Note to North: There are some vague indications of what’s in your care package included. Read at your own risk.
First Friday:
Beth and I picked my mother up from the airport the last Friday in May, the day before we left for the beach. (Noah was going straight from work to a concert so he did not come to the airport with us.) Mom had scored a direct flight from Sacramento to DC, a rare find, but it was to Dulles and landed around rush hour, so we spent almost half as long in traffic getting from the airport to her Silver Spring hotel as she had in the air flying from the other side of the country. We were expecting it to be a long ride, though, plus we’d just reunited and had a lot to talk about, so we settled in and it wasn’t too bad.
Two days earlier we’d had a worse driving experience. The second day of the Michigan-to-home leg of our trip featured a long traffic jam in Maryland just before Frederick, and a strange noise coming from the back of the car, which lead to Beth renting a car for the beach trip because there wasn’t time to get our car seen by a mechanic. The last bit of that ride, from Frederick to Takoma Park, with the check engine light on the whole time, was quite stressful. A little rush hour traffic doesn’t compare.
We had pizza at a Matchbox near Mom’s hotel. The food was good and we were eating outside on a lovely evening, which made the terrible service easier to bear. The crazy thing about the service was that the food came after a reasonable amount of time, but when it did, we still didn’t have water, silverware, or plates. And we had to keep asking servers, several different ones, and when we finally got these things, they came one at a time with long pauses between. The pizza was cold by the time we started eating it. Mom talked with North on the phone during dinner and later that evening, they called again to give me and Beth a video tour of their apartment.
First Saturday:
That morning, we picked Mom up at her hotel, where she and Noah were reunited, and we drove to Rehoboth as a foursome. It was a smaller group than usual. North, my sister Sara, brother-in-law Dave, and niece Lily-Mei couldn’t make it this year. We’d also invited Beth’s mom and brother John and sister-in-law Abby, but they couldn’t come either.
We made a lunch stop at Taco Bell and Dairy Queen. I texted North a picture of the big red spoon they’ve attached the to the side of Dairy Queen and shared the news with them that the day before Noah had gotten a job offer at the same media company where he worked during the summer of 2024, editing video for businesses, organizations, and Democratic political candidates. His official start date isn’t until the middle of June, but he’d been going into the office on an ad hoc basis since the last week of May, so the offer wasn’t a surprise. He got an official contract to sign later that week. The job is much like the one he had two years ago, but with slightly more responsibility. Also, the office has moved from Georgetown to downtown Silver Spring, which will be a lot more convenient for him. The job will last until the election. He has worked steadily (though not full-time) this spring, editing videos for the National Association of Letter Carriers, so these back-to-back jobs will make a longer stretch of employment than he had in 2025. We are all glad about this.
We arrived in Rehoboth, unpacked, and by 5:15 I was walking on the beach while Beth went grocery shopping for dinner and breakfast ingredients. It was chilly on the beach. It was chilly for most of the week, in fact. We don’t usually come during the shoulder season, but houses are cheaper before public schools are out and back when I reserved the house we didn’t know what North’s summer job would be and as day camp counselor was a possibility I thought before school let out could work well if that was what they ended up doing. As it turned out, I was kind of sorry about coming so early because the water was cold and swimming in the ocean is one of my very favorite things.
We threw together a quick dinner of burgers, fried tofu, corn on the cob, and baked beans. Noah, who has recently become interested in basketball, watched the last NBA semifinal game.
First Sunday:
In the morning Beth did a bigger grocery shopping trip, and I took a walk to BrowseAbout because my sister had ordered a book to be delivered there for my birthday present. It turned out I had not read the notification very carefully and it wasn’t due to arrive in the store for a few more days. I didn’t feel the trip was wasted, though, as the walk was mainly along the boardwalk, and I found something I thought North would like and I bought it for a care package we were putting together. We were buying things for it all week.
We had a video call with North late that morning and they gave Mom and Noah the virtual tour of their apartment Beth and I had already had. They said their training had gone well and they seem pleased with the apartment and the neighborhood. They’d been to the movies twice and were looking forward to starting work the next day. After the call we all went out to lunch at a café that we’d never tried before.
I went to the beach in the late afternoon. I had not slept well the night before and I was tired, so I split the time between lying on my towel with my eyes closed listening to the ocean, sitting on the towel watching the ocean, and wading in the ocean up to my knees. I wasn’t tempted to go in deeper.
Mom made ravioli and salad for dinner. We went to the boardwalk twice that evening. First, Beth, Noah, and I went for a walk and got fudge at Candy Kitchen for later and ice cream and frozen yogurt, including a dish for Mom, which we brought back to her in an only slightly melted state. She did come with us because the arthritis in her left knee (the one that hasn’t been replaced) had taken a sudden turn for the worse a couple weeks earlier and the walk to the café that afternoon had been enough walking for her. She ate the ice cream and then shortly before the moon was supposed to rise, all four of us went back to the stretch of boardwalk a block from our house to watch it. It was a full moon, big, round and orangey red, rising from the horizon over the sea. Venus and Jupiter and the Big Dipper were also visible in the Western sky. It was magical.
Monday:
The next day was the first day of June, so I went on a walk that morning in search of Pride flags to photograph and post to Facebook. I found some, plus a rainbow flag poster in a storefront, rainbow crosswalks and a woman on the boardwalk in a rainbow flag t-shirt. It seemed as if I had to look harder than I expected, though. Beth and I talked about it, and she said she didn’t think Rehoboth was as much of a gay enclave as it was when we started to come here thirty-five years ago. In some ways, this is good because it means LGBTQ+ people are more integrated in society than we were when Beth and I were in our twenties, but it’s also sad to lose gay spaces. (“Kind of like the Negro Leagues,” I said because we’d recently watched part of Ken Burns’ Baseball.)
Noah went out to lunch by himself. He said when you don’t go to the beach, the experience of being in Rehoboth is “largely culinary.” As I was the only person who had even been to the beach so far, this was true for many in our party.
Speaking of going to the beach, I went in the mid-afternoon. It was still windy and cold for swimming, but I did wade almost up to my waist and spent the rest of my time there either lying on my towel, sitting in a beach chair with my wet legs wrapped up in the towel to keep warm and looking at the ocean or reading. I had to leave on the early side because we were going out for Japanese.
The Cultured Pearl is one of our favorite restaurants in Rehoboth and it did not disappoint. We were seated next to a window, and we could see one of the koi ponds out on the deck. I find these fish beautiful and fascinating. I shared seaweed salad with Beth and Noah, edamame with Old Bay with Beth and Mom (she thought she wouldn’t like it, but she did), and vegetable tempura with Noah. I did not share my slice of peanut butter pie. Mom got a seafood pasta dish and Beth and Noah got sushi and noodles and chocolate torte and a banana tempura sundae.
When we got back home, I took a short walk on the board walk to keep my blood sugar from spiking after tempura and dessert in the same meal and then Beth, Noah and I played a complicated card game called Sea Salt & Paper. It’s one of Noah’s recent acquisitions that he got to take to his games group.
Tuesday:
Tuesday morning Beth and I went to the farmers’ market and the cheese shop to get strawberries and ingredients for her dinner that night. In between she needed to take a call from her brother, so I went to a boardwalk pavilion to read a book while they talked.
My mother and I had lunch at our usual lunch spot. We eat there because it’s right off the boardwalk and many tables have an ocean view. The vegetarian fare isn’t great, but I usually make one of my rare departures from vegetarianism to eat clams there. But alas, clams were not on the menu this year. My justification for occasionally eating clams is that they do not have eyes and can never have looked me in the eye. Perusing the menu, I stopped to google “Do scallops have eyes” and they do—up to one hundred! Then I started to wonder, what if clams do have eyes so I looked that up and it turns out it depends on the species, which is something to consider for later. Anyway, I had a salad. The view was nice and we got frozen custard on the boardwalk afterward.
I went to the beach and again could only convince myself to wade in up to my waist. The water was 61 degrees according to the chalkboard on the back of the lifeguard chair and the air was only a little warmer than that. It was pleasant to read and watch the ocean, though. I saw a dolphin jump out of the water upside down (belly up). I’ve never seen that before. For a second I had trouble even understanding what I was seeing.
Beth made her signature beach week meal that night—gazpacho, salt-crusted new potatoes with cilantro-garlic sauce, fancy cheese, bread, and olives. Everyone always looks forward to this and it was delicious as always.
After dinner, Noah and I went to the boardwalk. This is the last summer the Haunted Mansion at Funland will exist in its original form. They are going to renovate it, so though he hasn’t been inside it in years, I convinced him to come with me for old times’ sake. It was the same as always—the many skeletons, the giant spider, the room full of tiny skulls Noah liked best when he was in elementary school (he figured out almost immediately that it was done with mirrors), the zombie that scared North the most when they were about the same age, and the Frankenstein’s monster that most impressed Lily-Mei in her younger years. It made me quite nostalgic for all these children, now a teen and two twenty-somethings (and only one of them with us).
The former child with me wanted to know if we could “integrate ice cream” into this outing and we did, even though I’d already had frozen custard earlier in the day. Well, I only get one summer week at the beach a year and this was it.
When we got home, Noah and I watched the season finale of The Testaments and Mom watched, too, even though she had not watched any of the nine previous episodes. She’s read the novel but by the end of the season, the plot had strayed considerably from the novel so I’m not sure how much sense it made to her.
Wednesday:
We had a mid-morning breakfast at Egg. (Is it brunch if you do it on a weekday?) As per usual in the summertime, Noah and I both got the lemon curd-blueberry crepes and I gave him one of my three and I added a poached egg to my order. Mom thought the crepes sounded so good she got them, too. Beth got a yogurt parfait. We ate on the patio. The cool weather was nice for that.
Mom and I spent some time on the front porch, talking, reading (her), and blogging (me) before lunch. Then I went for a walk on the boardwalk, dropped off a book I’d finished at a Little Free Library, picked up another one, came home and chopped some vegetables for dinner.
Mom and I headed for the beach in the late afternoon. We could only stay a little over an hour because it was my night to make dinner, but it was nice to have company and we saw both dolphins and pelicans, which my mom loves. I still couldn’t bring myself to get in the water deeper than my waist, though it occurred to me that if North were there, they probably would have talked me into it. I’d been thinking of them a lot. I knew what they would have ordered at Egg. It would have been nice to have them with us on our last trip through the original Haunted Mansion. And if they’d gotten me into the water, we probably would have had a nice talk there.
I made mushroom-walnut soft tacos with a citrus slaw for dinner. Then Mom and I retired to the porch and Beth and Noah watched For All Mankind. After that Noah switched to watching basketball and I left to take a short solo walk on the boardwalk and beach. There was honeysuckle growing at the end of our block, right before the boardwalk starts and it smelled so sweet, even more so at night. The beach and boardwalk weren’t completely deserted, but they were quiet and lovely in the gathering dark.
Thursday:
In the morning Mom and I lingered over the breakfast table and then I went for a walk on the boardwalk. Along the way, I stopped and picked up items at Candy Kitchen and the Tea & Spice Exchange for North’s care package. Mom and Noah went out for lunch.
Mom and I went to the beach and stayed from about 3:15 to almost six. This is not a long time for me to spend at the beach, but it was the longest stretch of the trip so far. It was windy, but a little warmer and the water temperature had gone up one whole degree, to 62 degrees, plus the air was in the mid-seventies. (It was the first day I went to the beach without a long-sleeved shirt over my suit.) So, I decided, this was the day I would go all the way into the water, instead of just wading.
I didn’t go in right away, though, because I thought once I got wet, I’d be cold. Mom and I talked and watched dolphins, pelicans, and ospreys and read until a bit after five and I went in. The water was cold, but I got used to it more quickly than I thought I would and stayed in about a half hour. The waves were breaking closer to shore than I would have liked for a really satisfying swim, but it was good just to be in the water at last. It was enough. I emerged feeling happy and sat on my towel, not even cold as I dried off.
Back at the house Noah wasn’t quite finished making dinner, vegetarian crab cakes (made of chickpeas, artichokes, and hearts of palm), so after I showered (in the outside shower, another beach pleasure I was experiencing for the first time on this trip), I gave him a hand. This is his traditional beach meal and Mom said it was “even better than last year” because of the crust he’d gotten on the cakes. We all watched Rental Family that night.
Second Friday:
In the morning I went to BrowseAbout to pick up the book Sara got me. Mom had almost run out of books herself, so she came along. While she was browsing about, Beth and I went to the French bakery on Rehoboth Avenue for beignets, but while I’d had good macarons there earlier in the week, the beignets were unsatisfactory, basically little glazed doughnuts, served cold. I ate mine on the boardwalk, but Beth didn’t even want hers, so we saved them for Noah.
Beth and Noah went out to lunch, then to the Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge, where they saw eagles, herons, ospreys, red-winged blackbirds, turtles, and fiddler crabs. Mom wasn’t up for a hike so she and stayed behind and we went to the beach. This time I went in right away and stayed for an hour. The ocean was calm with no big waves, but it was nice to be embraced and rocked by the water.
We went out for pizza at Grotto and then got ice cream and frozen custard on the boardwalk and sat to eat it and watch as the evening light went golden and our shadows were cast on the dunes. It would have been nice to stay longer but I wanted to get mostly packed that night to reduce morning stress and we did get mostly packed up.
Second Saturday:
Once we were checked out of the house, I went to the beach. While everyone else waited for me in a coffeehouse, I swam in the biggest waves of the week. This happens so often I started to wonder if it had something to do with location. Rather than swimming close to whatever house we’re staying in, on the last day I often swim in front of Rehoboth Ave so I can meet my family for lunch. Could it be the waves are always bigger there? I should do an experiment some future year. Anyway, it was a fun swim, except for the time I dived under a wave that was so close to the shore there was nothing under it and I ended up rolling around on the sand and almost lost my swim bottoms.
We got crepes for lunch at our usual stand, then made a last trip to the beach so Noah and I could put our feet in the water and say goodbye to the ocean. He kept his feet in the water for twenty-six waves, the number corresponding to the last two digits of the year. As we waited in line at the foot bath I told him, “If we didn’t always do this and I asked you to do it, you’d think it was crazy, but it’s fun.”
He agreed and then added “More so in summer, though.” (He does the goodbye ritual barefoot all year long. I tend to wear boots in the fall and winter.)
On our way out of town, we stopped at the Crocs outlet because North and I both needed a new pair. Theirs went into their care package and it won’t be a spoiler to read it here because Beth sent them pictures of options and they chose a flowered pair.
There was traffic coming home, so we were all tired by the time we arrived. We had dinner at a Cava near Mom’s hotel and then went home to be reunited with the cats and check the progress of the garden, and then we watched an episode of Hacks and went to bed without unpacking much or starting laundry.
Second Sunday:
In the morning, Beth and I went to the farmers’ market and then to Takoma Park Pride, which was taking place nearby. We took a selfie at the photo op station, which was draped with folds of different colored fabric and then we watched the beginning of the parade. I always enjoy this parade, which has an emphasis on children and families. There was an elementary school rainbow club, Girl Scouts, people with signs that said things like “Let Me Be Perfectly Queer:” and “Sounds Gay. I’m In,” dykes on bikes who got off them to do cartwheels in the street, and a trans woman who’s running for County Council.
We left the parade in the middle to meet Mom and Noah at her hotel and have a video call with North in the lobby, where we told them about the beach and they filled us in on their first week at work. They are going to be working a Pride event soon (for work), they were planning to see a play (on their own), and they want to adopt a cat. We have our doubts about this plan, as they are going to be moving every few months for the next year at least. They will be in Wyandotte for the summer, Oberlin in the fall, abroad (probably in Ireland) in the spring, and now they are talking about spending next summer in Sweden.
Mom, Beth, Noah, and I had lunch at Lebanese Taverna and then Noah left for his games and the rest of us left for the airport. I walked Mom inside and found an agent when the kiosk wasn’t working right. There were a lot of people wanting the agent’s attention, so once I was sure Mom was on her list, I said goodbye and Beth brought the car around and picked me up and our visit was over. Even with the small group, chilly weather, Mom’s limited mobility and all, it was still enough.