones at Cedar Point and Hershey Park, which are about twice the size of these.

Speaking of Hershey Park I was wearing a t-shirt I got years ago at Hershey Park that says, “I Survived the Sooper Dooper Loooper” and for the first time ever a stranger commented on it, saying, “I survived the sooper dooper looper, too!” Later while we were having ice cream, I saw a small boy at the counter wearing a shirt with the same slogan. When I bought it, my kids insisted that in adult sizes it’s ironic, but it is not for me. It identifies me as someone who likes roller coasters, but only smallish, usually older, ones. That’s my sweet spot.

I rode the swings, taking my shoes off so I could feel the wind on my bare feet, and I was sizing up the flume ride, trying to decide if it was small enough for me when we finally met up with the group that had come in the other car—Meg, her daughter Holly, Sean’s daughter Rebecca, and Aisling. They recommended the raft ride as something that might be tame enough for Beth and we headed that way. It was a good ride for her. You get into a six-person boat, and it floats down a river with some gentle rapids. It wasn’t too scary, and we all got wet.

After the rafts, four of us (everyone but Rebecca and Beth) braved the haunted house. Rebecca bought us cheese fries to eat in line because the others hadn’t had lunch yet. We thought we’d have to throw them out at the entrance but to our surprise, none of the staff said anything, so we kept them for the first part of the house.

The haunted house is mostly the kind where you ride in a car, but you start by walking into a room where a ghost on a screen informs you he is the spirit of the original owner of the house and everyone else who has lived there has remained as a ghost and he wants them evicted and then asks you to shoot them with laser guns provided in the buggies. It was a competition within each car and the ghost said each winner will be invited to stay in the house with him forever. Aisling said she wasn’t even going to try because she didn’t want to be stuck in the house. She did end up shooting, though. Holly won the competition in our car, with Meg a close second, and me a distant third, with Aisling not far behind me. I think Aisling might have had the right idea at first, though, because it was hard to appreciate the decorations while looking for green lights to hit.

By the time we finished, it was past five and we had a long drive home, so Beth and I left and drove back to a buffet of leftovers someone had set out, and a leisurely dinner on the upper deck, chatting with Sean, Carole, and Beth’s mom, and listening to the cicadas.

After dinner I showered and put on a new sensor, which we’d just picked up at CVS on the way home, after several days of wrangling with medical bureaucracy to get one. I was mostly happy to have it, because I’d wondered about my blood sugar a lot during the past few days, but it can also be nice to have a break from knowing, especially on vacation. I’m pretty sure ice cream followed by cheese fries would have produced a number I didn’t want to see.

Thursday

This was a laid-back day, at least for me. (Beth cooked for a crowd and had some work drama.) Some of the kids went on an expedition to the climbing wall with Carole and their parents and got their faces painted at a Family Day picnic a local retirement home was having in the park. (Orla said they crashed the party, but Carole knows some people who live there who invited them to join the fun.)

I took a walk past the lake to the park mansion, trying to find gardens I remembered there from previous years, but there was construction, and I didn’t end up finding much planted. On the way back, I stopped at the lodge to work, thinking the internet might be better there, and it was. When I got back to the house, I had lunch and helped Beth pick cilantro leaves off the stem for the cilantro-garlic sauce she was making for dinner.

In the afternoon, while most people were at the pool, I started A Haunting on the Hill, which I’ve had in my to-read pile for a long time (since Christmas maybe?) and put a good dent in it. I haven’t read for such a long stretch in ages, so that was satisfying.

Beth served her signature dinner for big gatherings—gazpacho and salt-crusted new potatoes with cilantro-garlic sauce, served with a cheese plate, baguettes and olives—to an appreciative crowd. Later that evening, Beth’s high school friend Michelle dropped by the cabin while most people were out on an ill-fated stargazing outing (it was cloudy and the park cancelled the event, so they salvaged the expedition by taking a walk instead), and we had a visit with her. As I was falling asleep, I noticed my throat was sore, but I was too sleepy to get up and take a covid test.

Friday

I took a test on waking—negative. I went for a walk that took me by the tennis courts where Beth worked as a teenager, without even knowing I’d find them. Around ten-thirty we set off for Pittsburgh, where we were having a lunch-and-movie date. The movie theater was in Squirrel Hill and there was an abundance of interesting restaurants nearby. We chose a tea house where we got mezze—humus, tzatziki, baba ghanoush, raw vegetables, and pita with cookies (chocolate chip for Beth and ginger-fig for me). I also got a chilled ruby tea. After lunch we had some time to kill so we walked on mix of residential and commercial streets through the neighborhood, which seems vibrant and funky.

The move was Didi, which I recommend if you like coming-of-age stories and you can stand to watch a boy in his early teens make bad decision after bad decision that make you want to reach through the screen and hug him or try to talk some sense into him.

We got back to the cabin and headed to the pool for a quick, last swim. We ran into Michael and Orla and their girls there and learned that Marjorie was the latest of us to fall ill with covid. I was mentally crossing my fingers that we could escape infection in day and a half we had left in Wheeling.

Second Saturday

On checkout day, I took one last walk in the park on a path through the golf course and around the swimming pool, where I saw women doing yoga on floating surfboards. I walked around an old, abandoned frame house near the pool and found a big patch of mint growing behind it and picked a leaf to chew.

We vacated the cabin and regrouped at Carole’s house before people went their separate ways. One group was driving to D.C. in a rented van for a few days of tourism. Another group was staying with Carole in Wheeling for a few days. And we were headed for the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia just outside North’s camp, where we’d pick them up Sunday morning.

We made a pit stop at Blackwater Falls, where we walked down to the wooden stairway to the base of the falls. It felt strange to be there in the summer, as it’s almost always winter when we go, but the falls are beautiful any time of year and it is easier to descend the stairs when they are not covered in ice and snow. From there we got ice cream at the snack bar (usually closed when we’re there) and drove to the canyon overlook. There was a wedding taking place in the field by the overlook and Beth was so charmed by this idea she said she wanted to have a fiftieth anniversary party there in thirteen years. Mark your calendars.

It was almost eight when we got to our AirBnB, which was an apartment in a large Italianate house. There were balconies, a portico, a reproduction of the Venus de Milo, a pool, and deck on the roof of the portico outside our apartment with a view of the mountains. This was an excellent place to watch the sun set and later the stars, including the Big Dipper, shining brighter in the sky than at home.

In between the sunset and the stargazing, we sat with our feet in the pool, watching the crescent moon rise through tree branches and bats swoop over the pool, listening to the cicadas, and smelling the bank of lavender growing behind us. It was quite the romantic place to relax after a longish drive.

Second Sunday

At ten-thirty we arrived at North’s camp and collected them and a fellow counselor who lives in Takoma and packed both kids’ belongings into our car. Rose is the oldest child of Mike, the filmmaker who’s been a mentor to Noah, and Sarah, who used to be the Secretary-Treasurer of Beth’s union.

On excursions to town all summer North had been seeing signs for local attractions they wanted to visit so we hit up a couple of them on the way home. Our first stop was Natural Chimneys Regional Park. It’s just what it sounds like, giant limestone formations that look like chimneys, or (even more so in my opinion) the ruins of a castle. We admired them and then wandered down to the North River, which was full of water again after being dry for much of the summer.

North wanted to have lunch at a restaurant in Harrisonburg that specializes in grilled cheese, but it turned out it was closed on Sundays, so we headed straight to Luray Caverns and had (probably inferior) grilled cheese and soup at their snack bar before descending into the cave for a self-guided tour.

I don’t think we’ve taken North to a cave since they were ten and this was a nice one, with winding paths and majestic formations in a ten-story room and a pool that reflects the stalactites on the ceiling so they are doubled. North said they were tempted to touch the formations. Of course they didn’t, but we did see people disregarding that particular rule because people are idiots.

We listened to a couple of episodes of the Handsome podcast in the car and a couple hours after leaving the caverns we stopped for frozen custard. It was a fun ride home and it was nice to have Rose along for company.

We got home around five and were reunited with Noah and the kittens. I swear Walter grew perceptibly in the nine days we were gone. (The size gap between the two keeps increasing. North says at almost five months, she still looks like a kitten, but he looks like a half-grown cat.) In our absence they both learned how to get up onto Noah’s loft bed, which was a great triumph.

We now have twice the zinnias we had when we left and new blooms on the sunflowers, some of which are now taller than me. Plus, there were two cucumbers big enough to pick and about cup of cherry tomatoes and all the herbs are doing well. So, I think we can safely say Noah succeeded in his primary and secondary goals of keeping the cats and the garden alive.

It will be less than two weeks before we hit the road again, and that time we’ll be leaving our youngest at college, where with luck they will grow and thrive, too.

Update, 8/15: On Wednesday, four days after we got home, we learned that Carole and Santino both had covid, bringing the total to five attendees of the reunion.

18 to 81, or Interesting Times

Posted on July 23, 2024 by Steph

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Our beach party was small this year, just five of us, my family of four plus my mother. And for the first time since Noah was born, there were no minors present. We ranged in age from eighteen to eighty when we arrived and eighteen to eighty-one when we left.

Here’s what our all-adult group did at the beach and just after, while our country experienced nine days of twists and turns. (Ironically, while at the beach Noah and I were reading Terry Pratchett’s Interesting Times, named after the purported Chinese curse—“May you live in interesting times.”) President Biden was in Rehoboth at the same time we were, recovering from covid and contemplating his political future. It makes me a little sad to think about that. It was time for him to go, and he had a mixed record, but he did a lot of good, and it must have been hard.

Friday and Saturday: Getting There

North and I made it down to the beach by 5:15 p.m. on Saturday. It had been a long journey. Beth had left at 6 a.m. the previous morning to pick them up at camp, deliver them to a medical appointment and then home, where we were all reunited after almost two weeks, and had a dinner of homemade pizza. North always comes home from camp exhausted because they need to get up early and stay up late doing bed checks on campers, so they bowed out of meeting my mom at the airport. Shortly after dinner, though, Beth, Noah and I drove out to pick up my mom at National and dropped her off at her hotel in Silver Spring.

By mid-morning we were at her hotel again to fetch her and begin our drive to Rehoboth Beach. It took about six hours, with stops. There was almost no traffic at the bridge; in fact, most of the traffic seemed to be going the other way, which prompted my mom to tell the story of the time (when my sister and I were teens) when we were driving to the Outer Banks in heavy rain and all the traffic was going the other way and it turned out that it was because the storm was a hurricane and the islands were evacuating. There’s more to this story, involving my stepfather almost getting arrested for breaking into the closed realty’s office for the keys to our house. It’s a family favorite.

But while it was raining on and off during this drive, it was not a hurricane, and the only hardship we experienced was agonizingly slow traffic at the very end. We got to the house by 4:30. It has an interesting feature which is stone from an old lighthouse that collapsed in the 1920s is set in the brickwork of the chimney and around the front door.

Once the food was unpacked and linens distributed to all the bedrooms and bathrooms, North and I took a rainy walk to the beach. We only had one umbrella between us, and we tried to share but North ended up getting soaking wet. We were both happy to get our feet in the sand and surf, though, and to breathe sea air.

Meanwhile, Beth was doing a quick grocery shop for dinner and breakfast the next day. North and I made dinner—veggie burgers and dogs, baked beans, corn on the cob, sliced tomatoes, and watermelon. This was the day Trump was shot at the Republican convention. This was distressing news. I don’t want to live in a country where presidential elections are marked by violence against anyone, even him. (Before we left the beach, Noah reports, there were already t-shirts with the image of him with his fist up in the t-shirt shops. I missed that.)

But we were on vacation, so all five of us headed for the boardwalk, where we got frozen custard. The boardwalk was hopping, as befits a Saturday night in July, but I’d thought the rain—which had mostly stopped—might have deterred people. It was a pleasant night, though, not too hot, and we saw a rainbow on the way there. I spotted it first in a puddle and had a hard time finding it in the sky, but standing in the middle of the street, we found it, big but faint. It was easier to see in the reflection than in the sky. This seemed like it might be a good metaphor, but I’m not sure for what. Maya would probably know.

Sunday: Settling In

Sunday morning Beth and Mom did the big grocery shopping, North did a couple online modules they had to complete for school about alcohol and hazing—their Internet connection is not good at camp and they don’t have much time anyway—and I made and received calls from the realty about the fact that the house did not have hot water or any frying pans, which Noah needed to cook dinner. Once both of those problems were resolved with visits from the gas company and a realtor bearing pans, and once North had put together a potential class schedule for the fall semester and met with their advisor online, North and I went to the beach.

We got there about 2:30 and had a long swim, about an hour and half. The water was cold getting in, but pleasant once we got used to it and the waves were adequate. We saw pelicans and osprey catching fish and had a nice talk. In my opinion, the ocean is one of the best places to chat with someone. After our swim, North headed up to the house and I went to one of the boardwalk pavilions to read my book club book (The Great Mistake, a 1940s cozy mystery) in the shade for about an hour until my mom showed up and we went to sit on the sand together. She’d had something of an odyssey buying a beach chair and finding our meeting spot, but we had almost an hour to sit on the sand, watching the waves and talking. The beach is also an excellent place to talk.

Noah made dinner that night—veggie crab cakes made of chickpeas, artichokes, and hearts of palm. Beth loves these and had asked him to make them at the beach. They are quite tasty. After dinner, we watched Fancy Dance, which is very good, but heavy.

Monday: 37

Monday was Beth’s and my thirty-seventh anniversary. This is the summer anniversary, the one that commemorates our first kiss. We decided that rather than exchange gifts we’d just spend the whole day together, doing an activity of her choice in the morning and mine in the afternoon, and then we’d go to dinner.

Beth chose kayaking. We rented kayaks and explored Assawoman Bay. We saw all kinds of wildlife—egrets, geese, herons, dragonflies, a horseshoe crab, jellyfish, and mussels along the banks of an inlet. We were on the water for almost two hours. The day was sunny and warm but not oppressively hot, plus I was wet from the waist down from the water dripping off the paddles and that cooled me down. I haven’t been kayaking with Beth in a couple years—she goes frequently, so that was pleasant.

We returned to the house for lunch—Mom and the kids had gone out for Mexican, but they returned shortly after we finished eating. Our next stop was an ice cream place we’d never tried—it’s in one of the little alleys off Rehoboth Ave. I got black raspberry and Beth got cappuccino. I saw a gnome with popsicles on its hat there and photographed it for Nicole, who collects gnomes. It turned out to be the first in a series of vacation gnome pictures I sent her.

From there we went to the beach, where we rented chairs and an umbrella. This is something we don’t often do, so it felt luxurious. We read for about an hour and then stood in the surf for a while and then Beth went back to her chair while I had a brief swim before returning to our rented shade to watch the ocean.

I was people-watching, too. I spotted a young man in the surf with a glucose monitor on his arm. I thought—in his twenties and fit, probably type 1, but you never know. When he got out, he walked right by me and I wondered if he noticed my monitor and thought—in her fifties and plump, probably type 2, but you never know.

We went back to the house and showered for dinner. We went out for tapas and ordered a feast—a watermelon and berry salad on arugula, a cheese plate, ratatouille, tortilla Española, and two desserts to split—olive oil cake with berries, and a flourless chocolate torte. Everything was excellent. The waiter put a candle in the olive oil cake because it was our anniversary, which caused someone at the next table to wish me a happy birthday.

We went and sat on a bench on the boardwalk and almost immediately spotted dolphins. They weren’t going in a straight line north or south as they usually do, but circling and Beth surmised they were feeding on a school of fish. We watched them for at least twenty minutes and then took a walk on the beach in the sunset. I saw dolphins almost every day we were at the beach, but this was something else. It was a magical way to end the day, but the best part was just having a whole day devoted to spending time with each other.

And it so happened that the card I got Beth had dolphins on it. She got me one that said, “Let’s get old and weird together.” Apparently, North was with her when she bought it and opined quite firmly, “That’s the one.”

Tuesday and Wednesday: Being There

We went out to breakfast at Egg on Tuesday morning. Noah and I have worked out a system for summer breakfasts at this restaurant. I eat something high in protein at home before we leave, then we each order the lemon-blueberry crepes, and I eat half of mine and give the rest to him. I get a meal that doesn’t cause my blood sugar to spike or leave me feeling deprived, and he gets a plate and a half of crepes, which are one of his favorite foods.

Leaving the restaurant, we all strolled through the farmers’ market that’s right across the street and bought tomatoes and cucumbers for the gazpacho that Beth was making that night and peaches and blackberries. At a honey stand, I found a yellow and black striped gnome with a beehive in one hand a bee in the other and I took its picture for Nicole.

From there North and I continued down Rehoboth Ave where we went to BrowseAbout to get a birthday card for my mom. North browsed but did not buy anything. Next, we went to Candy Kitchen where I got taffy for the neighbors who were watering our garden in our absence, fudge for the house, sea salt caramels for myself, green apple army man gummies for North (eating them was an anti-militaristic statement, they assured me), and some dark chocolate-salted caramel-covered almonds for Beth, who had recently picked out a similar confection for herself at another store, put it down, and failed to bring it to the cash register.

Beth, North, and I went to the beach in the mid-afternoon, and the waves were better than average, the best of the trip so far. North and I swam and talked, but I also spent some time sitting with Beth and reading my mystery.

Beth left the beach first because it was her cooking night. Her beach meal is set—every year she makes gazpacho and salt-crusted new potatoes with cilantro-garlic sauce, served with Spanish cheeses, baguettes and olives. North made a pitcher of watermelon agua fresca to go with it. The meal was superlative, as always.

Mom was in the mood for ice cream afterward and it didn’t take much convincing to get everyone to the boardwalk. North and I stayed to ride the Haunted Mansion at Funland, which I love beyond reason, even though (or perhaps because) I have it practically memorized. The only surprise is whether it will take the route that goes across a balcony that gives you a brief glimpse of the beach and boardwalk and makes your car visible to passersby. We always hope for that and this time it happened.

One thing I do not love beyond reason is the idea of going to a water park at the beach. I am fine with water parks in their proper place, which is within amusement parks on a hot summer day, but if I am hot at the beach, I want to be in the ocean. So, I did not go to Jungle Jim’s with Beth, Noah, and North Wednesday morning.

While they were gone, Mom and I went out to lunch at our usual lunch place, O’Bies by the Sea. The food is fine, and it has an ocean view. It’s where I often indulge in my once yearly departure from vegetarianism, with a plate of steamed clams. I paired it with devilled eggs with Old Bay, and a berry cup. Mom got a crab cake sandwich.

I was alone at the beach that afternoon and I swam, walked the almost the length of the boardwalk twice, and read.

Mom cooked dinner that night. She made portobello mushrooms stuffed with kale and cheese, which were quite good. North asked what we wanted to do after dinner and I said something “undemanding” because I was worn out, so we ended up watching Mama Mia, which fit the bill.

Thursday: 81

In the morning Beth and North went kayaking in Rehoboth Bay. North said they explored a marshy area and got a little lost in its waterways and they saw herons, egrets, mussels, and many fiddler crabs. North found their asymmetric claws amusing.

While they were gone, Mom and Noah and I took a walk down to the boardwalk and sat in one of the pavilions. It was quite pleasant there, with a nice breeze and view of the dunes. We walked down to the beach briefly to look for dolphins because Mom hadn’t seen any yet, but none were in evidence.

We all got back to the house around the same time and ate lunch. Then Beth and I went to the bakery to pick up my mom’s birthday cake. It had pink and purple roses in the frosting, and she said it was almost to pretty to cut, but we did. I’d picked up some candles to go with it because I thought she would like their pastel colors and did not notice until Beth told me that they were the re-lighting kind. I warned Mom ahead of time and she said I should have surprised her with them. They not only re-lit themselves after she blew them out, but they threw off sparks, so there was a surprise after all.

In the afternoon, North and Noah went to Funland and Beth and I went to the beach. Rain had been threatening so I swam right away. The water was calm, probably because it was low tide, as I heard a man mansplaining to his companion. (Did you know there is one high and low tide each day and night and that they are not at exactly the same time every day?) I got out and read a few chapters of my book while North, who had just joined us, swam, and then I got in with them and swam again. The waves were a little bigger. Perhaps the tide had changed. I don’t know. Clearly, only a select few understand tides.

We went out for Japanese to celebrate Mom’s birthday. It’s a very pretty restaurant full of greenery, strung with fairy lights, and crisscrossed with koi ponds inside and out. (I would have liked to eat on the roof, but there were no tables available there.) We got some of our favorites—the kids got noodle dishes, we had edamame with Old Bay, seaweed salad, vegetable dumplings, and vegetable tempura. Beth got sushi and Mom got seafood pasta. Afterward we got ice cream on the boardwalk, having lucked into an excellent parking space.

North had been trying to get a root beer float since the water park, where they had been disappointed that it had been taken off the menu. They’d tried again that same day at another place that was supposed to carry them but had been out of root beer that day. We were returning to that establishment but, sadly, they were still out of root beer. North had to settle for coke float, their second one in two days. Beth drove Mom and Noah home and North and I walked home along the boardwalk in a fine, refreshing drizzle.

Friday and Saturday: The Last Hurray

With so much beach-going and other fun, I had been having a hard time keeping my blog up to date, so Friday morning I went to Café A-Go-Go to have a half-sweet Mexican mocha and a third of a piece of crumb cake and to pound the blog out before we returned home the next day and got buried in all those urgent things you have to do when you get home from a trip. Beth and North came with me and got their own drinks/treats, plus the other two-thirds of the crumb cake, and they sat outside so as not to disturb me. (When I asked my mom and Noah if they wanted to come and not talk to me, Noah said, “No thank you” and my mom seemed puzzled by why I was going in the first place instead of writing at the house or what she would do there.)

That afternoon everyone but Noah went to the beach. North and I swam in some very respectable waves, taking a brief break in the middle to reapply sunblock, rest, and eat cherries and pistachios. When the lifeguards blew the five o’clock whistle, we got out and headed back to the house for pre-dinner showers.

Dinner was mozzarella sticks, pizza, spinach stromboli, and gelato at Grotto. (Mom went around the corner to get a frozen custard.) The evening was mild and pleasant, after some warm and humid weather earlier in the week. Mom said festive umbrellas and strings of lights make every outdoor space more inviting and it does seem to be true. And when I went inside to use the restroom, I spied a pair of gnomes by the front door.

When dinner was finished all went around the table and said what our favorite part of the week had been, at Mom’s request. Noah wondered if he was allowed to say the water park (yes), Beth and I chose our anniversary, Mom liked her birthday dinner at the Japanese restaurant (“my favorite restaurant in Rehoboth”) and North chose swimming in the big waves that day. North had skipped dessert at Grotto because they wanted to try one more time to find a root beer float and this time, by trying a new store, they had success.

We got home and began packing. I assessed the contents of the fridge, tossing a few things and making decisions about what I’d throw out in the morning if no one ate it for breakfast and there wasn’t enough room in the cooler. (This is the most stressful part about leaving a rental house for me so it helps to think about it ahead of time.) Noah pitched in by eating a slice of birthday cake and some fudge on top of gelato. “I am doing my duty,” he said solemnly.

The next morning the kids had birthday cake for breakfast (“I do what I must,” Noah commented.) While we were packing and carrying things out to the breezeway in front of the driveway, an orange cat appeared and made the rounds, getting people to pet him.

After we vacated the house, we split into three groups. North and I went to the beach, Mom and Noah went to read in a boardwalk pavilion, and Beth returned the keys and went to read in a coffeehouse. Much to our surprise, the orange cat followed us when we left the house, even crossing a busy street. A man witnessed this, asked if it was our cat and when we said no, he scooped it up. North surmised he was going to take it to a vet to see if it was microchipped, because it was acting lost.

North and I had a nice final swim. When we got out of the water we saw a big pod of dolphins, including some that were jumping high enough out of the water that I saw their tails, but not their noses. It was the first time that week North and Mom (whom we fetched from the pavilion) saw any dolphins, so they were excited. Noah stayed in the pavilion to watch our stuff and by the time he got down there with his camera, they were gone.

We all met up for lunch. North got a sandwich at Green Man, Noah got fries at Thrashers, I got orangeades, and we brought them to supplement our meal at the crepe stand where we always have our last lunch on summer beach trips.

We had a few errands to do in town—a last run to Candy Kitchen, a last ice cream, a photo op at O’Bies by the Sea. Beth and I once took a picture there with my sister, who also went to Oberlin and Beth had the idea to take a new picture with our newest Obie.

Next we dropped by the realty to get the keys back because my mom had left a charger in the house, but the cleaners had taken it away, and when we checked back at the realty later (after a visit to the Crocs outlet on the highway) it wasn’t back yet, so we gave up on it and drove out of town, but right after a stop for gas, the realtor called and said it had finally been returned. We were not far away at this point, but I failed to consider that on a summer Saturday afternoon beach traffic is mostly going into town, not out, so it took much longer to get back than it had to get to the gas station in the first place. We weren’t driving away from the beach for good until 4:30.

After that we made decent time, but we got home later than we expected. Mom and the kids and I had dinner at Cava in Silver Spring, while Beth took the car home to unload it and then she came back and took Mom to her hotel. When we got back to the house, we were reunited with the kittens, and I was happy to see our first sunflower had bloomed in our absence. North and I tackled the first of what would be four loads of laundry so they could have all their clothes clean to take to camp and we fell into bed.

Sunday: Goodbyes

The next morning, we dropped North off at the camp bus stop where they would check campers onto the bus before boarding it themselves. Beth and I went to the farmers’ market from there and came home with tomatoes and a bounty of summer fruit (apricots, blueberries, peaches, and plums). Then she took me to Silver Spring, where Mom and I met up, wandered through a small street festival, listened to some music, and got Lebanese for lunch, while Beth finished the grocery shopping.

Back at home, Mom met the kittens, and took in the changes we’ve made to the house since she was last here. While Beth was out taking a walk, and Mom, Noah and I were chatting in the living room he got a notice on his watch that President Biden had dropped out of the race, so we turned on the television to learn more. It was a small relief, as I think Vice President Harris is in better shape to govern, though I don’t know whether she’s better positioned to win—and this question is causing me a lot of anxiety. At the very least, she’s not less likely to win. Beth came home while we were watching tv (also alerted to the news) because she had to work on a press release. It wasn’t the first time she had to work during this unprecedented week in American history. She is the communications director of her union so when something big needs to be communicated, it falls to her.

Mom and I took a little walk around the neighborhood, ending up at a playground where we reminisced about taking the kids when they were little. Later that afternoon, we took her to the airport and our visit was over. I’m hoping next summer my sister, brother-in-law, and niece will come to the beach and then we’ll be 12 to 82. Also, less interesting current events during a week of a Harris presidency would be fine by me.

All Roads Lead to Oberlin

Posted on April 10, 2024 by Steph

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Thursday

Thursday morning North and I were in the kitchen making our breakfasts and I mentioned we’d be hitting the road soon, and asked “And where will that road go?”

“To Oberlin,” North answered.

“And why is that?” I asked.

“Because all roads lead to Oberlin,” North said, right on cue.

A little while later, having missed this exchange, Beth came back from her morning walk and said she supposed she wouldn’t need to use Siri to navigate because “…all roads lead to Oberlin.” In case you hadn’t guessed, this was the name of the accepted students’ day at Oberlin. It’s a slogan they’ve been using since we attended Oberlin in the mid-to-late 1980s and who knows how long before that?

It was a longer journey than we anticipated. The weather slowed us down—as we crossed Pennsylvania (this is the bulk of the drive) there was almost every kind of precipitation—rain, snow, sleet, hail, even graupel. The crazy thing was that in between, there would be bright, sunny spells. We also stopped a lot—for walking, restroom, and meal breaks, and Beth had to stop and work on an unexpected work project for a total of two hours, about half of that time in a Starbucks, the rest in parking lots, where I paced to get some steps. We left Takoma Park around 9:30 a.m. and didn’t arrive at our AirBnB in Oberlin until 9:30 p.m. We passed the time with a diverting mystery audiobook, so it didn’t seem that long.

The AirBnB was the same one where we stayed almost six years ago when Noah visited Oberlin as a prospective. I had a deeply evocative memory of lingering on the back porch on a cool summer morning watching the rain and trying to imagine him in college while he slept in. North would not have that opportunity, as the admitted students’ schedule was jam-packed. (Noah didn’t end up applying to Oberlin so we never did an admitted students’ event there with him.)

Friday

At eight a.m. Beth took North to pick up some coffee and a bagel at the Slow Train Café and then to registration, where the two of them met Oberlin’s mascot, an albino squirrel. (You occasionally see these, minus the Birkenstocks, on campus.) I stayed at the house to eat breakfast because we didn’t have any joint events with North until late morning. They were going from registration to sit in on a Psychology class, and then to a session for students interested in the pre-law program and other preprofessional majors. One of the features of the day was that they split up the kids from the parents more than at Johnson and Wales or St. Mary’s. As a result, North spent more time talking to current and prospective students than at the other schools and we think that gave them a better sense of the vibe of the place. “I can see myself here,” they said later in the day. It was also a softer sell. There were no announcements about where to go if you wanted to commit on the spot (at St. Mary’s they have a gong they ring when someone does).

Beth came back to the house, and we hung out until it was time to meet North for the President’s address in the lovely Finney Chapel. North said they’d found talking to the pre-law administrator informative and they enjoyed their class, which was in the same building I used to have psych classes (it was one of my two minors). From there, we were separated again. North had lunch at a dining hall while Beth and I ate with other parents and staff in a hotel. All day, whenever we told people in addition to being the parents of a prospective, we were also alumni, they were surprised and kind of delighted. The food, at least the vegetarian option, was less delightful. I needed to go back to the car to get some cheese and a hard-boiled egg to supplement it because it had almost no protein and I need some at every meal to keep my blood sugar regulated.

We met up with North in the lobby of the hotel where we left for a campus tour. North had requested a slower-paced one so it was a private tour. I kind of miss hearing other people’s questions when it’s just us and a guide, but she happened to be interested in law and psychology, just like North, so they bonded over that and I always enjoy walking around Oberlin’s beautiful campus. Every now and then I would point out places of interest to North.

Afterward we stopped at the biggest classroom building on campus because North wanted to rest on a bench for a bit. Beth perused a directory and saw that an English professor we’d both had and another one I’d had at Oberlin were still there. It was kind of wild to think North could take a class from one of my old professors, just like Allison‘s daughter does. (Hi, Allison!).Next we went to drop-in hours at Disability Services where we had a chat with a staff member about the kinds of accommodations North might be able to get for migraines.

And from there, it was off to a session about the practicing arts at Oberlin (all but music because there’s a whole conservatory for that). We listened to art, creative writing, dance, film, and theater professors and staff talk about their departments and then split off for a tour with the Managing Director for Theater, Opera, and Dance. We saw multiple theaters including a main stage and black box theater, backstage space, rehearsal spaces, the costume shop, and scenery shop. The facilities are extensive, impressive, and recently renovated. They put on ten major plays a year, plus smaller shows, not to mention dance and opera performances. It seems like quite a vibrant program. North is hoping to act in college and is thinking of minoring in theater.

The director had so much to say that the session ran over, but it didn’t really matter because our next stop was flexible. It was separate receptions, one for students and one for parents. Beth and I might have skipped this, as we’re not big on socializing with strangers, but we were both hungry, and we figured there would be food, so we went and snacked on crudites, cheese, chips with guacamole, and a frosted cookie in the shape of a white squirrel that we split. We were not entirely anti-social and did talk to the father of a prospective and an admissions staff member.

From there we went to have dinner at a dining co-op. Student-run housing and dining co-ops were one of the most important aspects of my time at Oberlin. I ate in co-ops all seven semesters I was on campus and lived in them five semesters. There’s something very empowering and educational about being part of a group endeavor like that. Over the years, I had jobs that ranged from doing KP, serving as a waiter, cooking, cleaning bathrooms, and acting as recycling coordinator for my house and a representative on the board. I met a lot of my friends in co-ops and had a lot of fun. I must have sold it well because North says they will definitely live in a co-op if they go to Oberlin. (The picture of North is outside Harkness, with the OSCA twin pine logo behind them.)

I never lived in Harkness, a vegetarian co-op, but I had a close friend who did, and I ate there one Winter Term when my regular dining co-op had closed for the month, so it was a familiar space. It really looks very much like it did in the 80s, including the industrial kitchen, where we went to bus our dishes after dinner.

We sat at a different table from North, so they could mingle more freely, and we listened to current students and prospective students at our table talk about things like if there’s “a good party scene” at Oberlin. (The answer was it depends a lot on what you mean by that.) We had salad, pizza that North later said tasted a lot like the homemade pizza we make every other Friday, and brownies.

It would have been nice to linger in Oberlin, but we had three-and-a-half-hour drive ahead of us because we were staying with Beth’s mom in Wheeling that night. Beth would be spending the week in West Virginia, and North and I would fly home from Pittsburgh the next day.

Saturday and Beyond

Our flight wasn’t until mid-afternoon, so we had time for a visit to a nearby coffeeshop, a walk around the neighborhood, and a visit with Beth’s aunt Carole. That morning in Wheeling, North declined their offer from Johnson and Wales, so it’s down to Saint Mary’s and Oberlin.

We came home to piles of clean, folded laundry on my bed and Noah making roasted cauliflower with yogurt sauce for dinner. Almost immediately, I checked the porch ledge to see how the mourning dove chicks were doing. I don’t think I’ve mentioned them this year, but there’s a nest there every spring. Before we left, we’d gotten to the nerve-wracking part where the parents start to leave the babies alone, first occasionally, then for longer and longer periods. They do not always survive this. But the babies were alive and well and bigger than the last time I’d seen them. Over the course of the next few days, I saw the parents less and less and one of the chicks was creeping closer to the edge of the ledge, craning its neck to peer down, and wiggling all over. Later one of them seemed to be trying to open its wings. And this morning, when I went out to get the newspaper, one of them was perched on the wicker chair. I thought the other one was gone, but later I saw it on the porch floor. They spent the morning moving around the porch until one of them took off. The other one is still there as I write, but I doubt it will be there for long. Talk about symbolism. That’s a bit heavy-handed, universe.

North went to school Monday and Tuesday, and they have the day off today because it’s the day between third and fourth quarter. That drove home how little of North’s time in high school is left (six and a half weeks because the seniors get out three weeks before everyone else). It started with covid and virtual school, and if you’ve been reading here a while you know all the twists and turns there have been along the way. I feel grateful they are where they are today, at a fork in the road, with each path leading to a good place.

Update: Thursday, 4/11

All yesterday afternoon I kept peeking out at the remaining chick. I saw it taking little flights all over the porch and in the early evening, both parents came back to the ledge and called to it, and they all met on the porch floor and the adults fed it. The next time I checked, all four birds were gone, and I haven’t seen them since.

That night in a video call with Beth, who’s still in Wheeling, North told us they’d chosen Oberlin.

48 Hours

Posted on February 27, 2024 by Steph

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Friday Afternoon and Evening

It was about 3:30 Friday afternoon when we left the house for the second time. We’d swung by the co-op to get some groceries for our weekend getaway to Ocean City, and while we were there, we’d picked up a few staples Noah wanted and dropped them back at the house before hitting the road. I felt light-hearted and happy. Beth and I were embarking on our first full weekend alone in twelve years. (Our last overnight was in Pittsburgh in 2016 during a visit to Beth’s family in Wheeling.)

It took four hours to drive to Ocean City, mainly because there was a surprising amount of traffic for a random weekend in February, mostly between Annapolis and the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. There were some compensations, however. Beth had been wanting an Oreo Shamrock Shake since we saw them advertised during the trip to Providence and we stopped at McDonald’s and got one. Also, around Easton there was a beautiful sunset that stained the sky with oranges, reds, and purples. We were driving over the Choptank River around six, near the tail end of it, and that was a gorgeous sight.

When we got to Ocean City, we drove straight to the pizzeria we’d chosen for dinner. It was late and we were ready for dinner, so it was a pleasant surprise that service was remarkably fast. We were eating our fried mozzarella and mushroom and spinach white pizza within fifteen minutes of setting foot in the place. It was quite festive in there, too, all decked out with sparkly green St. Patrick’s Day decorations.

After we ate, we went to the condo where were staying. It was on the eleventh floor of one of those classic Ocean City high rises, with two glassed-in sun porches, one in front with an ocean view and one in back with a bay view.

After unpacking a bit, I stood on the front sun porch, looking down at the ocean and trying to decide if it was worth going back down eleven floors for a quick stroll on the beach when I already had a very nice view of it. Go ahead and guess what I decided. Yes, that’s right, I went.

Saturday

Saturday was the nicest day I can remember having in a long time. Beth happened to get up to go to the bathroom as the sun was rising and when she opened the bedroom door, red light poured into the room. A few minutes later I stumbled out to see the dramatic sunrise from living room, though I was too sleepy to think to take a picture of it, and then I went back to bed.

About an hour and a half later, I had breakfast on the sun porch, watching the waves as I ate my eggs, veggie sausage, and oatmeal with bananas and walnuts. Rain was predicted in the morning, but there was just a little drizzle streaking the porch windows before we set out on our day’s adventures.

We drove to Berlin, where we got coffee (me) and hot chocolate (Beth) at a café. For Valentine’s Day I’d promised to take her out for hot chocolate and ice cream (two of her favorite treats) on this trip and I’d researched the best places to get each in the greater Ocean City area and gave her several options. She chose this one because it has dark hot chocolate. She was not disappointed.

From there we went to the always lovely Assateague Island National Seashore. We started off with a walk on the beach. There were gulls in the sky, sandpipers on the sand, and surfers in the water. We walked all three trails (forest, dunes, and marsh). We saw a blue heron in the water, and a pair of bald eagles in a tree. We speculated that they were checking it out as a prospective site for a nest. We didn’t see any of the famed wild horses on the trails, but we saw some by the side of a parking lot, by the side of the road, or in the case of one horse, in the middle of the road between two lanes of traffic. As we got close, I could see someone in one car had rolled down her window and was petting its nose. You are not supposed to do that because they are wild horses, but people will take stupid chances sometimes.

We’d had a long ramble in the park, and we’d worked up an appetite for lunch. We went back to Berlin, where we ate at a farm-to-table restaurant run by the same person who used to run one of our favorite restaurants in College Park (when I was in grad school there) and later in Rehoboth. It was a long wait to be seated, but worth it. I got a vegetarian cheesesteak with mushrooms and Beth got an eggplant sandwich and they were both very good. We ate on a pretty enclosed porch.

After lunch we walked around downtown Berlin and browsed in various shops. We bought some aged Gouda, sour cherry jam, and dark chocolate. It turned out the ice cream parlor Beth had selected was closed for the season—I tried to check for that, but not all the websites were up to date—so we drove back to Ocean City and got hot fudge sundaes at Dumser’s Dairyland, which was her second choice. We sat at the counter and admired the displays of antique ice cream dishes in different colors of glass and metal. I don’t usually eat maraschino cherries because they’re not my favorite, but on the drive to Ocean City the day before we’d listened to an episode of Poetry Unbound (one of my favorite podcasts) that featured such a joyous ode to the bright red preserved fruits, that I felt I had to this once.

By this time, it was late afternoon, and we were ready to go back to the condo and relax. I read for a while on the sun porch. That night we watched The High Note on the couch where we ate the prepared food that we’d bought at the co-op on our way out of town. (I had a spinach and cheese pie and falafel.)

Sunday Morning and Afternoon

In the morning, I jokingly told Beth I had enough of my diabetes medications to stay another day. (I always travel with extra just in case I get stuck somewhere) and she noted that she could work from anywhere. In fact, she had to work a little that morning because a New York Times story about organizing at Microsoft came out and as the Communications Director of her union, she’s always on call to communicate with the members about things like that, vacation or no.

But we did not stay. Before leaving we took separate walks. Mine was on the short side. I walked about six blocks north on the beach (from 114^th St. to 120^th St.) and then back along the path that runs through the dunes parallel to the ocean and connects all the beach access paths. It was cold, in the low thirties, with ice on the puddles in the condo parking lot, but it was sunny, so after walking I was warm enough to sit in the sand for a little while in front of our building and watch the waves before going back upstairs to finish packing.

We left the building at ten and found an open Candy Kitchen—some were closed for the season—where we bought candy for the kids (and some not for them). We picked gummy mermaid tails for North because they are fond of gummy candy, and this was a novel shape. For Noah we got chocolate-covered pretzels covered with mini–Reese’s Pieces. Right before Valentine’s Day I’d seen chocolate-covered pretzels in a banner on the Nuts.com website marked “For Her,” and as this is one of his favorite confections, we’d been teasing him about that. Seriously, though, why do pretzels need to be gendered? In case you were curious, the featured “For Him” product was a box of mixed nuts. Have you ever heard anything so ridiculous?

Next, we headed to the Ocean City boardwalk where we took another stroll. Most everything except t-shirt shops was closed, but it was fun to walk there on a pretty day and people watch and look at the stilled roller coasters and Ferris Wheel and the shark statue emerging from the wall of Ripley’s Believe It or Not and the dinosaur skeleton statue on the beach, and the front of the shuttered haunted house and, and the very eclectically decorated façade of the Ocean Gallery, and of course, the ocean. I only thought a little about the time we lost the kids on this boardwalk (but I will probably always associate it with that terrifying day). I went and got my boots (and my socks) wet and said goodbye to the Atlantic until summer and then around 11:30, we got in the car to drive home.

We made a pit stop in Cambridge, first going to a café where we got coffee and cake—I recommend their limoncello-olive oil cake and Beth recommends the chocolate-pistachio cake. We took the food to the Choptank River Lighthouse grounds where we had a picnic lunch of dinner leftovers, a mandarin, and cake. Then we strolled over to the lighthouse. It’s a replica (built in 2012) of a classic Chesapeake style lighthouse that used to be on the river nearby. It was closed for the off-season so we couldn’t go up to the top or visit the museum, but I like lighthouses, so it was a scenic place to eat lunch. While we were eating on a bench by the water, I listened to a couple have an extended argument about the composition of a photograph of the lighthouse one of them was taking. It’s interesting what other people will fight about sometimes.

We got home at 3:35, almost exactly forty-eight hours after we left. We were reunited with our offspring, who survived the weekend without us, and gave them their candy. I told Noah that his pretzels were called “Peanut Butter Explosion,” and I thought that sounded sufficiently macho for him to eat them. He laughed and then when he bit into one and some of the candies fell off onto the kitchen floor, North said, “I can hear the explosion.”

It was good to see them again, but it was also good to get away just the two of us. We will be empty nesters someday not so far in the future, so there should be an opportunity to do it again before another twelve years goes by.

Rhode to College

Posted on February 18, 2024 by Steph

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Thursday

On the Thursday the before President’s Day weekend we made a six-state, nine-hour-fifteen-minute-with-frequent-stops-drive to Providence to attended Accepted Students Day at Johnson and Wales University.

I took this picture of a chicken statue outside a convenience store near the Maryland/Delaware border, thinking I’d made a Facebook album of whimsical roadside statuary, but there was no more. It was around this point in the trip that we started seeing scattered patches of snow on the ground. By Connecticut, there was an even layer of it everywhere that hadn’t been plowed. I asked Beth if she was enjoying the snowy landscapes and she said, “Yes!” enthusiastically.

Somewhere in New Jersey we got a text from Noah, informing us the job he’d interviewed for was his if he wants it. It’s a six-month, full-time junior editor position, starting in early May, at a video production company where he did some gig work back in October. He’s waiting to see the contract, which has some key details (like salary) he didn’t get over the phone, but we were all very happy to hear the news, as his job search has been proceeding slowly.

When we crossed the Rhode Island state line we started seeing signs that read, “Don’t Litter Our Clean Rhodes.” I was taken with those. There was also one that warned motorists of “Rhode work.” You have to admire their commitment to the bit.

We arrived at our AirBnB just before 6:30, ordered Chinese, and watched an episode of Gilmore Girls. Our progress through this show has slowed considerably in the six months Noah’s been home because it’s a Beth-Steph-and-North show and we aren’t watching television in that configuration much these days, so it was nice to get in an episode. We are near the end of season five (of seven) and we started it when North was fourteen, so our goal of finishing it before they leave for college isn’t seeming very achievable, especially since they recently accepted a camp counselor job at a Girl Scout camp this summer, which will have them away from home from early June to mid-August. Everything’s coming up employment for the Lovelady-Allen offspring.

Friday

Accepted Students Day events didn’t start until 11:30, so the next morning we all took a mid-morning walk to a neighborhood bakery, where we got coffee, hot chocolate, olive bread with cream cheese, and a ginger scone. I immediately started plotting to return to try the lemon cake I half-wished I’d ordered instead of the scone (which is no shade on the scone, which was very good).

The event started at a hotel in downtown Providence. We walked past a group of enthusiastic cheerleaders and picked up information packets and stood in line to get our pictures taken with balloons that read “2028” and signs that read “JWU” and “JWU Mom.” There was only one of those, so Beth and I had to share. (Beth joked she was going to write “a sternly worded email” admonishing the school for the lack of signs for non-binary parents.) Someone in a Wildcat Willy costume was circulating and giving people high fives. North said, “I got an email from him, saying I might see him here.” North then opined he had “too many muscles and too many teeth.”

After the preliminaries, there was a luncheon in the ballroom. While we ate, we listened to the President of the University, the Director of Admissions, and an alumni speak. The administrators sounded like administrators at any school, but the alum was a business major who was active in Republican politics, trying to “modernize the party.” North admitted later this choice “got in my head.” They knew it wasn’t a lefty liberal arts college, but they did wonder why a mainstream school would select someone with strong beliefs on either side of the political divide to represent it. We were also curious what it would mean to modernize the Republican party. Would that mean arresting its slide toward authoritarianism or accelerating it? So, that was distracting.

Appropriately for a university with a famous culinary school, the food was much better than usual for this kind of event (though I don’t believe it was student-made, except for some chocolates on the table). There was salad and rolls, and the vegetarian entrée was risotto with asparagus, artichokes, green beans, mushrooms, and sun-dried tomatoes. Sadly, I had to leave about two-thirds of the meltingly soft rice on the plate (thanks, diabetes), but I ate half a roll and all the chocolate cake with raspberries and whipped cream. So now you know where my priorities lie. Beth advised North, “I like the school that gives you chocolate cake.”

Next, we attended sessions on Residential Life and Dining Services, New Student Orientation, and a Q&A panel of current students. Most of the questions for the students focused on student clubs and campus recreational facilities. There was a table with popcorn and quite a spread of desserts (multiples kinds of cake, brownies, cookies, etc.) at this event, but it was too close to lunch for me to partake. I did tuck a packet of peanut butter protein balls into my coat pocket for later.

Since we had toured the Harborside campus last spring, we toured the downtown campus. This would be where North’s academic classes would be (the culinary ones are at Harborside) and where the library, bookstore, and administrative buildings are.

The student ambassadors were very friendly and attentive. One noticed North’s crutch as we were on our way to one of the sessions and directed us to a more accessible entrance to the auditorium. Another saw we were falling behind our tour group and offered to take us around on our own private tour. It seemed like a good sign for getting accommodations should North need any and personal attention in general.

Oddly, though, we couldn’t get much information about the honors program. North recently got an invitation to apply, but details about it are scarce online and neither the tour guide nor a staff person at the orientation session was able to say much about it. It was very different from Towson, where we attended a whole panel about their honors college last spring. (North got into that program, which I may not have mentioned because Towson is relatively low on their list.)

By this time, it was almost five, and we were all tired. We perused the menu of a nearby pizza place where we got pizza last spring, ordered from the hotel lobby, and returned to our AirBnB. Friday is movie night for us, and North thought we should watch something Noah wouldn’t like. We watched Family Switch and I have to say I think it fit the bill. Speaking of their brother, North observed, “He doesn’t know how to appreciate a good bad movie.” After the movie, I blogged a little and we played Uno and got to bed later than we intended.

Saturday

Saturday morning Beth went to a nearby park for a walk and North and I visited the bakery again (and I got the lemon cake, which worth a second trip). It was snowing and it was cozy to sit there with our coffee, tea, and pastries, watching the snow and eavesdropping on a college-age straight couple having what North interpreted to be a bad first date at the next table. Then we drove home, through heavy snow in the early part of the drive that petered out in Connecticut. When we got home, we congratulated Noah on his job offer and he presented us with a plate full of chocolate and chocolate-peanut truffles he’d made in our absence. (On Valentine’s Day he’d promised us a surprise on our return.)

It was a nice trip, but it didn’t feel as clarifying as the Accepted Students Days we attended with Noah, the ones that ended up steering him toward Ithaca and away from RIT. JWU was North’s first choice last fall when they were accepted and it’s still high on their list, but they’ve become less sure recently and the program didn’t sway them back to it or rule it out for them.

But they don’t have to decide yet. We’re attending another Accepted Students Day at Saint Mary’s College of Maryland in a couple weeks, and they are still waiting to see if they’ve been accepted to Oberlin and Mount Holyoke, and we can’t forget Aberystwyth, the school in Wales. They were originally told they had to accept or decline their offer there in late January, but they applied for an extension, and they were given until the end of March. So, there are a lot of pieces that haven’t fallen in place yet, but sometime in the next few months we’ll know where their Rhode to college ends.

All For The Love Of You

A Chronicle of Suburban Lesbian Family Life

Category Archives: Travel

Ten for December

Waiting for Joy

To Be Grateful

Get the Party Started

Welcome Home, Obie

Reunited

18 to 81, or Interesting Times

All Roads Lead to Oberlin

48 Hours

Rhode to College