A Wild Ride: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 77

Posted on November 27, 2022 by Steph

Tuesday: Hello, Covid

It was the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, parent-teacher conference day at North’s school. I was in between my second conference (French) and the third (Foundation of Tech) when I got a text from Beth informing me that while I was gone, North, who’d woken that morning with a cough, headache, stuffiness, slight fever, and dizziness, had tested positive for covid. It sounds kind of obvious in retrospect, but I was surprised. After two years and eight months of dodging this virus, I guess I was feeling we were invincible, even though my mom got it in the spring, and my sister’s whole family got it earlier this month.

Two days earlier we had let North leave the house without adult supervision for the first time since they got back from the hospital. They’d had brunch at a crowded diner with several friends. It was an exception to our no-eating-inside-restaurants policy, though we don’t know for sure that’s where they got it. Given that the incubation period is two to fourteen days, the second most likely option seems like the school play, which we attended about a week and a half before they started to feel ill. And I suppose there was the cat café, and we did go see a movie (Ticket to Paradise), but neither the café nor the theater had very many people in it. Ironically, they’d been around people less than usual during the two weeks before they got sick, first on a closed hospital unit and then at home.

I wondered whether I should bail on the rest of my conferences, being an official close contact of someone with covid. That might have been the ethical thing to do, but I was already there and masked, and given that North’s been out of school for several weeks, I really wanted to touch base with each of their teachers to explain what’s going on and discuss various possible paths forward for North academically. It seemed important, and the conferences were less than fifteen minutes each, so I went through with it.

When I got home, Beth said, “I feel like the degree of difficulty of our lives just keeps getting higher,” elaborating that we were like the proverbial frogs being slowly boiled in a pot. There were a few reasons this was bad timing for our family’s first bout with covid. (Is there such a thing as good timing for it?)

We were supposed to have an in-person intake interview at one of the partial hospitalization programs to which we’ve applied the following morning.
We were leaving our annual Thanksgiving-at-the-beach trip immediately after the interview.
The next day was also Beth’s birthday.

Beth called the hospital and to our surprise, they said we could do the interview virtually, so that was a relief. After a brief discussion, we decided we would go ahead with the beach trip. It usually involves Christmas shopping on Black Friday at the shops in downtown Rehoboth and we’d have to skip that, but I said it would be worth it to me to go if all we did was hang out at the house, have Thanksgiving dinner, order takeout the other nights, and take walks on the beach. That was what our first pandemic Thanksgiving trip to the beach was like anyway. (On our very first pandemic beach trip North was paralyzed, and we didn’t cancel then either. We are hardy travelers.)

There were risks, of course. Driving there would mean several hours of close contact with North and if Beth got sick in Rehoboth, then the drive home would be difficult or we could even get stuck there, but if you know how we feel as a family about the beach (me most of all), you’re probably not surprised that we went.

So many of you have shared your covid experiences on your blogs or on Facebook that we’ve had a range of models for whether or how to isolate infected family members from non-infected ones. We didn’t even discuss isolating from North. Given their current situation, it didn’t seem like a good course of action. We began masking when we were in the same room with them, but we weren’t avoiding them, and most of the time we even ate together inside, so that made the decision to spend a few hours in a car together slightly more rational.

After that was decided and after we’d filled out some pre-interview forms to scan and send to the hospital, I made Beth’s birthday cake, a chocolate cake with coffee frosting I’ve made many, many times. You’d think I’d remember the recipe well enough that I wouldn’t almost forget to add the egg, actually forget the vanilla, and accidentally turn the frosting into a glaze by halving all the ingredients except the coffee, but you’d be wrong. What can I say? I haven’t been sleeping well and I’ve had a lot on my mind. It was comforting to make it anyway, because it smelled good baking and there were batter and frosting bowls to lick, and it made the stressful day seem more festive.

Wednesday: Happy Birthday, Dear Beth

The next morning while we were packing for the trip prior to the interview, Beth got a call from the hospital informing us it was cancelled because that health care visits can’t happen over Zoom across state lines. The hospital is in Virginia and we’re in Maryland. Later I remembered we’ve run up against this rule before while travelling. I guess there’s some sort of exception for D.C. because we’ve had a lot of virtual meetings with providers in the District. This was quite frustrating. We couldn’t get a new appointment until the second week of December, and we won’t even be on the wait list until we have the interview. But there was nothing we could do about it.

We hit the road around eleven and arrived in Rehoboth around three-thirty, with a stop for a lunch of drive-through Taco Bell and Dairy Queen eaten at the tables outside the DQ near the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. We masked in the car and kept the windows partially down. It was a warm day—it got up to sixty degrees—so that wasn’t a hardship.

Near the end of the drive, Beth got a call from another partial hospitalization program where we’d been waiting for an intake interview since North got out of the psychiatric unit almost two weeks earlier. It’s in Annapolis, but they are opening a new location in Prince George’s County, which is closer to us than Annapolis, and they wanted to know if we’d like to interview for that location. Beth said yes. They’re supposed to call back by Monday to arrange it. So, on that front, it was one step back, one step forward. Because the facility is new, we’re hoping there will be less of a wait there.

We got to the house, a two-story yellow frame cottage with pale blue shutters, a living room and kitchen on the first floor and three small bedrooms on the upper floor, a narrow staircase between them, and a screened porch in front. We settled in, unpacking food and clothes, making up the beds, and deciding on our order of Japanese takeout for dinner. I was on the beach by five to see the sunset. When I got back Beth left to get the food and we ate her birthday dinner around the kitchen table.

After dinner, she opened presents. There was imported Spanish drinking chocolate powder from North, three fancy chocolate bars from Noah (one from Colombia, one from India, and one from Tanzania), and a bottle of French olive oil from me. It was all very international. Beth’s a fan of good chocolate and olive oil, so she was happy. Next, we ate cake and ice cream, and watched A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, and The Mayflower Voyagers.

Before bed, we took a walk down to the beach to see the stars. We could see Orion’s belt and one of the dippers– we weren’t sure which one. Beth stayed on the boardwalk while North and I went down to the sand. While we were separated, my sister’s family called Beth on her cell and sang “Happy Birthday” to her and let her know her present was on the way.

As we were going to bed, I asked Beth how her birthday had been, and she said it was “a wild ride,” but that it ended well. In my card I’d written (before North came down with covid), “I hope it’s better than getting deloused, or getting your gallbladder out, or getting a flat tire.” I suppose this one will go down as one of Beth’s many memorable birthdays.

Thursday: Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving started for me at 4:49. Remember how I said I’m not sleeping well? I stayed in bed until six, trying to get back to sleep, and then I relocated to the living room couch so the light from my cell and laptop where I was reading Facebook and blogs wouldn’t wake Beth. Around 6:45, I decided that as long as I was up, I might as well see the sunrise on the beach, which was only a five-minute walk away.

I used to watch the sun rise on the beach more often, when the kids were younger, and we all used wake at ungodly earlier hours. Well, I can’t exactly say I’m thankful for my recent insomnia, even on a day dedicated to gratitude, but… I was genuinely grateful that morning to see the orange ball of the sun rising over the ocean, touching the beach grass with faint light, putting touches of pink in the sky, painting the wet sand silver with streaks of gold, and making a big, ruffly, clear jellyfish I found at the waterline seem to glow from within.

I walked on the beach until the dawn colors had all drained away from the sky and the sand, went back to the house, ate breakfast, and made a batch of low-sugar cranberry sauce before anyone else was up. Everyone cooked a little throughout the day. Beth made the mushroom gravy and finished the broccoli-cheese casserole that North started. (North felt well enough to cook at first and then got dizzy and had to go lie down.) I made the basting sauce for the tofu roast and Beth made mashed potatoes. We’ve pared down our traditional feast a little over the past couple years since I got diagnosed with diabetes. I stopped making the brandied sweet potatoes because I was the only one who liked them, and we longer make breadcrumb stuffing because the roast comes stuffed with wild rice and Noah was the one who liked the original stuffing best.

Late in the morning, we all made our traditional turkey table decorations from apples, toothpicks, raisins, dried cranberries, and olives. “Will you make these with your kids?” I asked North.

“Yes,” they said. “Will you make them with them?”

“Yes,” I said. It was a cheering vision of the future.

Beth and I had lunch out on the screened porch—leftover Japanese, crackers, cheese, nuts, and fruit. Then we all had overlapping naps. I didn’t manage to fall asleep, but I came close, and it was nice to rest. North slept most of the afternoon. We’d hoped to take our Christmas card photos on the beach that afternoon, but they weren’t up for it. After my nap, I put the roast in the oven and went for another walk on the beach and boardwalk. When I came back to baste it again, Beth went for a walk of her own.

We ate a little after six and everything was delicious. Before we ate, we offered thanks for North being out of the hospital, for being together, for the fact that though we wished Noah was with us that the reason he wasn’t was that he was studying in Australia, something he’d wanted to do for years, and for the vaccines and boosters that kept North’s case of covid mild and that had protected me and Beth so far.

Speaking of Noah, at seven we had a Zoom call with him. It’s only the third time we’ve done it since he’s been abroad. The first time, with me and Beth, was to let him know North had been hospitalized and the second, with all four of us, was the last night North was in the hospital. He’d been trying to call them at the hospital and between the fifteen-hour time difference, difficulties with his changing between domestic and international SIM cards, and the fact that all the kids on the unit shared one phone and it was usually in use, he had not managed it until we linked him into one of our pre-scheduled Zoom calls.

We asked him if he’d done anything for Thanksgiving and he said no. It reminded me of studying in Spain the fall of my junior year of college and how it’s strange to be abroad on this very American holiday. My celebration that year consisted of a sweet potato boiled on a hot plate in a dorm room. We also found out his last school assignment is due the first week of December and he has two whole weeks of free time before he comes home. Beth and I both urged him to travel. He’s already planning a trip to the Great Barrier Reef, but he hasn’t explored much outside the town where he’s living, so it seems like a good opportunity to see more of the country where he’s been living since September. He mentioned in a puzzled way that a lot of the international students have been taking trips to New Zealand and Bali and missing class to do it.

It was good to talk to him. It was the first time I’ve been to Rehoboth without him since before he was born—in fact I think the last time we went without him might have been the trip when we brought printouts of sperm donor profiles to pick out his. It was also the first time we haven’t been together on Thanksgiving, so I was missing him a lot.

After the call, we watched an episode of Gilmore Girls, and then North and I walked to the beach again to look at the stars. There were seabirds resting on the waves, visible only as white spots bobbing up and down in the distance or occasionally taking flight and streaking across the dark sky.

(Not So) Black Friday

I managed to sleep until 5:30 the next morning, a slight improvement. Because my daybreak walk at the beach had been so rewarding the previous morning, I decided to do it again. It was cloudy and drizzling so there really was no sunrise to watch, but I never regret a walk on the beach.

I came home, made myself breakfast, and then left again to go pick up a few books I’d pre-ordered from Browse-About before North got sick. I double-masked and was in and out in a few minutes, resisting the temptation to stay and shop a little. On the way home, I detoured to the beach. It was high tide and an extensive network of little pools and channels of water had formed all over the sand. It was very cool, but I had to wend my way carefully to avoid getting stranded somewhere that would soon be covered by an incoming wave.

There was a family on the beach with preschool-aged twins running around, one in a ladybug rain slicker and one in a bee slicker. The hoods of their jackets had antennae. They were adorable and made me miss my little ones, who are not so little now.

When I got back home, Beth drove out to Route 1 in Black Friday traffic to get Grandpa Mac takeout for North. They’d slept all morning, so it was their first meal of the day. (Then Beth drove back when the order was wrong to get a replacement. This is a testament to Beth’s love for North.) I blogged and read and did laundry so we could bring home mostly clean clothes. It felt odd, not to be busy on the day I usually either start or get serious about my Christmas shopping.

In the late afternoon we had our Christmas card photo shoot on the beach. North and left ahead of Beth and went to the boardwalk where we purchased a frozen custard for North. We all met up and took pictures on the sand and jetties. While Beth and I had our backs to the ocean a rogue wave caught us by surprise and we both got our feet soaked. North took a series of photos of us running out of the ocean. I am considering using one of them on the card. After all, we haven’t had a picture-perfect year.

Beth and North went back to the house while I went to Grotto’s and ordered a pizza and mozzarella sticks for pickup. While they cooked, I went back to the beach to watch the sunset turn a bank of clouds in the northern part of the sky vivid pink and color the water and sand with swirls of pink, gold, and blue. I brought the pizza back home and after an hour or so, I heated it up and we had an early dinner before heading back to the boardwalk for the holiday sing-along and Christmas tree lighting.

When we reached downtown, Beth went to get soft pretzel bites for North while North and I found a place to sit away from the crowds near the bandstand. We found a bench on the boardwalk where we could hear the singing and see the tree but without standing shoulder-to-shoulder with hundreds of celebrants. We noticed someone was flying a drone near the tree, presumably to get an overhead view when the lights came on.

Although the other people sitting on boardwalk benches and passing by weren’t singing, we did. The first song was “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” and for a half an hour, there was a series of mainly secular Christmas songs like “Jingle Bells,” “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” and “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” At seven sharp, the lights on the tree flashed on, just as they always do. The sameness of this event is deeply satisfying.

On the way home, Beth confirmed that the orange light North and I had been seeing in the sky over the ocean the past two nights was in fact a planet—Mars. We marveled that you could see its color from so very far away.

That night before bed, because I’d had a sore throat all day and I was getting stuffy, I took a covid test. To my surprise, it was negative.

Saturday: Goodbye, Beach

Another morning, another early waking, this time around 5:40, another lovely sunrise on the beach, which I enjoyed along with parents with kids, people with dogs, walkers, runners, and people camped out on the sand wrapped in blankets watching the fiery sun hover at the horizon over the ocean. It’s quite the perq if you have to be up before dawn.

I came home and had breakfast and we packed up the house. Even though he’s busy with end-of-semester projects, Noah texted me the pictures of himself wearing a green t-shirt and standing on an Australian beach that I’d requested. We’ll juxtapose one with our beach photos on the Christmas card.

We stayed in Rehoboth for about an hour after we vacated the house. Beth took her daily walk and North and I had a slower ramble along the beach and boardwalk, with a long rest on a boardwalk bench. It was a wild ride getting to the beach, but once we got there it was actually a sedate couple of days, with more naps and less bustling about in shops than we usually have on Thanksgiving weekend, but I’m glad we went, and I hope it will prove restorative.

Note: Beth and I both tested positive for covid on Sunday morning.

Oregon Equinox

Posted on September 25, 2022 by Steph

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Two days ago, I got back from a week in Oregon, where I was staying at my mom’s house as she recovered from knee surgery. While I was gone, North had their own medical adventure.

Friday: Arrival

The alarm went off at 5:30 so I could catch an 8:30 flight. Medford is small airport, so it always takes two or three flights to get there. I was lucky to only have one layover, in Denver. As I mentioned earlier it was my first flight since covid. The last time was in February 2019, when Noah and I flew to Boston to tour Boston University.

The flights were uneventful. The most notable thing about the first one was that there was a passenger dressed as a jester, complete with the stick with ribbons on it (but no hat) and the most notable thing about the second flight was that I spilled half a can of seltzer all over myself. I also managed to read about a third of Stephen King’s latest, Fairy Tale, which was a nice way to pass the time. There was a tight connection between the two flights, but I made it and arrived in Medford early in the afternoon local time.

My sister Sara, who had been looking after my mom the previous week, picked me up at the airport and took me on a series of errands. We went to Home Depot for mulch because, though she lives in Davis, California now, she and her husband haven’t sold their Ashland house yet, and they’re trying to keep the property looking spruced up. We spread the mulch and she got the sprinklers watering the lawn and fruit trees and then we tried to go to Trader Joe’s, but it was closed because of a power outage.

We went to Mom’s house and socialized for a while. Sara had more errands to do and while she was gone, I took an hour-and-fifteen-minute nap—I’d been up since what would have been 2:30 a.m. in Oregon and I was exhausted. I woke around seven and I could have easily gone back to sleep for the night, but I needed to adjust to Pacific time, plus Sara had made pizza from a kit, so I got up and had dinner with Mom and Sara.

Starting when I was in my early teens, Mom, Sara, and I had pizza every Friday night. My mom was a single working mom, and she was in grad school to boot so she was busy. I’m surprised we didn’t eat takeout more than once a week honestly. The Friday night pizza tradition lived on after my mom married my stepfather and then in my adult family, but it’s been a long, long time (maybe almost forty years?) since it was just me, my sister, and my mother around the table eating pizza on a Friday night. It was nice, like old times, except completely different.

Sara showed me how to help Mom with her PT exercises and how to massage her leg and where things were in the house and then they watched a movie, but they started it at 9:30, and I was considering it an accomplishment to stay awake until ten, so I had a shower and went to bed.

Weekend: Settling In

The next morning, I woke a little after five, which was earlier than I would have liked, but not surprising. I stayed in bed until almost eight, first trying to get back to sleep, then looking at Facebook and blogs and texting with Noah. He’d sent me two dozen pictures he took at a wildlife sanctuary he’d visited with Ida, the other boarder at his house, and some of her friends. There were koalas, kangaroos, capybaras, an ostrich, a lemur, a red panda, a Komodo dragon, a crocodile, and other animals, and the photos were gorgeous. It made me happy he’s getting out and doing things besides going to class and hanging out at his house because he tends to be a homebody.

Sara got up around eight and once we’d both eaten breakfast and talked some she went grocery shopping for me and Mom before heading back to Davis. I went for a walk and got a latte and a small chocolate cookie from a nearby coffeeshop and picked up some things Mom needed from the drug store all the while admiring the mountains that ring Ashland. There’s one arid ridge and one covered with evergreen trees. I knew there were wild blackberry canes all over Ashland from previous visits, but I was surprised to learn they’re still producing edible (and quite tasty) berries in mid-September. I sampled them all week during my rambles.

Over the course of the day, I helped Mom with her exercises twice, massaged her leg, folded laundry, swept the leaves off her porch and driveway, and walked with her to her mailbox (which is in a bank of them a short block from her house). She also folded some laundry and said with satisfaction, “We’re getting things done today.”

It rained a little in the afternoon, which is not so common in Ashland until the fall, but it was almost fall. The equinox was my second to last day there. Fall did seem closer in Ashland than at home anyway. It was cool enough for long sleeves most days and a few vanguard trees were already turning red or orange. Mom and I settled down with our books in the living room and read while the dryer hummed, and rain ran down the windows that look out on her back patio. It was very cozy, and she even dozed in her chair for a bit.

I made chili for dinner, and we watched State of Play, which was the movie Mom and Sara had started but not finished the night before while I was in bed. (Mom wanted to see how it ended so we started it over from the beginning.) It’s a twisty journalistic thriller, good but not great. Because it takes place in D.C. I was occasionally forced to say things like “No one calls it the subway, it’s the Metro.”

Sunday was similar. I did little chores around the house, read, and took a longer walk. I wandered through a cemetery, walked along the railroad tracks, saw a community garden, and ended up near the same coffeehouse where I’d been the day before. This time I got chocolate ice cream with slivered almonds and whipped cream. I made a cream of mushroom soup and salad for dinner, and we watched the first episode of Ken Burns’ The U.S. and the Holocaust. I so seldom watch broadcast tv it felt strange to have to be ready at a specific time. Mom had been experimenting with different levels and timing of her painkillers, trying to balance pain relief and side effects, but as a result of skimping on it, she had some pretty bad pain that evening.

Monday to Thursday: A New Routine

Monday was the first morning I managed to sleep until a time that started with 6, which correlated to feeling rested for the first time, and that was convenient as I started working that day. There was no reason not to, as I had my laptop, a little office with a door that closes (which is more than I have at home) and enough time. Sara left an extra monitor for me, but I found I missed having a mouse. It also would have been nice to be able to figure out how to get my laptop to communicate with Mom’s printer because I am the sort of old school person who likes reading things on paper and marking them up with a pencil.

Monday morning while I was out on an errand to drop off an application for a handicapped parking permit at the DMV (a failed mission, as it turns out that location is closed due to staffing shortages), Mom went for twenty-five-minute walk with her walker alone. One the one hand, I was encouraged she was able to do it, but on the other I wished she’d waited for me to come home so I could accompany her, just in case.

Mom had a physical therapy appointment that day and the good news was her pain and mobility were improving and the swelling in her leg was completely gone. The bad news was she and the therapist thought she wasn’t getting enough flexion in her knee and that scar tissue might be the culprit. They decided to reduce the frequency of PT appointments until she can get a doctor’s opinion about whether she needs a manipulation (or worse, more surgery) so as to save some of the appointments her insurance covers for after further treatment, if needed.

That night I made a stir-fry for dinner, and we watched a PBS show called Animals with Cameras, which is just what it sounds like. We saw footage from cameras mounted on cheetahs’ heads, seals’ backs, and baboons’ necks. The point is to learn something about the animals’ behavior, sometimes just for the sake of science, but sometimes to learn how to possibly alter it (as with baboons who raid farmers’ squash fields and who are in danger of being shot if the scientists can’t get them to stop).

The days rolled on. I worked two or three hours a day and took walks, short ones with Mom, and longer ones alone. I got coffee or tea most days, sometimes at the coffeehouse, once at a Dutch Brothers kiosk in a parking lot because I understand that’s a quintessential Oregon experience, and sometimes at a Starbucks inside a supermarket because it was the closest coffee-selling establishment to Mom’s house. I made a homemade tomato sauce with garden tomatoes a neighbor brought by to eat on whole-wheat spaghetti Tuesday, burgers with side dish of cauliflower, broccoli and carrots with cheese sauce on Wednesday, and a curried zucchini soup Thursday night. We finished watching the Holocaust documentary series and watched some more Animals with Cameras. Whenever Mom introduced me to anyone (a friend from Peace Choir who came by, a neighbor we encountered on a walk, her housecleaner) she told the person I was her daughter who came “all the way from Maryland” to stay with her. She raved about my cooking, even though it seemed pretty run of the mill to me.

By the end of the week, Mom was walking much better, not using her walker at all and only using her cane on walks outside the house, but she was still concerned that if she did need a manipulation, it would set her recovery back.

Meanwhile, At Home

Things were more eventful… Beth and North got the new covid booster on Saturday, the day after I left, and North was tired and achy for days afterward. On Saturday they made a plum pie for the Takoma Park farmers’ market annual pie contest (held for the first time since covid), but by the next day they were feeling too unwell to attend, so Beth delivered it for them. It didn’t win but it was delicious—Beth bought and froze a slice for me so I could have it when I got home. North missed school Monday and Tuesday, mostly because of lower back pain. Then late Tuesday afternoon, North lost the ability to urinate.

If you’ve been reading this blog at least two years, you probably remember this affliction. We still have catheter supplies, but they had expired, I suppose because they can’t guarantee sterility beyond a certain point. Beth and North went to the emergency room, where they had an excruciatingly long wait to be seen. They had an ultrasound in the evening and an MRI the following morning to rule out physical causes. As expected, there was nothing. They arrived in the late afternoon, and it was the middle of the night before anyone would use a catheter to empty North’s bladder so they were quite uncomfortable.

Both Beth and North brought phone chargers to the hospital because this was not their first rodeo in the ER. At first, they couldn’t find an outlet but then North did so I was able to communicate with them throughout the evening and the next day. I felt a little guilty going to bed that night when I knew Beth was likely going to be up all night in the ER (and she was) but not as much as I would have in the past. We learned two years ago how to spell each other by taking turns on hospital nights and while I expected and hoped North would be at home when I got home three days later, I knew there was a small but non-zero chance that I’d be taking a turn sleeping (or not sleeping) in their hospital room at some point.

What I didn’t expect was that Beth and North would be in the ER, not admitted, from Tuesday afternoon until the wee hours of Thursday morning. Apparently, one of the doctors thought they could not be sent home with catheter supplies without retraining both Beth and North on the procedure and this could not happen unless they were admitted. And they could not be admitted because the hospital was over capacity. By the second night, I was starting to feel guilty I wasn’t there. North managed to get several hours sleep here and there but Beth didn’t sleep for forty-three hours, when they were finally trained (without being admitted after all) and sent home with supplies.

North slept most of Thursday and stayed home Friday as well. Beth made arrangements with the school for them to be able to use the nurse’s bathroom when they return next week.

Friday was North’s half-birthday. We always celebrate the kids’ half-birthday with cupcakes, and this year was no exception. Early in the week I asked North to save me one and they said I had to eat one on the right day, so I got an almond flour cupcake with rose frosting from the natural foods store near Mom’s house and sent North a picture of it, as proof I’d honored the day that they tipped closer to seventeen than sixteen. I’ve always enjoyed the fact that their birthdays and half-birthdays occur on or near the equinoxes as the Earth is making a similar transition.

Thursday to Friday: Departure

Thursday evening Sara returned to Ashland, with Dave and Lily-Mei. They were all attending a wedding on Saturday, so they were staying the weekend with Mom (who was also going). Sara drove me to the airport Friday morning. My flight was delayed by twenty minutes, then forty minutes, and finally an hour and twenty minutes, which was concerning because my layover in Denver was exactly that long.

There was plenty of time to observe my fellow travelers before we boarded the plane. I think the prize for most interesting went to the young man wearing a graphic t-shirt with a plague mask (but no mask for our current plague), a necklace with a plastic bird skull, leather bracelets with hardware, and knee-high leather boots with a spider design embossed on them. He was painting with watercolors in a tiny leather-bound book.

I had a window seat and the flight from Medford to Denver was beautiful, with many mountains and canyons. I didn’t read at all and just looked at the landscape unfold beneath me. As the plane approached Denver and then as we sat on the tarmac waiting for an open gate, various passengers with tight connections commiserated about their chances of making their flights. Mine was scheduled to take off about ten minutes after my seatmate’s, so I don’t know if she made her flight to Wisconsin, but I did make mine to Baltimore, even after getting turned around in the airport and having to figure out how to take a train from one concourse to another.

I wasn’t the only passenger with a late flight (or even the last one to arrive) and they held the plane for us. I got to the gate about ten or fifteen minutes after the plane was supposed to have taken off. Then there was a lot of confusion about seat assignments, with someone in my assigned seat and someone else in the next seat the flight attendant thought should be empty. I ended up seated between a woman in a Mennonite-style prayer cap and a man in a ball cap who was cursing and loudly protesting the delays and who later tried to order more than one alcoholic drink (you can only have one). Once the plane took off, he was calm and friendly, but I was nervous about him for a while.

We ended up sitting on the ground for an hour after I was seated because another passenger had to be removed from the plane under mysterious circumstances. Rumor was spreading through the plane that he was on the wrong plane—but how could that even happen? At any rate, he wasn’t belligerent, but he did appear impaired in some way, possibly sick, drunk, or on drugs. I saw him while the flight attendant was taking me all over the plane trying to find a seat for me and his seatmate piped up that she thought he was in the wrong seat. Another mystery—why would you even look at anyone else’s boarding pass—but she said she had.

But the happy ending was my second plane landed around 11:45 p.m. in Baltimore, only about thirty-five minutes late, and even though she was still dragging from having missed a whole night of sleep a few days earlier and I told her I could take a Lyft home, Beth was there to pick me up. Our family may have been scattered between Australia, Oregon, and Maryland on the day the light and dark were equal but being with Beth always helps me feel balanced.

Lucky

Posted on September 11, 2022 by Steph

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Labor Day Weekend

After Noah left, we had a three-day weekend. It was low-key, but nice. We all watched The Edge of Seventeen on Friday night, Beth went kayaking on Saturday morning, and on Saturday evening I listened to my friend Becky’s radio show on Takoma’s community radio station while making dinner. I almost skipped it because when Noah isn’t here, this show reminds me of our routine of cooking together and listening to it on Saturday nights and I wasn’t sure I was ready for that, but Becky and her co-host were giving away tickets to see Neko Case and Patty Griffin and I thought I might as well give it a try. There were four pairs of tickets and you had to send an email after they played a song by one of the artists. I kept trying, but I realized toward the end of the show I’d inserted an extra period in the email address, so I tried once more with the right address, and I won! The first three winners were announced on the air, but I didn’t find out until after the show was over. We were all watching Gilmore Girls and I got a message from Becky.

That same night Noah landed safely in Australia, got through customs, and boarded his third and final flight, from Sydney to the Gold Coast. We were relieved there was no issue with his visa or his medications. “What a night!” Beth said.

North hung out with Sol on Sunday afternoon and evening, first at the mall and then at our house. Beth and I went to the pool while the kids were at the mall. It was only the second time I’d been to an outdoor pool this summer, so I was glad to do it. Unlike the last time we went, the water temperature was pleasant. I swam fifteen laps—I would have done more if we’d had more time—and went down the water slide a couple times, which was fun and made me wonder why I don’t do that more often when I’m at a pool that has one.

On Labor Day, Beth was doing some straightening up in the basement and she gave me two boxes. One contained student papers, teaching materials, and dissertation research notes from 1997 to 2001. During this time, I was finishing my PhD at the University of Maryland, teaching there and at George Washington University. I had no idea I still had any of those papers. I thought I’d gotten rid of them long ago, but I guess a missed a box. I went through it cursorily just to make sure there was nothing in it I wanted, but not too carefully because spending too much time thinking about my academic past sometimes sucks me down into a shame spiral.

The other box was of mementos that spanned from childhood to my mid-twenties. Some were things I’d thought were lost, like my high school diploma and my senior year yearbook. There was also some artwork, mostly not done by me, including a portrait of me at age eleven, which my sister remembered was drawn by a stranger we met at the playground. And there were letters and a folder of printouts of email I’d exchanged with a work friend when I used to work at Project VOTE (a now defunct non-profit that registered low-income African Americans to vote) back in the early 90s. I read the email rather than the letters, because it was easier to read than handwriting and because it looked like about the right amount to read in an evening without going down a rabbit hole that would last longer than that. Reading it was a more emotional experience than I expected. I remembered David and I were close, but I’d forgotten how close. Working in that office was intense and when he left to take another job, it wasn’t the same and we drifted apart pretty quickly. This is the kind of moment in which you can feel sad about a faded friendship, or you can appreciate what it meant to you while you had it, and I managed to go with the latter for the most part.

We usually have a picnic in the back yard on Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and Labor Day, but it was raining, so we ate our veggie dogs, baked beans, deviled eggs, corn-on-the-cob, and watermelon on the porch instead. It was actually nice, to sit and watch the drizzle and hope it would bring cooler, less muggy weather.

Report from Australia

Meanwhile on the other side of the world… Noah arrived at his place, which is a boarding house. He has his own room and shares a kitchen, bathroom, and common areas with the landlady and another boarder, a Norwegian, but not the same Norwegian he’d been corresponding with earlier about sharing an apartment. This one is a young woman. Noah said the landlady is nice, that she took him to the mall so he could get some things he needed, and she took him on a tour of the university. There wasn’t a desk in his room, and he wanted one, so he bought one, which I guess he’ll leave for the next boarder.

His orientation started Tuesday with some online modules and continued in person on Wednesday through Friday. He said most of the international students are Americans or Norwegians. He’ll start classes on Monday. He sent me a picture of the gate of the university and said, “Good to know it’s real and I haven’t fallen for an elaborate scam.”

Here are some of his observations about Australia, from the first days he was there:

Light switches are backwards (up = off)
At the mall I went to the escalators were like airport conveyors but at an incline. The airport had stair-style escalators so it’s not universal
Masks required on the domestic flight, lots of masks at the airport (about 50%) but very few at the mall
Even as a non-driver, cars driving on the left is disorienting. Also, I assume that means the cultural standard is to walk on the left when possible
The spoons in this house are all very small or very large. But that’s probably just the house

An Unexpected Package

I was on the porch, reading an online trade magazine for work Wednesday afternoon when a UPS delivery person dropped off a small box. When I saw it had a pattern of Hershey’s kisses on it, I had a sudden inkling of what it might be.

Two days after we got back from Hershey Park, I realized I’d lost a coin purse containing my debit card, my ID, a SMARTrip (a bus and train pass), and a twenty-dollar bill. The last place I’d spent money was Chocolate World, right as we were leaving the park. I considered calling to see if there was a lost and found but I thought at such a big complex it would be a bureaucratic ordeal, so I didn’t do it. I cancelled the debit card and transferred the money on the SMARTrip to another card, but I hadn’t managed to order a new ID because of ongoing computer problems at the MVA (speaking of bureaucratic ordeals).

And, then as you have no doubt guessed by now, someone found the coin purse and turned it in, and the Customer Service department at Chocolate World mailed it back to me, free of charge. Nothing was missing, not even the cash. So, I didn’t need to wrangle with the MVA’s recalcitrant online system anymore, I had twenty dollars I thought I lost, plus a coin purse I rather like. Between winning concert tickets and this, I was feeling pretty lucky.

We also found out that same day that North’s application to be a theater reviewer for local high schools was successful, so they are going to be doing that. It should be fun, and they will get to go to a lot of plays throughout the DC metro area.

Back to School Night

On Thursday we went to Back to School Night at North’s school. It was the first year since before covid that this event was in person. Since North’s a junior, and we missed two years, this means it was our first time meeting their teachers at their high school and we had to learn our way around the building. (It was also our second to last Back to School Night ever I realized as we walked back to the car. That was a startling thought.)

Because North is not at our home high school there were fewer parents we knew than we knew at their elementary or middle school (or Noah’s high school), so I was surprised when Talia’s parents walked into the AP World History classroom. Talia went to preschool with North, played on a basketball team with them through most of elementary school, was on the costumes crew with them for the fall play last year, and her mom Megan is a good friend of mine. North hadn’t mentioned she was in the class. Chatting before the teacher’s presentation we learned Talia’s folks were going to the same concert we were the following night. (The presentation itself was the most detailed in terms of the curriculum. So far, it also seems to North’s hardest class.)

It was nice to get to see the teachers in person. North’s Astronomy teacher is fresh out of school and so young I wasn’t sure she was the teacher when I saw her standing in the classroom door. The AP Lit teacher wasn’t present because she’s eight months pregnant and was attending an infant CPR class. She made a video for parents to watch. The French teacher is quite energetic, and the math teacher seems enthusiastic about math and down to earth. The tech teacher basically said it was a gut class and there was no excuse not to get an A, if the kids made an effort. The painting teacher told us to let her know if our kids are interested in painting with oils, because it’s not part of the regular curriculum. (When we told North later, they said they are interested.)

I was glad to have gone, even though I had to miss book club (and we were reading Octavia Butler).

Concerts

The weekend was quite musical. Friday night we went to the Neko Case/Patty Griffin concert and Sunday we attended the first Takoma Park Folk Festival to be held since before covid.

Late Friday afternoon we said goodbye to North and Ranvita who were settling in for pizza and a movie (they watched Call Me By Your Name) and we drove to Virginia and picked up our own pizza and some mozzarella sticks for a picnic on the lawn of Wolf Trap. Beth had made a Caprese salad with a tomato and some basil from the garden to go with it. We also got some soft serve from the concessions stand.

The weather was really nice, just a perfect temperature (when we arrived) and not too humid. When the sun set, I actually wished I’d worn long sleeves and socks. I lay on the blanket and read a few chapters of Gwendy’s Final Task while we waited for the concert to start. I’d been texting with Megan to see if she and her husband Tom were on the lawn or in the pavilion. They had seats inside, but she said they were in line for merch, and they’d come visit us on their way inside. Then they ran into other friends, ran out of time, and we didn’t end up connecting.

While all this was going on, I happened to look at the tickets for the first time. I just wanted to see how much they cost (and it didn’t say, just “complimentary”) but then I noticed they had seat numbers on them. Despite what the radio station manager said, they weren’t lawn tickets after all. After some brief consideration—because it is nice on the lawn on a pretty night—we decided to move inside, where we’d have a better view. Also, I thought it might be a little warmer in there (and it was). The seats were near the back in a sparsely populated section and the pavilion is open on the sides we didn’t feel the need to put on our masks. Before the music started, I spotted our around-the-corner neighbor Chris and Beth went over to talk to her. Then Chris came to sit with us for a while during intermission and she and Beth talked shop—they both work in the labor movement—and about Chris’s daughter’s adjustment to middle school.

Patty Griffin came on first, but I’m not sure I’d say she was opening for Neko Case because their sets were almost equal in length. Both shows were great. I know more of Neko Case’s songs than Patty Griffin’s, but it’s easier to make out Griffin’s lyrics so I was following along a little better during her part of the show. There was a nearly full moon that night, so Griffin sang “250,000 Miles” and Case sang “I Wish I Was the Moon.” Patty Griffin had a song about Bluebeard I liked, and I was glad to hear Neko Case sing “Last Lion of Albion.” It was a very nice evening, and we got to bed by 11:45, which is quite late for us, but at least we didn’t turn into pumpkins, which may well have happened if we’d been out at midnight. It’s been so long I have no idea.

Two days later we were watching live music again at the Takoma Park Folk Festival, which was cancelled for two years running because of covid. It was raining in the morning, but the festival carried on with the performers under tents. When we arrived around one, the rain had stopped, and we spread our blanket on the wet grass under trees that occasionally dripped on us. Overall, it wasn’t as well attended as usual, probably because of the weather, but we had fun. We saw Ruthie and the Wranglers, some people from the Folklore Society of Greater Washington singing Celtic songs, and Holly Montgomery and I enjoyed them all.

North got a plate of noodles and a Thai iced tea when we first arrived and then between the second and third set, we got ice cream. As always, we saw a lot of people we knew, the mother of a preschool classmate of North’s, the younger sister of their best friend from elementary school who was working the information booth, and another elementary school friend and her mom, who were also volunteering. I would have liked to stay a little longer and hear some more international music, but North got a headache near the end of Holly Montgomery’s set so we left. Still, I was glad to be back on the familiar grounds of a local middle school listening to live music for the first time in years. When we saw Leila and her mom Shaneena, we talked about how this year life is really starting to feel normal. More than a recovered coin purse or free concert tickets, that may be the luckiest thing about right now.

The Next Chapter

Posted on September 3, 2022 by Steph

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It was a big week around here. North started eleventh grade on Monday and Noah boarded the first of three planes that would take him to Queensland on Friday evening. As I write on Saturday morning, he’s on the second one, from Los Angeles to Sydney.

Back to School

Beth thought North would wear eyeliner on the first day of school because they’ve only been allowed to wear eye makeup since they turned sixteen last spring, and it was a big deal to them at the time, but they said they didn’t want to get up any earlier than they were already, plus they didn’t want to “set expectations too high” right off the bat. (It was Thursday before they wore any makeup to school.)

North didn’t have too much to report when they came home other than that their painting teacher was the only one to ask for students’ pronouns (the English teacher asked on a subsequent day) and based on a story about his glory days playing high school football, they think their AP World History teacher is going to be full of boring stories.

More information trickled out over the course of the week: They’ve switched from taking Spanish to French, and they can now say, “I prefer cats,” when asked if they like cats or dogs better. They had to research different kinds of computers based on buyer specifications for their tech class. AP World History started off with a geography unit and then moved on to the Song dynasty in China. Their AP Lit class is mostly seniors (because they chose to take it before AP Comp instead of the other way around). They had to pick three celestial objects to research for a poster in Astronomy and they went with dwarf planets, moons, and black holes. The fall play is going to be Clue. They’re auditioning for a part, and they’ve also applied to be costumes manager, so we’ll see which they end up doing. (If they get an ensemble part, they may do both.) They’ve also applied to be a play reviewer (for plays at other high schools). They say only about a quarter of kids are still masking and when I asked if that was enough for them not to feel self-conscious, they said yes.

To a Land Down Under

Meanwhile, Noah continued to tie up loose ends for his trip. He got the letter he needed to take meds into Australia on Monday, four days before his departure. (Speaking of letters from doctors, the letter North needed to take their meds to camp arrived a few days after they got back from camp. I’m glad it wasn’t the other way around because I think customs would be less likely to bend the rules than North’s camp.) Beth got him some Australian cash. The bills are made of flexible plastic and feel strange in your hand if you’re used to paper money. He got his hair cut on Wednesday and he wasn’t happy with it because it was shorter than he wanted. Independently of each other, Beth and I both said it wasn’t as bad as the shortest haircut he ever had (in eighth grade). Apparently, that’s the benchmark.

Between Tuesday and Thursday, in different combinations of people, we got halfway through season 5 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (our revised goal for the summer), finished season 6 of Blackish and season 2 of The Strain. Any show that anyone was watching in a group that did not include Noah was put on hold while we made progress though shows he was watching. He and I finished reading Sourcery (from the Discworld series) on Friday morning. It was the eighth novel we read this summer, all of them fantasy, science fiction, fantasy-adjacent (Terry Pratchett), or science fiction-adjacent (Cory Doctorow). My favorites were all three books in The Magicians trilogy, but I enjoyed everything we read. To finish Sourcery in five days, we had to read for about an hour a half a day, instead of our usual forty-five minutes to an hour, so it was a bit of a rush, but we both wanted to finish one more book.

On Thursday, Noah’s last night at home, we went out for ice cream again and he chose Ben and Jerry’s. The kids split a brownie sundae. At the patio table Beth quizzed North for their geography quiz the next day. After we got home, Noah and I watched The Strain and North read aloud from the almanac desk calendar we read from at bedtime, Noah started printing his boarding pass and other official documents.

Noah had a late afternoon flight. North had wanted to come to the airport, and we considered picking them up from their bus stop or directly from school, but in the end, we decided it would be cutting it too close, so they settled for waking him up to say goodbye (with his consent) at 6:30 when they left for school.

We read the last sixty-odd pages of Sourcery. I did one last load of laundry with his clothes in it, and he folded it. Beth and I worked, and Noah finished packing. He wanted to know if when we took his by-the-gate, back-to-school photo for college departures if we included luggage or not, so I checked my blog photo folder and the answer was there one with and one without (and no gate photo for sophomore year, because he spent that year at home). I asked how he’d prefer it and he said with, so around 2:15 we piled his luggage around him at the front gate and took his picture with it before we put it in the car. Ten minutes later we were on our way to the airport.

As Noah was checking his baggage at the international counter, the clerk wanted to see his visa and then commented that the paper Noah produced wasn’t a visa, but a letter stating a visa had been approved. Sounding doubtful, he said he’d see if that was good enough, typed on his computer, asked some questions, and after an uncomfortably long silence, told him to start loading his bags on the scale. So, that was a little nerve-wracking.

Beth and I watched Noah go through the security line, load his things on the conveyor belt, and go through the body scanner, and then he was walking away from us with his carry-ons, headed for another continent. I only teared up a little in the car on the way home. Saying goodbye at the beginning of a new school year is still hard, but it’s gotten easier each time we’ve done it. Or maybe it hasn’t sunk in yet.

Friday also marked one year since my last period, so I am officially postmenopausal. When my mom hit this milestone (also at age fifty-five), my sister told her she was a crone now and she was not pleased to hear it, though Sara just meant she had entered the age of wisdom. In the maiden/mother/crone progression, though, I feel mother is still the most relevant stage for me, as I have a kid at home, at least for a couple more years.

As if watching my eldest embark on a fourteen-time-zone journey and reaching menopause on the same day wasn’t enough, it was also the one-year anniversary of my diabetes diagnosis. My most recent bloodwork (done a couple weeks ago) was good. My 1Ac (a measure of average blood sugar over the past three months) was a smidge higher than the last test, in February, but still in the lower half of the prediabetic range. That doesn’t mean I don’t have diabetes. It just means that with medication and dietary changes, my blood sugar is the same as an unmedicated prediabetic. My nurse practitioner seemed pleased and said I should keep doing whatever I’m doing.

So, the kids and I have all started a new chapter. I’m glad North continues to be active in theater and the GSA and is taking some challenging classes. Somehow junior sounds a lot older than sophomore, doesn’t it? Suddenly we’re in the second half of high school. And Noah has jumped forward, too, launched into an international adventure and his last year of college. I am proud of both of them and I am eager to see how the year unfolds for all of us.

Perfect Week

Posted on August 30, 2022 by Steph

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North had one week between camp and the start of the school year. They didn’t have any babysitting jobs or social engagements, though they did go to school on Thursday evening to staff a table for the GSA at the picnic to welcome incoming ninth graders and other new students. North is going to have a leadership role in the GSA this year and building membership is one of the organization’s goals. They said it was a success. They talked to a lot of people, got ten signups, and talked to a faculty member about the campaign to replace the annual powderpuff football game with something less sexist.

Creek Walk

On Wednesday afternoon, the kids and I went on a creek walk, which we do almost every summer, usually near the end. Occasionally these outings end in mishap, as when I fell and hurt my knee six years ago (it has never been quite right since then) or when Noah got fifteen bee stings last summer, which is why Beth urged us to “Be careful!” when we left shortly before three. We promised we would be.

We walked Starbucks for refreshments and then we made our way to the creek. It was quite pleasant. No one got hurt and it was nice to be in the water on a warm day. We found some deep places, where North submerged themselves almost completely by sitting on the creek bed and we walked further than I thought they’d want to, all the way to the bridge closest to our house. We would have gone under to arrive at our side of the street—it’s always kind of cool to be under the street, or I think it is—but North spied a man under the bridge who seemed to be relieving himself, so we gave him some privacy and backtracked until we came to a place that was clear enough of underbrush to get out onto the path and walk home that way. Walking in the creek always makes me nostalgic for when the kids were younger and used to pretend there were trolls under the footbridge where we typically start. Even if that sort of imaginative embellishment is in the past, I’m glad neither of them feels too old for this activity.

Hershey Park

Friday afternoon Beth and I quit work early and we all piled into the car to drive to Hershey Park for one last, quick trip of the summer. We arrived in time to check into our hotel and spend a couple hours in the park. We got pizza for dinner, rode a few rides, and everyone but me got desserts, either ice cream or in North’s case a chocolate-covered frozen banana. (I would have ice cream the next day, when I was able to space it apart from other carbs.) We got two rooms so the kids could have their own space and we could have ours. We also had a king-sized bed and a fancy shower that didn’t have a curtain or wall because it was big enough to have its own entryway. It was deluxe.

We said goodnight to the kids and told them to be ready to leave the hotel at 9:30 the next morning. The park doesn’t open until eleven, so we thought we’d do the factory tour ride at Chocolate World beforehand because it opens earlier. Beth and I went down to the hotel breakfast bar around eight, but there wasn’t a single thing I could eat, at least not in the morning when my metabolism is very reactive. The vegetarian fare was all muffins, waffles, flavored yogurt, and a couple unappealing looking apples. Beth got a little container of vanilla yogurt and some juice. We’d decided to go to a nearby grocery store in search of food, but there was a Starbucks in the parking lot so I was able to get a latte, kale and mushroom egg bites, and some string cheese, which I supplemented with some mixed nuts I’d brought with me, while Beth picked up a few items for herself at the grocery store.

We got to Chocolate World a little before ten. I expected we’d be in a very small minority of people masking indoors and we were, but it was even fewer people than I would have guessed, almost no one, even in crowded spaces where you stand near the same people for a long time (for instance in the line for the factory ride).

Shortly before eleven we left Chocolate World and got a wheelchair for North from customer service. They used one when they went to Hershey Park on a camp field trip earlier in the month and wanted one because it would be a long day of walking. They also had a pass for expedited entry on some rides, which hadn’t expired yet. We were able to accompany them and avoid the lines. The way it works is you can enter your first ride of the day without a wait and then the ride attendant writes on the pass how long you have to wait before entering another ride. It’s based on the average wait time for that ride. As North said, “you wait after instead of before.” It saves you from having to stand in line if that’s difficult for you and it also saves some time because you can use your wait time for getting to the next ride or eating or going to the bathroom.

So there were some advantages to using the chair and the pass, but also some disadvantages. It was work pushing it uphill (Beth, Noah, and I took turns) and we often had to split up and leave someone behind to watch the chair. We only did this later in the day because of what happened while the kids and I were riding the smaller of the two flume rides. We left the chair at the bottom of a staircase, and three teenage boys stole it. Beth, who was waiting outside the ride, actually saw them leave with it, and she wondered if it could be North’s, but she wasn’t sure, so she didn’t confront them. It wasn’t until we got off the ride and found it missing that we all realized what had happened. Beth texted security and they tracked down the culprits and returned the chair before our kids had even returned from their next ride.

It was a busy day. We made a list of rides we wanted to do in the morning but as the day progressed, we had to keep paring it down. I was sorry that we skipped the mine ride because it’s one Beth will do. She is the least adventurous of us at amusement parks and as of this summer I am the second least. When North was at Hershey Park during camp, they rode the Candymonium, the newest and biggest coaster in the park, which at 210 feet, is just a little taller than the biggest coaster I’ve ever ridden, the Magnum at Cedar Point. (I have not been on that coaster since I was twenty-two, for the record.) Given the fact that Noah rode the Great Bear, his first big coaster, on a band field trip in middle school makes me think that being with peers and not your parents makes you more daring when it comes to amusement park rides (and other things of course, for good and for ill).

North tried the Great Bear this year for the first time, Noah rode the Candymonium with North, and the two of them also did the bigger of the two flume rides for the first time. As the kids pointed out, it’s because they keep adding rides that we can’t find time for all our favorites in one evening and one day anymore. The kids and I also rode the Wild Mouse, the Comet, the smaller of the three wooden coasters in the park, and the Sooper Dooper Looper, the smallest looping coaster. It has just one loop, but it was one of the first looping coasters ever built, so it has historic significance. These rides are at the very edge of my own comfort zone. (After some consideration the day before about whether I didn’t want to be the kind of person who wears my tie-dyed Sooper Dooper Looper t-shirt while riding the Sooper Dooper Looper or whether that’s exactly the kind of person I wanted to be, I went with the latter.) We all rode the swings and the Ferris Wheel, which is Beth’s favorite. She took the picture of the park from up there.

We also went to the waterpark, but the lines were so long we gave up on doing a waterslide or the lazy river, but the wave pool had no line or just a short one when different members of our party arrived. It was nice to get wet, though, because by late afternoon we were all hot and tired. Beth and I took turns watching the wheelchair so everyone could go into the pool.

As we left the park, North took one last ride on the Candymonium while Beth returned the wheelchair and Noah and I did some shopping at Chocolate World. We were intending to eat dinner there, but the place we usually eat—it has several vegetable side dishes you can use to make a meal—was closed and the only option was pizza. Neither Beth nor I wanted pizza two nights in a row, so we went to Panera before hitting the road for home.

There wasn’t much traffic, so we were home by 10:15, which was good because Beth and I are usually in bed by ten and because Noah had scheduled a call about another place to live in Australia at eleven. If you’re thinking, wait, I thought he found somewhere to live, that fell through. This one is a room in a house where the owner also lives, a ten to twenty-minute walk to campus. He was offered the place on the phone and accepted, but he hasn’t paid the deposit yet, so I’m still a little nervous about it. Meanwhile he has an AirBnB booked for his first week and we’re not cancelling it quite yet, just in case.

Last Night of Summer Break

Sunday evening, after we enjoyed a nice summery dinner of barbequed tofu, fried okra, corn on the cob, and sliced tomatoes that Beth cooked, we went to Sweet Frog. We’ve always taken the kids out for ice cream (or occasionally frozen yogurt) on the night before school starts. It’s something my mom used to do for me and my sister and the tradition continues.

I finished first, having taken a relatively small amount of soft serve from the dispenser. I got up and walked up and down the block because I was short on steps, and when I returned Beth got up and did something similar because she was short on activity minutes. When she returned, she showed us that her Apple watch told her she’d had “a perfect week.” I’m not sure North would agree that a week brought their summer break to an end was a perfect one, plus we weren’t at the beach, but we were all together after a week split up into three groups and on the cusp of a longer separation from Noah, and we got to enjoy natural and not so natural amusements, so I’d say it was pretty near perfect.

Home Again, Home Again

Posted on August 22, 2022 by Steph

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The week after our beach trip North was at camp and Beth was staying at her mom’s house in Wheeling while attending a convention in Pittsburgh, so Noah and I were on our own.

Beth and North left on Sunday morning. I was tired because I hadn’t slept well and a little melancholy to have gone from a group of eight to two in the space of twenty-four hours. But I managed to occupy myself. I went to the farmers’ market, tended to load after load of trip laundry (there were four total), and spent a long time reading the Sunday paper. Noah and I read A Desolation Called Peace and watched The Strain, as we did almost every day. (Later in the week we also watched Midsommar and The Babadook.)

Monday I got back to work, outlining some web copy for a supplement company, and took advantage of the cool weather to weed the Black-Eyed Susan patch in our front yard, making a bouquet with the flowers I pulled up accidentally. The weather was relatively cool from the weekend through Thursday, which was a welcome relief from the two weeks of miserably hot and humid weather we had before leaving for the beach.

Heatwave flashbacks: One day in late July Beth and I went to the pool but after just ten laps in the tepid water, I gave up on exercise and decided to sit in the shade in my damp bathing suit and read instead. Another day I found myself exhausted by a thirty-minute walk, which is on the short side for me. We found refuge from the heat in various ways. Beth and North went camping one weekend in the Catoctin mountains and the kids and I went to see Nope in an air-conditioned theater.

Sometimes I have a hard time knowing what to cook when Beth’s out of town, but we brought a lot of vegetables back from the beach, because we were driving and had a cooler while everyone else was flying, and some of these vegetables were nearing the end of their useful life, so I focused on those. I made tomato-dill soup on Monday with two going-soft tomatoes and dill from a plant that went wild while we were gone, a veggie stir-fry on Tuesday, and an assortment of raw and steamed vegetables with Sara and Dave’s peanut sauce on Wednesday. We had abundant leftovers of all those meals—apparently I don’t know how to cook for two– so we ate some of those on Thursday and we got pizza on Friday and ate still more leftovers on Saturday.

Meanwhile, Noah was occupied with finding an apartment and other matters he needed to attend to before he leaves for Australia in a week and a half. There have been a lot of bureaucratic difficulties he’s had to navigate this summer, more than I remember having to deal with when I studied abroad in college. Here are a few:

Class registration opened the last week in July but he couldn’t get the online system to recognize that he had a valid visa (even though he did) so it was a week and a half before he got registered. Luckily, none of the classes he wanted were full when he finally broke through the impasse.
That same week in July he located and submitted an application for an apartment, which was supposed to be binding, and that potential commitment stopped him from looking for another place for a long time but he didn’t hear back and he didn’t hear back, so he started looking again last week. He interviewed for two apartments (one in a location convenient to campus, the other less so). These interviews took place on the phone at crazy tines (ten p.m. and midnight respectively) because of the fourteen-hour time difference. On a message board he also found two other international students, one from Germany and one from Norway, who are also looking for housing in the same city. They agreed to look for a place they could share while also pursuing individual leads. Then the German got into campus housing off the waitlist (a list Noah is also on) so I was glad to hear there is movement on that list, because a dorm room would be simpler, since he will only be there for three and a half months and the minimum rental period seems to be six months. Then on Sunday morning he told me that the upshot of his midnight interview the night before was that he was offered the less conveniently located apartment with five days to decide while he waits to hear back about the more conveniently located one (or to see if he gets a dorm room off the waitlist). So nothing is nailed down yet, but we all feel a lot better about his housing prospects.
Finally, still he needs to get a letter from his psychiatrist stating he has a prescription for his ADHD meds in order to be allowed to bring his existing supply with him. He also needed to figure out how to get those prescriptions renewed in a foreign country, which will involve securing an appointment with a psychiatrist there. He’s researching all this on his own, which really drives home that he’s an adult now.

Finally late Sunday afternoon, a week after they’d left, Beth and North returned. That morning I went to the farmers’ market again to get peaches and in the afternoon I made a cobbler to welcome them home. I adjusted my usual recipe, subbing almond flour for half of the whole-wheat to reduce carbs. It didn’t come out the way I hoped, but everyone ate it when I told them they didn’t have to, so I guess it wasn’t too bad. When Beth and North went camping in July I welcomed them home with an (almost) no-sugar blackberry cheesecake. I don’t bake as much as I used to, partly because North bakes so much and partly because of my diabetes, but I do like to celebrate our reunions with dessert, especially in the summer, when there’s such a bounty of fruit. That night for dinner, Noah and I also made whole-wheat spaghetti with cherry tomatoes, basil, and fresh mozzarella. It was nice to eat a meal all together.

North was full of stories about camp. The sixteen- and seventeen-year-old kids are in a different group than the regular campers. They go on a lot of field trips—to visit a museum about Amish culture, do goat yoga (which North says is “cheering”), go Hershey Park (where North rode the biggest coaster in the park) and an escape room complex (where the group managed to escape from both rooms they tried) and go shopping at a mall (North came home with a lot of earrings). But they also participated in leadership seminars where they learned skills such as how to facilitate a meeting. They also did normal camp things like attending the all-camp campfire, swimming, and making a tie-dye pillowcase.

Beth spent her time away working first at her mom’s house in Wheeling and then at the Netroots Nation convention in Pittsburgh, but she found time to hang out with an old friend, too. (She took the sunset picture in Wheeling.)

Finally, I have good news and very sad news. For everyone who had well wishes for my cousin’s daughter Annabelle, thank you. She came off the ventilator a week ago today and is home and well. But my mom’s boyfriend Jon, who was also hospitalized while we were at the beach and was supposed to be released last Tuesday, took a turn for the worse and by Wednesday he was in the ICU with a bacterial infection, viral encephalitis, and kidney failure. The doctors said he almost certainly wasn’t going to make it, so on Thursday evening, following his wishes and those of his adult children, he was moved to hospice care at home. He died early Friday morning, surrounded by his kids. My sister, brother-in-law, and niece (who moved to Davis, California last month) all traveled to Ashland to be with my mom for a few days to comfort her.

I never met Jon, but I know a little about him. He was well read, loved opera, and played the tuba. He was married twice and had two children, two stepchildren, and two grandchildren. He lived down the street from my mother and they had dinner together every night, plus breakfast on Sundays. They traveled together often, everything from a trip to the Olympic peninsula to an African safari. They were considering Mexico or Costa Rica as their next destination. My mom will miss his companionship terribly, but she said they had “four wonderful years together.” That’s no small thing.

Take the Win

Posted on August 14, 2022 by Steph

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Saturday

Around quarter to five in the afternoon, I settled myself on the damp sand, close to where the last little edges of the waves were reaching. My mom, sister, brother-in-law Dave, and niece Lily-Mei were in route from Philadelphia where they’d flown in the day before, Beth was out getting some groceries, and North had started making dinner. I don’t remember what Noah was doing, but he didn’t want to come with me.

I was wearing my swim bottoms and a t-shirt. I didn’t intend to go in the water because I wasn’t staying long—though if the waves looked good I probably would have, bathing suit or no bathing suit. As it was, the water was pretty calm. I sat and stared at it for a solid half hour and managed to get my mind nearly empty of thought. I think that might what it’s like to meditate, though I’ve never tried.

I walked in the front door just behind Sara and the others, having timed my exit from the beach just right. We showed them around the house and since there was a ping pong table in the basement and we had a nine year old who’d been cooped on planes and the car for much of the past two days, we had to play right away. While Lily-Mei was playing with my mom, she said, “You realize I’m going easy on you,” even though Sara had come up with a co-operative way to play. Rather than trying to score points against each other, each pair tried to keep a volley going as long as it could. The room also had a dart board, which North used throughout the week. They liked it so much they want one for Christmas.

North served a casual feast: veggie cheeseburgers, corn on the cob, watermelon, and a tomato-mozzarella salad with pesto. They also made a pitcher of watermelon agua fresca. We ate at the long dining room table, which was in a room with a soaring wooden ceiling and a wall of windows overlooking a narrow finger of Silver Lake. Throughout the week we’d see herons, geese, ducks, turtles, dragonflies, and enormous fish that swam with their backs sticking out of the water (looking like small eerie alligators) either from the dining room windows, or the lawn behind the house.

Once it was dark, Beth, North, Sara, Dave, Lily-Mei and I went for a short walk on the beach. There was a group of teenage girls standing in a circle near the water singing Carrie Underwood’s “Before He Cheats” with surprising enthusiasm. I wondered they were buoying one of their number whose boyfriend had recently cheated. I also wondered why girls so young even knew this song, but Beth speculated that maybe someone has remade it recently.

Back at the house, Noah and Sara’s family started a game of Sorry, but Beth and I were ready for bed, being an early-to-bed-early-to-rise sort of people. Sara and Dave were keeping Lily-Mei on West Coast time, so she was up later than us every night.

Sunday

Beth went kayaking in the morning. She’d rented a kayak for the week and this day she explored the waters right outside our house. I organized people into putting items on a grocery list and helped Mom brainstorm ideas for her meal for our party which included four vegetarians, one person with diabetes, one person with a gluten sensitivity, and at least the requisite amount of likes and dislikes in a large group (only the diabetes is new since the last time she cooked for all of us but it seemed to be the straw that broke the camel’s back because she was stumped). Then Sara and Dave went out to buy the groceries. Mom and I took a walk to the tea and spice store to get a tea ball to infuse herbs and Parmesan rind into a soup Noah and I would be making later in the day.

Mom, who is going to get a knee replaced soon, needed a lot of stops to rest, but that wasn’t a problem as there were benches and shaded pavilions all along the boardwalk and it gave us a chance to talk. She picked up a strawberry-banana smoothie to sip as we rested at one of them.

When we got back Noah and I read a little and then Beth, North, and I went to the beach. I couldn’t stay long because it was my night to cook, but we all waded together for a little while and then North and I went out deeper for a bit. The water was still on the calm side, but it was nice to be in the water on a hot day. I walked home on my own, leaving Beth and North at the beach.

Back at the house, Noah and I made minestrone. When Beth and North got home, Beth settled into the hammock we’d brought from home and set up near the water. She stayed there until dinner. The after-dinner entertainment was a screening of North’s drama camp performance of Pippin and a slideshow of Mom’s pictures from her trip to Morocco this spring. It looks like a very beautiful country. After that, Sara and Dave and Lily-Mei made a Candy Kitchen run. Beth and I were in bed before they returned.

Monday

Beth left to go kayaking in the canal in Lewes (having decided Rehoboth Bay was too rough) before anyone but me was up. Around 10:35, Lily-Mei and Dave decided it was the day for the water park and they wanted to go right away, but North wasn’t even awake yet and it’s possible Sara wasn’t either. In any case, they both needed to eat breakfast and get ready, so the actual departure was around 12:15. While they waited, Noah pushed Lily-Mei in the hammock like it was a swing. She kept saying, “higher” and he said, “I don’t want you to fall out,” and she replied, “higher!”

Mom and I took a walk to the turtle bridge, so called because turtles congregate in the water below. It was within sight of our house, so a very short walk. (Mom though she might have overdone it the day before.) We saw a lot of turtles, but also ducks and geese. One had a quarter of its shell that was a completely different, more colorful, pattern than the rest. I wasn’t sure if it was molting—do turtles molt?—or if the shell was broken and that’s what was underneath or if it that patch was just cleaner than the rest. The turtles, especially the bigger and presumably older ones, were all covered with muck and algae.

After the water park party departed, I headed to a pavilion on the boardwalk to blog in a scenic, shaded, breezy place. Once I got caught up I went back to the house to change into my suit. When I got back to the house, Beth had returned from kayaking and was eating lunch out back by our little sliver of lake.

I returned to the beach and stayed from three to six. I swam for about an hour. The waves were a little bigger than the day before and close together so it was hard to get in, but once I did it was nice. After my swim, I got a pistachio gelato on the boardwalk and sat on a bench looking at the ocean to eat it. As I did I encountered my inner child in the form of a three or four-year-old boy who was explaining to his parents, “We should build a house here so whenever we come to Delaware, we don’t have to leave” in the tone of one explaining the obvious solution to people who are slightly dim-witted. When I got back to my towel, I started Piranesi, which is the first book I’ve read on my own since the last time we were at the beach in early July. It’s short, so I read about a third of it and then it was time to head back for dinner.

Dinner was Beth’s traditional beach meal: gazpacho, salt-crusted potatoes with cilantro-garlic sauce, olives, baguette, and a cheese plate. It’s always much anticipated. After dinner, we split up. Sara’s family played ping pong, while Beth and my kids went to the boardwalk for ice cream. I stayed behind because I’d already had a boardwalk treat and it was my turn to do the dishes.

I watched Sara, Dave, Mom, and Lily-Mei play Pictionary, then took Mom’s place when she’d had enough, then Noah took mine when my family got back from the boardwalk. Dave said he wasn’t sure what it meant that he was “burning through partners.”

Tuesday

Beth, Noah, and I took a long walk the next morning. It was already very hot and humid when we set out around nine a.m., but we were undaunted. We hit Café a Go-Go, where I got an iced latte, Beth got a chocolate chip cookie, and Noah got a cranberry-orange muffin. Next we went to BrowseAbout, where I picked up a couple books I’d ordered and Beth tried to decide how to spend the gift certificate I got her for our anniversary and decided to hold onto it for now, and Noah got the third book in the Game of Thrones series and looked at an extension kit for Settlers of Catan he’s had his eye on for a while. (They’re surprisingly expensive.) Finally, we went to the farmers’ market and got some excellent raspberries and two giant soft pretzels, one for Noah and one to take home to North. I was intending to get the blueberry doughnuts I resisted in July since there were more people in the house this time to eat them up, but they didn’t have them that day.

Back at home we had lunch, I folded laundry on the ping pong table, which I recommend if you find yourself with a ping pong table and laundry to fold—it’s just the right height and it’s divided into neat quadrants. Noah and Dave finished the puzzle, which consisted of images from Funland. It must have been an easy one because we’d only started it that same day. I put in three pieces and fitted two together outside the puzzle, which is more than I generally do, which may also be an indication that the puzzle was easier than usual.

In the mid-afternoon I went to the beach, joining North, who was already there. We swam about an hour in small to moderate waves, then North went up to the boardwalk to wait for Beth to come pick them up and drive them back to the house. I went up to the boardwalk a little later to read another forty pages of Piranesi on a bench in the shade.

When I got home, Lily-Mei was showing off the impressive haul of stuffed animals she won at Funland, almost more than she could hold. Mom made fruit salad and three asparagus quiches for dinner and we ate two of them. (The other one disappeared over the course of the next couple days.) North had gone to bed with a headache and didn’t come to dinner. After dinner, Beth went for a walk, Noah and I watched Only Murders in the Building, and Sara’s family played a board game called Outburst and went to the boardwalk. After we’d gone to bed I could hear Sara animatedly reading a Harry Potter book to Lily-Mei. I couldn’t make out any of the words, except “Gryffindor” and “Slytherin” over and over so I’m guessing it might have been about a Quidditch match.

Wednesday

In the morning Beth went kayaking on the lake outside the house again. This time Noah walked along the shore, following her and taking pictures and drone footage. It was good she got some time in nature because she had to spend a lot of the afternoon and evening ferrying people around. She drove my mom and me to our traditional lunch spot because the walk would have been too much for Mom. After lunch all eight of us met up for ice cream and funnel cake on the boardwalk and she drove our kids there. Then everyone but Beth and me went to the movies—they saw Marcel the Shell—but even though she didn’t go to the movies Beth drove our kids because Sara and Dave’s rental car wouldn’t fit six. She dropped North’s required covid test for sleepaway camp in the mail, and then she picked up the kids at the movies and me at the house and drove us to dinner at a make-your-own-bowl place out on the highway, and drove us all plus my mom to Sweet Frog for frozen yogurt and then home. On that drive, we all admired the gorgeous moon, huge, golden, and nearly full, hanging low in the sky.

Earlier that day, while most of our party was at the movies, I went to the beach. It had been sprinkling a little while Mom and I were walking and it started again while I was in the water. It was such a light rain it was hard to tell it even was raining, since I was wet already, but I could see the rings forming and spreading on the surface of the slate gray water. Parts of the sky were blue, with puffy white clouds, but most of it was full of dark clouds. The water was very still, with the smallest swells. I floated on my back and studied the cloudbanks. When the lifeguards blew the five o’ clock whistle, I got out of the water and started to read on my towel, but the sprinkles turned to drizzle and I sought refuge in a pavilion one block down the boardwalk. After I spread out my towel along the back of the bench and got my book out, I looked up and noticed a huge rainbow over the beach. It was a day of beauty in the sky.

Thursday

We had bad news from my cousin Holly in the morning. Her fourteen-year-old daughter Annabelle, who has multiple disabilities and is medically fragile, was in the hospital with unexplained breathing problems. (It turned out to be septic pneumonia.) The hospital was in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, only three hours away, and Holly’s a single mom without a lot of support in the area, so Sara was thinking of leaving the beach to go be with her, but then she found out Holly’s adult stepdaughter was going to come out, so she didn’t.

Meanwhile, Mom took my kids out to breakfast at Egg. When they got back Beth took North to an urgent care to get a camp physical because despite weeks of trying to get the required health form signed and faxed to camp, we’d found out from the camp nurse the day before that it never arrived. The short version of this story is that our pediatrician is on leave and her substitute had promised to send the form but never did, despite multiple calls. The week before we left for the beach, when the form was already overdue, Beth even dropped into the office, unannounced, and tried to stage a sit-in, but she left when assured the form would be sent. Anyway, it never was.

This urgent care did not take appointments, so Beth and North had to sign in and then sit in a hot car for almost three hours until they were called in and told the doctor could not sign the form because of North’s complex medical history and multiple prescriptions. They came home very discouraged as camp was starting in three days and it was seeming as if they might not be able to go.

While they were gone I walked to Café a Go-Go, got myself a latte and brought one home for North. I also had half a piece of coffee cake and saved the other half for Beth, who was having a rough day, for reasons beyond what I’ve mentioned.

Mom, Sara’s family, and I went to the beach. Sara and I had a nice talk, mostly about our kids, while in the ocean, and then she read a Harry Potter book to Lily-Mei, and then she and Dave and Lily-Mei made a sand castle with dribble towers and series of pools and canals and walls that captured water to use for the dribbles. Mom and I read our books and I texted back and forth with Beth about the camp problem and other problems and then I went for a walk along the shore and back down the boardwalk.

When we returned from the beach, Beth was on the phone with the camp nurse. She’d explained that her next step was to drive back to D.C. and attempt another sit-in at the doctor’s office when the nurse said if she could just see some kind of official record of North’s prescriptions, they could waive the form. Within seconds Beth was on the Children’s National Medical Center portal and making a PDF of the records and sending to the nurse. The nurse texted her “See you on Sunday” and there was much rejoicing in the house.

Sara and Dave set up a make-your-own spring roll station for dinner, which was fun. I actually skipped the wrapper and ate only the fillings and sauce because we were having S’mores after dinner and I came into dinner with higher blood sugar than I anticipated, due to a poorly timed afternoon snack.

We made the S’mores over the backyard propane fire pit filled with volcanic rook and blue glass pebbles. It was very pretty with the flames dancing among the colored glass and reflected in them and it was peaceful to sit by the water, surrounded by tall oak trees. However, those trees were blocking our view of the sky, and North wanted to see the moon because it was full that night and a super moon to boot. So Noah and North walked to the turtle bridge to see if they could see it from there, but it wasn’t high enough yet.

People peeled off gradually. Mom went inside to call her gentleman friend Jon who was recovering from his last radiation treatment and wasn’t doing well. Sara, Lily-Mei, and Noah went inside to watch a Harry Potter movie (#3). Beth called her brother. North and I went back to the turtle bridge and this time we could see the moon and it was lovely. Finally, North went back inside and Beth came out for a little bit, and then she and I went to bed, and Dave was the last one lingering by the fire.

In bed Beth was speculating about why the camp nurse had agreed to waive the signature on the form, when there was more on it besides the prescriptions, then she decided not to think about it, saying she’d “take the win.”

Friday

Friday morning Beth went kayaking on the lake one last time and then Noah helped her get the kayak up on top of the car so she could return it. I caught up on my blog, and then everyone but Mom and Sara went out for crepes or pizza for lunch.

After lunch, we dropped by Candy Kitchen to buy taffy and truffles and then Beth left and Dave and I accompanied the younger generation to Funland. We rode the Haunted Mansion twice in a row because both Lily-Mei and North wanted to sit with me. I could let you think I’m that popular, but it was because I was wearing my glow-in-the-dark Haunted Mansion t-shirt and they wanted to see what it looked like inside the Mansion, even though there’s black light in there so North’s whole white shirt glowed, as did the white trim on Lily-Mei’s shorts. She yelped when the big bat swooped down at us and at some of the other jump scares, and afterward she said it was scarier than she remembered from last year. She’d been telling us before we went in that it was “tame.” In my experience, eight to ten is the perfect age for the Haunted Mansion, and she’s nine.

The kids did some more rides (the Paratrooper and the Freespin) and then we took a break for games, because apparently Lily-Mei hadn’t won enough stuffed animals yet. (She came home with two more.) At that point, Noah and I walked home and read, while Lily-Mei and North went on more rides and then North called for Beth to give them a ride home, leaving Dave and Lily-Mei there. When Beth and North got back, my family of four plus Sara all went for a quick trip to the beach. Steps from the boardwalk, we ran into Dave and Lily-Mei who were returning home from Funland, so Lily-Mei switched parents and came to the beach with us.

It was almost five when we got there and we were going out to dinner so we only stayed a little over an hour, but it was a nice time. The weather was lovely—the heat having let up a couple days earlier—and Sara and Lily-Mei discovered a set of large, interconnected holes (big enough to climb into) with walls that rose a little above ground level that someone had dug and they set to work decorating the walls with dribbles. North and I got into the water and enjoyed the best waves of the trip. I got out just in time to read the last fifteen pages of Piranesi, which was gratifying, while Sara and Lily-Mei splashed in the water.

Earlier that afternoon Noah had reminded us that we hadn’t taken the family portrait yet, so after everyone was home and showered, he set up his tripod behind the house and we took it.

Sara and Dave went on a dinner date by themselves, while the rest of us had pizza and stromboli on the patio of Grotto. It was pleasant out there, with strings of white lights crisscrossed over the tables. Some people got dessert on the boardwalk and then Noah and I walked home, while everyone else drove. Noah and I stopped at the turtle bridge on the way home to look at the now-full moon.

Back at home Mom was trying to get information about Jon, who was now was in the hospital with a bacterial infection, probably due to the radiation suppressing his immune system. She was talking to the neighbor who she’d asked to check in on him and his daughter throughout the afternoon and evening. It was a hard week on people we care about.

We set to work folding laundry (on the ping pong table again) and packing, but we finished in time to show Mom the movie Noah made in his Advanced Cinema Production class last spring. In the middle, Sara and Dave came home so we started it over. Once everyone had seen it, Beth and I went to bed, around the same time Sara, Dave, and Lily-Mei were leaving for one last trip to Funland. They managed to stay on West Coast time the whole trip, but this meant we’d be checking out of the house the next day at what would feel like seven a.m. to them. I wondered how that would work out.

Saturday

Despite this obstacle and the usual chaos packing up and emptying the fridge, we did manage to get out of the house only fifteen minutes late. We said our goodbyes on the front lawn and went our separate ways. The West Coast folks were going to Philadelphia where they’d visit the Harry Potter exhibit at the Franklin Institute, stay overnight then fly home on Sunday, all except Sara who was going to visit Holly. (This was planned before Annie got sick.) We were headed for Maryland, at least until today, when Beth is taking North to camp and then driving to Wheeling, where she will stay with her mom for a week while attending a conference in Pittsburgh.

Speaking of Beth’s mom, we were all sorry she wasn’t able to join us this year and it wasn’t the most relaxing vacation with all the stress about North’s camp and worry about Annie and John and others, but it was also the first time I’d seen my mom, sister, brother-in-law, and niece in over a year, and that time is always precious. And I got to go to the beach every day and Beth kayaked most days, so even though we didn’t build a house so we wouldn’t have to leave, I count that as a win.

Fun Days

Posted on July 11, 2022 by Steph

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Saturday

Around five in the afternoon I was on the beach photographing my feet. The first picture I took to mark the moment the first little waves rushed over my sandals. Touching the water is often what makes it seem as if we’ve arrived at the beach. Shortly after we got to the little mint green house where we’d be staying for the week, Beth and Noah got back in the car, to get groceries and visit the Crocs outlet. North went into their room and closed the door, presumably to nap, so I made the ten-minute walk to the beach by myself.

The second two photos I took to remind myself of what the jetties near the beach access path I’d need to find again looked like because there were a lot of paths and few good landmarks on this stretch of beach, no houses, just scrub pines, and even the lifeguard chair had no number, which is kind of unusual. I ended up putting three of the photos on Facebook because I was taken with them. I took a walk along the waterline, enjoying the sights, sounds, and smell of the beach, before turning back to the house, walking in the back door at 5:50, the exact moment Beth and Noah were stepping through the front door. This was satisfying because it meant I’d had as long a walk as possible without making my cooking partner wait.

Noah and I had planned to cook dinner together, a soba noodle salad with tofu and vegetables. He’s been on a soba noodle salad kick. This was the third or fourth variation he’s made this summer. (His cooking leans heavily on pasta and the buckwheat noodles agree with my blood sugar better than white, which might be part of the reason he keeps planning them.) After dinner we watched an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which in combination with having just arrived at the beach, is a truly superior way to end an evening.

Sunday

Beth was up early the next day. She had gone for a walk and then left to go kayaking before anyone else made it out of the house. North and I went to the beach late in the morning. It was mostly overcast with the sun breaking through every now and then, so I wasn’t too worried about being on the beach near noon. The water was cold, but not forbiddingly so, and the waves were moderate, not quite as big as I’d like, but still nice. In the water and later on the towel, where we retreated to warm up, we had a nice long conversation. They told me about things that happened at the day camp where they’d been volunteering as a junior counselor the week before and what might happen at the overnight camp where they’ll be in a leadership program in August. (The answer is they’re really not sure, as they’ve never done it before as it’s for sixteen and seventeen year olds, but it’s at a camp for kids with LGBTQ+ parents they’ve loved as a camper, so they figure it will be fun.) It was nice to have an unusually large chunk of one-on-one time with them.

Back at the house we ate lunch and then Noah and I read a couple chapters of The Magician’s Land, the third book in the Magicians trilogy, which we’ve been reading since late May. We watched the television series a year ago, so it’s a little strange to be reading the book, because it feels as if I should know what’s going to happen next, but I don’t, because the plots keep diverging and coming back together. I do recommend it, though, if you’re a fan of fantasy.

I headed back to the boardwalk afterward, to check out a new coffee place on the boardwalk Beth told me about. I’m always on the lookout for a shaded place with an ocean view where one can hang out for extended period of time and if they serve coffee, that’s a bonus. It was closed when I got there, but the tables were still out, on a brick platform overlooking the boardwalk, and I had my water bottle full of ice water and a book to read (Rhode Island Red—my book club always reads a mystery in July) so I had nearly everything I’d wanted. I read three chapters and headed back home where Beth was making her traditional beach week dinner—gazpacho, a cheese plate, olives, salt-crusted new potatoes with cilantro-garlic sauce, and baguette. We ate this delicious feast out on the spacious deck, under the leafy cover of the big trees that grow there.

We ate a little on the early side so I could get the dishes done in time for a seven p.m. departure. Rehoboth was having its fireworks a day early (presumably so tourists driving back home on the last day of the three-day weekend could attend and spend money in town). The display wasn’t supposed to start until 9:30 but we wanted to get ice cream and secure a spot on the sure-to-be-crowded beach. I’d been experimenting with ice cream in the past week or so, after not having more than a few bites at a time since my diabetes diagnosis ten months ago. I knew a child-size portion with nuts on top would be fine, especially if I walked a little before or after, and having learned our lesson about never driving into or out of Rehoboth on the Fourth eight years ago, we’d walked there. I got a peanut butter-chocolate twist, to go with the nuts I’d brought.

It was good we got there when we did because the beach filled up with people, as did the street that surrounds the nearby bandstand, where a group was playing classic rock covers (Average White Band, Beatles, Van Morrison, you get the picture). I was glad the music wasn’t patriotic, as it’s a little hard to muster much patriotism these days, with the recent Supreme Court rulings heavy on everyone’s mind. Beth said they played “Proud to Be an American,” but from the beach the music was sometimes faint and I didn’t hear it, which was just as well because it would have been hard not to yell “Unless you’re a woman of reproductive age!” after the chorus “at least I know I’m free.”

I told the kids to bring something to entertain themselves and they both brought books. Noah was reading Game of Thrones and North had The Iliad. (They got interested in it because they read part of The Odyssey for their English class this past school year.) I read another few chapters of my mystery, until it got too dark to read. It was a lovely evening. It had been humid earlier in the day, but it wasn’t any more and the light on the ocean was lovely before the sun went down and when it did you could see a crescent moon rising in the west.

There were a few drones up in the air, against the rules, but apparently it wasn’t impossible to fly, as it is in permanently restricted areas around D.C. The show started around 9:40, by which point I was impatient because it was ten minutes late and under normal circumstances, I’m in bed by ten. It was a nice display, not as fancy as what you’d see in D.C. but probably comparable to Takoma’s fireworks, though I haven’t seen those in years, as they haven’t happened in years. (They didn’t have any this year either, but it was the first time Takoma’s parade happened since 2019. We missed it, of course, being out of town, but I saw pictures on Facebook.)

Monday

Monday was the actual Fourth and Beth suggested we get the before-lunch ice cream we usually get on the Fourth, even though it wouldn’t be from the ice cream trucks that gather at the end of the parade route in Takoma. She’d gone kayaking again and returned around eleven-thirty. I broke ranks and ate an early lunch before she got home because I wanted to stay on the boardwalk afterward and I didn’t want to have to come home for lunch. Beth said since I was not partaking of before-lunch ice cream as tradition dictates, I should take the picture of those who were, so I did. I did have some frozen custard, though, strawberry-banana twist, even though there’s no photographic evidence.

Everyone else went home, but I went back to the boardwalk café, which was open this time, so I got an iced latte and read, blogged, and watched dolphins leaping in the sea from my seat in the shade for two hours.

When I got back to the house, I found Beth and Noah working on a puzzle of Mount Rushmore they’d chosen from the house’s selection of puzzles and North frying tofu for a late lunch. They wanted to go to the beach and so did I, but they didn’t want to walk, so Beth drove us.

We had another nice swim and talk, starting with their immediate job prospects (a babysitting gig they’re interviewing for when we get back) and moving onto college and career plans. In one scenario, they attend culinary school in Rhode Island, then study abroad in France, then open a bakery in Provincetown. They have given some thought to how they will afford the astronomical rents in this gay mecca: “Step one: I marry rich… Solid, right?” In another scenario, they major in pre-law, go to law school, become a public defender, and reform the legal system. In both scenarios, they foster kids before having their own.

When we got out of the water, I was tired, having been up late two nights in a row, so I lay down and closed my eyes. We were sitting next to a loud group and I kept thinking I’d like to move the towel so I could hear the ocean, but I was comfy on the sand in the sun and I couldn’t muster the energy to move. North texted Beth to come pick them up but I stayed a while before walking home.

When I arrived preparations for our Fourth of July picnic were underway. Everyone had a cooking assignment. Mine was boiling hot dogs and devilling eggs. We ate out on the deck again and then we finished a movie we’d started at home, Eurovision: The Story of Fire Saga. It was fun, if you’re in the mood for something light.

After the movie, Beth, Noah, and I headed for the boardwalk where he got ice cream and she got almond bark. The main purpose of the outing was to go sit on the beach and see if we could see fireworks from any of the neighboring jurisdictions that were having theirs on the actual holiday. The answer was yes. We could see the Dewey fireworks to the south and Cape May’s far to the north. Plus people were setting off their own private stash just north of us in Cape Henlopen, and at one point there were more going off just behind the big hotels to our west. Sometimes it was hard to know which direction to look. But because the fireworks were further away than the night before they were of course smaller and quieter. The beach wasn’t empty—it’s never empty, not even in winter—but it wasn’t packed either. It was eerie and beautiful to be sitting there, almost alone, watching the distant bursts of color lighting up the night in three directions.

Tuesday

Beth and I went to the farmers’ market the next morning to get tomatoes, cucumbers, peaches, berries, and giant soft pretzels for the kids. I was tempted to get some cucumber starts because ours are growing very slowly, not even flowering yet, but we weren’t sure the little plants would survive four to five days in their tiny pots, plus a stint in the hot car the day we left the beach, so we didn’t buy any. I also resisted the siren song of some tasty-looking blueberry doughnuts.

Later in the morning Beth took the kids to the water park. I puttered around the house, starting laundry, and after lunch I went back to the boardwalk café and got mint chocolate chip ice cream—and not a child’s size this time because my experiments with ice cream had gone so well. It was good and I stayed in range. I can’t tell you how cheering this was. It must be all the fat, slowing down the impact of the sugar. In addition to eating ice cream, I read a few more chapters of my mystery, and then I hit the beach.

The day was overcast and the water was choppy. The waves weren’t big but they were close together. The water was a uniform gray, without the blue, green, and golden-brown highlights you see on sunnier days. In the water I watched a preteen boy do tricks on his boogey board. He stood on it like it was a surfboard and when it crested a wave, he’d jump off, do a somersault in the air, and land in the water. It was really something else.

By four, I was out of the water and it had started to sprinkle. People were packing up and leaving and I considered staying because I do enjoy a less populated beach, but Noah and I hadn’t read that day, and there was laundry to cycle, and it was my night to cook, so I left, too. It was cozy on the sun porch reading while intermittent rain hit the windows, and the dryer hummed.

For dinner I made veggie burgers, green beans, and a tomato-cucumber-mozzarella salad. After dinner we watched a couple episodes of Blackish (all of us) and Only Murders in the Building (me and Noah).

Wednesday

Rain was predicted in the afternoon, so I made sure to get to the beach in the morning. Beth was kayaking, Noah was doing something on his phone, and North was still asleep when I left. The water was much calmer. I would have liked more waves, but there was an advantage, which was that I could see a lot of dolphins, swimming out past where the waves would normally block my view, and I saw one jump all the way out of the water, tip to tail. It was a stunning sight. There were pelicans and osprey, too, quite the nature show.

Beth brought home Italian takeout for lunch. The kids had pasta and Beth and I split a rolled, breaded eggplant appetizer with cheese and tomato sauce, making the rest of our lunches ourselves. There were Italian cookies, too.

It was at lunch that we realized my online book club meeting that evening was going to conflict with our plans to go to Funland. (I’d forgotten about book club when we made these plans.) But then I double checked and the email about book club was ambiguous, saying the meeting was Wednesday, July 7, a date which does not exist this year, so I wasn’t sure if it was Wednesday or Thursday. I wrote the leader and not getting a response, called the library, which organizes the club, but the librarian wasn’t sure, so I called the community center where the room for the people who attend in person is booked (the meetings are hybrid). Eventually I found out book club met Thursday so we could go ahead with Funland, as planned.

Beth and North went to the beach while Noah and I stayed at the house to read, but when we were done, I joined them for a short swim. Beth had texted me that the waves looked big. She actually has an app on her phone that reports wave height that she uses for kayaking. I wasn’t sure if five-foot waves were bigger than average or not, and it turns out they weren’t as big as I thought they’d be, but I can’t really regret a second ocean swim in one day. Afterward I walked to town to buy some candy at Candy Kitchen, and to get an iced latte. I took it to the tables at the now closed café (I know now it closes at two) which I was starting to regard as my personal office and blogged some more.

When I got back to the house at 6:10, I was a little surprised North wasn’t making dinner yet, but Beth told me they’d gone to bed with a migraine, so it turned out we didn’t go to Funland that night after all. The rest of us made our own dinners (Noah had pasta, I made scrambled eggs with tomatoes, vegetarian bacon, and potatoes, and Beth made herself tacos, which was the planned meal) and then we watched an episode of Buffy. Afterward Noah settled in to listen to a tech podcast, Beth went for a walk, and I continued to blog.

Thursday

Thursday I was out of the house for most of the day and barely at the beach. We had brunch at Egg. Noah and I both ordered the lemon-blueberry crepes and I gave him half of mine, which turned out to be about the right amount of crepes for both of us. (He really likes crepes.) I supplemented mine with poached eggs and a glass of milk for balance and walked immediately before and after the meal and I didn’t get a big spike.

Where I walked after brunch was BrowseAbout Books, where I’d promised to buy both kids some books. (Beth split off the group to go get a massage.) North got Her Body and Other Parties; Noah got Clash of Kings and Rule of Wolves.

From there we walked to Funland. It wasn’t open yet, so we all read on a bench nearby—and then I took a short walk on the beach—and then the kids rode the Paratrooper (a mutual favorite) and tried out the new Free Spin, which has replaced the Free Fall. They disapprove of any change at Funland on principal, but otherwise they liked it, I think. Noah went back for a second ride on the Paratrooper while North rode the Sea Dragon and the Graviton (which I heard a little girl called “The Stick to the Wall,” which is an accurate description as any). North lost their phone on the Graviton and the ride was halted for five minutes while employees searched for it, which North says was embarrassing, but worth getting the phone back.

We took a break for funnel cake and it turns out a quarter of a funnel cake is still too much for me if I don’t add a protein or exercise much, but now I know. Noah headed home and North and I went back to Funland to ride the Haunted Mansion and to buy a puzzle of images from Funland and a Haunted Mansion t-shirt I’ve had my eyes on for years. It’s the only ride I go on there and I love it. (I wore the shirt to bed the first night we were home and made the delightful discovery that the moon behind the haunted house glows in the dark.) North said I should use the subhead “Fun Day” for this day because we went to Funland and had funnel cake, but I wasn’t using subheads beyond the days of the week and I didn’t have a title yet, so now I had one.

Beth picked us up and Noah and I had time for two chapters of The Magician’s Land before it was time to leave for dinner. We had 4:30 reservations because it’s really hard to get reservations for the roof at The Cultured Pearl and we decided we’d rather eat outside than at a more traditional dinner time. It’s really beautiful up there with reeds and koi ponds between all the tables and drapery on top of and around them. In a day full of culinary risks, I tried tempura, and by eating a lot of edamame beforehand, I was able to manage it without a spike. Two successes out three’s not bad, I reasoned. Oh, and if you ever have the opportunity to try edamame with Old Bay seasoning or smoked mayonnaise, go for it. It’s a fun change from just salt.

Beth and the kids got dessert afterward and I came along but didn’t indulge. Afterward everyone else drove home, but I walked along the beach. When I got back, Beth and North had left for the Crocs outlet since North didn’t go when Noah did, Noah worked on the Mount Rushmore puzzle, and I logged onto my book club.

That night I took my first shower in the house (I’d been using the outdoor shower) and it didn’t drain. The toilets wouldn’t flush either. Beth emailed the owner of the house and we went to bed. I thought I noticed a faint, swampy aroma wafting from the bathroom but I told myself I was imagining it.

Friday

Maybe not though, because in the morning sewage had started backing up into the shower. Just a little, but any sewage in the shower is more than you want. The owner called a plumber and he was at the house by 9:15. The longer he stayed the less cheerful and communicative he became, which was concerning, but at 10:25, he came in and said the problem was fixed. I trusted him enough to start a load of laundry and no soapy water came up out of the shower drain, so everything seemed to working as it should. (The owner of the house rebated us $500 for the inconvenience, which was quite generous.)

By the time the plumber left, it was getting to be the time of day I try to avoid on the beach, especially if it’s sunny, which it was, so I stayed at the house, read with Noah and did laundry again. When Beth got home from kayaking, she brought home Grandpa Mac for the kids. We all ate lunch and by two p.m. all four of us were at the beach together for the first time since the fireworks. The waves were actually big that day, so Beth just put her feet in the water for a bit and Noah was in and out pretty quickly. The two of them retreated to the sand and his book and her magazine.

I swam for two hours, mostly with North, with a break in the middle to get ice cream and water ice at the snack bar on the beach access path. The waves were absolutely amazing, the best I’ve experienced in years. It was somewhat less conducive to conversation than our previous swims. In fact, once North asked me a question just a big wave towered over us and I just said, “No talk!” before we dived under it or jumped into its swell to be pulled up and over it, I don’t remember which.

There was a strong northward tug in the water so we had to get out of the water when we got close to the red flag and walk back to the other end of the lifeguards’ range several times. It was one of those times we decided we needed a rest and frozen treats. As I headed back into the water, full of cookies-and-cream ice cream (and alone this time, though North eventually joined me again), I told Beth “I’m so happy!” and she laughed and said, “I know.” The next time I got pulled too far north and had to get out of water I thought I might be done, because I was tired and cold, but North was waiting for me on the beach and it wasn’t hard to convince me to get back in the water. Some years, many years, we spend a whole week at the beach without waves like this, so I thought we should seize the day. The next time we had to get out, though, I collapsed on my towel. Everyone was heading back to the house to shower and get ready to go out to dinner, but I lingered a bit, resting and watching the waves hurl themselves on the shore.

We had dinner at Grotto. We got a table on the patio right away, much to our surprise, and we had to put off the server who wanted our order a few times while we waited for Beth to arrive—she’d been looking for parking. Everyone had mozzarella sticks, the kids split a pizza, and Beth and I split a salad and a stromboli. I felt happy and kind of stoned from my swim, but it gradually wore off when I started thinking about needing to pack and clean out the refrigerator and all the leaving-the-vacation-house chores we had to do. Despite this, we watched a movie when we got home, Kramer vs. Kramer. I hadn’t seen it in a long time and it’s so evocative of its time, perhaps especially for a child of a late 1970s divorce (though my parents’ divorce wasn’t much like the Kramers’).

Saturday

We did all the aforementioned chores, left the house a little after ten, and split up. I’m actually not sure where the kids went, but Beth went for a walk and before I had one last swim and before we all had a lunch of fries and crepes and pizza, and before the kids and I went down to the water one last time to put our feet in the ocean and say goodbye to it, I did some errands, which included picking up the two gift certificates I promised my sister for her birthday in March. One was for the bookstore and one for the tea and spice shop. She’ll be able to redeem them in August when we return to the beach for another week, this time with extended family. It’s never easy to leave the beach, but it’s certainly easier when you’ve had such a string of fun days and when your next trip is only four weeks away.

Going West: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 70

Posted on April 18, 2022 by Steph

[Show as slideshow]

Washington is not a place to live in. The rents are high, the food is bad, the dust is disgusting and the morals are deplorable. Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country.

Attributed to Horace Greeley, New-York Daily Tribune, July 13, 1865

I actually think Washington and its surroundings are a very fine place to live, but we like other places, too, and spring break is a good time to visit them. Often we go east, to Delaware or Maryland beaches, but we have gone as far north as Vermont and as far south as North Carolina. This year we went west, for three reasons: to visit Beth’s mom in Wheeling; for North’s first college tour at Beth’s and my alma mater, Oberlin; and to visit North’s half-sibling Avery in Ypsilanti.

Before I write about the trip, though, a word about the mourning dove chicks. Sunday afternoon, just one day after my last blog post, I went out on the porch and noticed the nest was empty. I am really not sure what to think about this. There were no signs of struggle, no blood or feathers on the porch floor, but I didn’t think they were quite ready to fledge. I hadn’t seen any of the hesitant initial flights to the floor and back to the nest I often see, but on the other hand they weren’t tiny and helpless any more. In my mind, it could have gone either way. It could even be that the smaller one got snatched and the bigger one flew away from the scene of the crime. Since I’ll never know, I am hoping for the best.

Monday: Takoma Park, MD to Wheeling, WV (via Morgantown, WV)

Back to our travels: we hit the road around 10:30 and immediately turned around because a block or two from the house North and I realized we had not packed any masks. We were the only people wearing masks when we stopped at The Blue Goose Fruit Market and Bakery for treats and I was one of two masked customers when I went into Taco Bell to pick up our lunch order.

As we drove west, Trump signs got more common and spring seemed to rewind a bit. When we stopped in Morgantown to visit Stephanie, a friend of ours from college who teaches at WVU now, she had crocuses in front of her house and there were cherry trees in bloom nearby. It was nice to see them again as their bloom is so fleeting and our cherry trees were done. It was also nice to see Stephanie and drink peppermint tea and eat crumbly cheddar and talk about the books she’s teaching and her students and climate change (she teaches Environmental Humanities) and North’s thoughts about college.

We arrived in Wheeling around 6:30. YaYa had prepared a nice dinner for us, a vegetable-white bean soup, salad, and bread. We’d brought some leftover banana pudding cake North and their friend Ranvita had made on Sunday and when Beth’s aunt Carole came over after dinner, we all had some.

Tuesday: Wheeling

In the morning I read my book club book (Palace Walk) and Beth and YaYa went for a walk in Wheeling Park. Carole came over a little after noon to dye Easter eggs with us. North made the trans flag on one and got tie dye and batik effects on a few more. Beth made the Ukrainian flag with a heart sticker. I made very busy yellow and green one covered with spring-themed stickers. I initially put on just a few then decided more is more. Our collection of little felt hats was pressed into service, as it is every year. YaYa chose a green beret with a pipe cleaner spiral on top. Carole went with a more classic, unadorned look for her pink and half-green, half-blue eggs.

Later in the afternoon, YaYa, Beth and I went to Oglebay park to walk among the daffodils and tulips and around the little lake with its swan boats and ducks and a turtle sunning itself on a log. Beth’s aunt Jenny came by for a fly-by visit and then we had dinner at Carole’s house, which is two doors down from YaYa’s. She made spinach ravioli with sauteed vegetables and a salad and then she put out ice cream and gingersnaps. We lingered at the table for an hour or so after we’d finished and the two members of the older generation asked the lone representative of the younger one about high school and North was quite expansive about the classes they liked and the ones they didn’t and everything else they were asked about. We went back to YaYa’s house and Beth’s friend Michelle from her own high school days came over and we had a wide-ranging discussion about everyone’s health issues and life changes and work and relationships, in other words all the important things.

Wednesday: Wheeling to Oberlin, OH

Beth’s aunt Susan came by the next morning, full of news about her great grandchildren. And with that visit we’d seen all three of YaYa’s sisters in the space of two days. After Susan left, Beth and YaYa went back to Oglebay because YaYa had wanted to go to the gift shop the day before and it had been closed. While they were gone, I took a long walk in Wheeling Park and the adjacent cemetery.

After lunch, we hit the road for Oberlin. With pit stops so Beth could take a work call and so North and I could get coffee and use a restroom it took three and a half hours to get to our AirBnB. Beth went out for some groceries and I made egg salad out of some of our Easter eggs for dinner. I served it on toast with broccoli on the side.

We took an after-dinner stroll through Oberlin, traversing Tappan Square and walking through town. I felt right at home when I saw a short-haired young woman in Birkenstocks with a guitar slung over her back. Beth told North about three separate times that she thought they could be happy in Oberlin because “it’s a happy place.” We pointed out the movie theater where we had our second date (in July 1987) because every trip to Oberlin is a trip down memory lane for us and the kids just know to expect that.

We got back to the house just in time for me to log onto my book club meeting. It’s hybrid now and it’s not ideal because there are almost always technical snafus at the beginning and it’s hard to hear the people who are in person when you’re remote and I haven’t gotten the hang of how to jump into the conversation when I’m not in the room, so I just settled in to listen. Even with all the drawbacks I was glad to be able to do it. It’s better than missing it entirely. While I was in book club, Beth worked a little and then she and North played Battleship on their phones.

Thursday: Oberlin

In the morning Beth took a walk around campus and I read until North got up and then we went to the campus art museum. I had a strong desire to take North there because I visited it when I was a prospective at Oberlin and I was really taken with it. I remember thinking if I went to Oberlin I’d go there all the time, and while I didn’t go as often as I anticipated, I did go often enough to have favorite pieces. I showed North St. Sebastian Tended by Irene which I wrote an essay about for an art history class and this sculpture I really loved. Beth showed North her favorite painting and we browsed the rest of the eclectic collection.

From the museum we went to the campus bookstore, where North selected Wilder Girls, which is a book I’ve considered reading and now that it’s going to be in the house, I probably will. North says it’s horror with lesbian characters—“What more could you want?”

We were wandering around looking for somewhere to eat lunch (almost none of the haunts of our college days are still open, so there was no obvious choice) when I noticed North was slowing down and limping and in the interest of letting them get some rest before the walking tour, we decided to eat at a nearby Mexican place, rather than continuing to compare menus. I had a spinach quesadilla with a side order of refried beans. I wasn’t sure how the white flour tortilla would affect my blood sugar and I still don’t know because my sensor had just expired and I didn’t have a new one on yet.

We attended an information session held in a lecture hall where I had an intro Psychology class my first year. The presenter talked really fast for an hour, talking about the things every college touts at these things—student faculty ratio, the abundance of clubs and cultural events, how environmentally friendly the school is, although Oberlin’s goal to be carbon neutral in the next few years goes above and beyond. He also covered the Experimental College with its student-taught classes, the student-run co-op housing and dining halls, and opportunities to work closely with faculty. I never took an ExCo class but I knew people who did and I did eat and live in co-ops and my senior year I helped a professor teach literary translation workshop I took as a sophomore, so it all rang pretty true for me.

The walking tour was next. Beth asked the guide if he could go a little slow so North could keep up and he did. The tour didn’t take any longer than advertised, though, so either he cut some of his normal stops or he always walks pretty slowly. Oberlin is a smaller campus than many we toured with Noah, so maybe the guides don’t have to rush as much. We went from North quad to South quad, stopped at the library and saw a model dorm room. I peeled off from the group at the library because the id card office is there and I wanted to get an alumni id so I could use the pool later. The tour left before I finished and I had to catch up with it following Beth’s texted directions.

After the tour, I asked North if the presentation and tour made them more or less interested in Oberlin and they said they said about the same. What’s drawing them to it is the pre-law program, which I don’t think even existed when Beth and I were students. As North and I walked to the house, Beth went back to the library and got her own id card.

After a short rest, we went to the gym and Beth rode an exercise bike while I swam in the pool where I used to swim laps in college. The locker rooms have been renovated beyond recognition, but the pool looks pretty much the same. I looked at the board of swim team records and noticed a few date back to the early nineties, just after I graduated. It pleased me to think of someone just a couple years younger than me still holding a pool record. It was not a record day for me. The pool in Takoma where I swam closed at the beginning of the pandemic and never re-opened so I have only swum laps a handful of times in the past two years and I could feel it. I did about two-thirds of my usual routine and called it quits. My time wasn’t bad, but I was tired and Beth was finished so I didn’t want to make her wait.

While I am normally not at all self-conscious in changing rooms, I discovered I am when the average age of women in the room is about twenty (and most of them are members of the swim team, which had just finished practicing). I considered the irony of the fact that when I was that age (but not on the swim team) I actually wrote a poem called “In the Women’s Locker Room at Carr Pool” which was about all the different types of bodies in the locker room, students and faculty and little kids, all ages and shapes, and how they were all beautiful. I need to try to see myself with my younger self’s eyes.

Back at the house, we got excellent Thai takeout and watched an episode of The Gilmore Girls and then the second half of Being the Ricardos (which we’d started about a week earlier).

Friday: Oberlin to Ypsilanti, MI (via Lake Erie)

We lingered in bed that morning, and before we left Oberlin, we went out for coffee at a place called Slow Train Café, which might have been named for how long it takes to get your coffee. It wasn’t the baristas’ fault by any means. They were swamped. The coffee was good when we got it. We also checked out another bookstore, where we got a couple Oberlin t-shirts, one for Beth and one for my niece. (My sister also went to Oberlin.) Lily-Mei’s shirt had a squirrel on it because the squirrel is the unofficial mascot of the college. It’s because there are albino squirrels you can occasionally glimpse on campus. (We didn’t see it any on this trip.)

We hit the road, had lunch at Panera, and stopped at Maumee Bay State Park on Lake Erie, where North sat on swing with a view of the water and then collected little shells on the beach, while Beth and I took a short walk along the shore.

We got to our AirBnB in Ypsilanti a little after four. We unpacked a bit and I set out a variety of snacks from our store of food—garlic cheddar, olives, smoked almonds—and some raspberry lemonade we found in the fridge because North’s half sibling Avery and one of their moms was coming over.

We sat in the living room and got to know each other. As you can see, there is definitely a physical resemblance between the kids, which I knew ahead of time from pictures, but it seemed stronger in person, probably because Avery’s intonation and hand gestures are similar to North’s. When you see the whole package it’s kind of eerie. Besides having lesbian moms (not so surprising for donor-conceived kids) they have more in common. Avery is non-binary, into theater and likes to bake. Like North and the donor, they had red hair as a baby that changed to light blonde and then darkened as they got older. They also have joint issues and migraines.

Avery has met several of the group of fourteen known half-siblings, so I imagine it was less novel for their mom than it was for us, but it was a pleasant chat. Everyone got along and we all met up with Avery’s other mom at a pizza place for dinner. The kids had plans to spend all of the next day together, but North came back to the AirBnB with us for the night, where we watched an episode of Gilmore Girls before bed.

It was a very Good Friday.

Saturday: Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor, MI

Avery came by the next morning to pick up North. It was the first time I’ve watched North leave in a car driven by a peer, as none of their friends drive yet.

North and Avery spent the day wandering around Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor, shopping for books and crystals. They had lunch in a diner and then went back to Avery’s house where they had takeout pasta for dinner and watched a horror movie. North slept over at their house.

Left to our own devices for twenty-four hours, we got a leisurely start to the day. Beth took a walk. I did laundry, messaged back and forth with my friend Megan about meeting Avery, and read my book club book. After lunch, we went on our own little adventure. We visited the University of Michigan’s Matthaei Botanical Gardens and explored a small area of Ann Arbor. At the botanical gardens we walked through the conservatory, looking at cacti, a lemon tree, and other plants. Beth was quite taken with a kaleidoscope that’s aimed at a planter full of succulents. The images of the plants make the design when you spin it. Outside in the formal gardens, the daffodils were just getting started, but not much else was blooming, so we didn’t spend long there and took a walk on a wooded path that passed by a creek and some ponds. We saw geese and turkey.

In Ann Arbor, we picked up some groceries at a food co-op, got coffee (me) and drinking chocolate (Beth) at an upscale chocolate shop, where I also got myself a tiny dark chocolate Easter bunny and some toffee-almond eggs, and we made a pilgrimage to Zingerman’s deli, where we walked out with fancy bread, cheese, olive oil, potato chips, pastries, chocolate bars and a lighter wallet. Are you familiar with Zingerman’s? We’ve never been in person but we are fans of the catalog, and apparently so are a lot people on my Facebook page, based on the response to the pictures I posted there. I got Noah something for his birthday which I will not reveal here because he often reads my blog.

Back at the house, I blogged and then made dinner—sherry-cream mushrooms on toast, salad, and some leftovers (sautéed Brussels sprouts and an Easter egg). Beth and I watched the season finale of Abbott Elementary and the first episode of Severance.

Easter Sunday: Ypsilanti to Somerset, PA

In the morning, North came back from Avery’s house as we were packing up the house. Beth told them the Easter Bunny had left a basket in their room and after a brief search North found their basket of candy, bee socks from the botanical gardens, and dill pickle potato chips from Zingerman’s in the under-bed storage drawer.

It turned out we’d had a misunderstanding because we thought the visit with Avery was over and we were about to leave town and North thought they were going to see Avery again and have lunch before we left, so there was some texting between Avery’s mom and me and North and Avery and it was decided we’d swing by their house so the kids could have a proper goodbye. We all went inside and chatted for a while and my eyes were drawn to a picture of Avery in elementary school that looked a lot like North at that age. Then they showed us their garden and we piled back into the car.

We drove out of Michigan and all the way through Ohio and into Southwestern Pennsylvania, where we arrived at our third and final AirBnB around dinnertime. We picked up some canned soup at a Dollar General (no grocery stores were open on Easter) and Beth and North collaborated to make mushroom melts and soup. Afterward we watched two episodes of the Gilmore Girls and ate Easter candy. We watched four episodes on the trip, satisfying progress toward my recently announced goal of finishing the series before North leave for college so we don’t end up in a Buffy situation like we have with Noah now. (Not starting that show earlier in the pandemic was a strategic mistake.)

Monday: Somerset, PA to Takoma Park

We had to be out of the house by eleven, which meant rousing North from bed at ten. It was quite a chilly day in the Laurel Highlands with snow predicted. Beth and I both got in our morning walks before it started to precipitate. The house was in a neighborhood set on a very steep hill, terrace style. On my walk I found a path that went through the woods on the back side of the hill and then past a barn with horses in a corral and a pond. Spring seemed to have the weakest hold here of all the places we’d been, with forsythia just get started and daffodils and hyacinth the only flowers.

As if to emphasize this, by the time we left, freezing rain had set in. Eventually it changed over to snow and for a while it was like driving through a snow globe, with big fat flakes, sticking to the ground and the trees. Beth enjoyed it, as she never seems to get enough of winter weather. About a half hour after our stop for a late lunch it changed back to rain.

When we got home, we discovered spring in Takoma has advanced. Many more trees have leaves than when we left and there are azaleas and dogwoods in bloom.

“It was a good trip,” Beth said as we ate Indian takeout for dinner, and it was. I think it was one we’ll remember for a long time.

On the Horizon: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 66

Posted on February 28, 2022 by Steph

[Show as slideshow]

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

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

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

Travel News

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

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

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

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

Medical News

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All For The Love Of You

A Chronicle of Suburban Lesbian Family Life

Category Archives: Travel

A Wild Ride: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 77

Oregon Equinox

Lucky

The Next Chapter

Perfect Week

Home Again, Home Again

Take the Win

Fun Days

Going West: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 70

On the Horizon: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 66