First Saturday
En route to her family reunion, Beth and I had a picnic lunch and then a short walk at the Sideling Hill Road Cut, or as we’ve called it since the kid were small, “the stripey rocks.” There was a mountain view from our picnic table, and when we sat down to eat, Beth sighed and said, “I like mountains.” She likes them like I like the beach.
We pulled into Beth’s mom’s condo driveway around five on Saturday and from there proceeded to the cabin in Oglebay park where the reunion was taking place. Cabin isn’t quite the right word, as it was more like a small hotel, with two stories, eight bedrooms, and ample common space, both upstairs and downstairs. The upstairs was quite airy with a soaring ceiling in the main area. We knew what to expect because we stayed in the same cabin at the last reunion. In addition to the people staying in the cabin, there were people staying at the park lodge, and people staying with in-town relatives. It was a big and ever-shifting crowd.
This was the fourth reunion Beth’s mom’s family has had since 2002, when we brought our toddler son to one in a smaller cabin. There was a second one in 2012 and then a third one in 2016. It’s interesting to see how the family has gone through cycles since the first one. Noah was the youngest person in attendance at the first one and there were a bunch of kids older than him. Then at the middle two, our kids were almost the only kids (except a seventeen-year-old boy at the second one, which barely seemed to count to us at the time as our kids were so much younger, and a couple babies at the third one). But at this reunion there were about a half dozen kids who have been born since 2016 and three pregnant women, so the family is clearly in a growth phase, most of which is occurring in Beth’s aunt Carole’s branch.
The attendees were mainly descendants of Beth’s maternal grandparents—Beth’s mom, her three aunts (Carole, Susan, and Jenny) and their kids, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. It was startling to realize that of the four generations present, Beth and I are in the second oldest generation, the one in which many people are grandparents.
When we arrived, a couple people were constructing an easel to display the family tree that Jenny made and there was also a calendar of events and a list of who would be attending dinner each of the first several nights. (The next day Carole’s granddaughter Holly set up a posterboard display of photos from previous reunions.) That night we had pizza and talked to many, many people, some of whose names I learned (or re-learned) and some I never learned. A lot of people asked after Noah and North and we reported on their jobs and North’s college plans.
Many of the people at the reunion were Irish. Carole and husband raised their kids partly in Ireland and most of her kids, grandkids, and great grandkids still live there. The Irish parents were speaking to their kids in English and Irish and Marjorie (who’s Chilean and married to Carole’s grandson Eanna) spoke to her son Santino in English and Spanish.
After dinner, Beth and I took a short walk through the park because I hadn’t walked much during the day and then we had dessert. I had a slice of the blackberry pie we’d bought at a farm market on the drive—the group made short work of it—and Beth had ice cream.
We retreated to our downstairs bedroom a little after nine-thirty. We are early-to-bed people, and we were tired from staying up past our bedtime all week to watch the Olympics and from the drive. I slept all the way through the night without waking, which is quite unusual for me, as I’m a light sleeper. The room was dark and quiet, even with so many people upstairs.
First Sunday
In the morning people went their separate ways. Carole’s grandson Michael went for a run as he did most mornings, Beth and I each took walks, and many people headed to the pool at various times. There were some grocery runs and an expedition to get corn and tomatoes from a farm. I worked on my last blog post and this one, too. After her walk, Beth showed me photos of the morning mist and some cool spider webs she’d seen. She was animated and very happy to be in Oglebay.
My glucose monitor expired on Sunday morning and I’d forgotten to bring a new one. (I realized this about an hour into the drive.) It ended up taking several days to get an early refill approved and what with all the treats in the house, my self-control was not always what it should have been, but you know, vacation. To complicate matters, my Fitbit broke a few weeks ago, while we were at the beach, so while I was still taking a walk every day and trying to remember to get up and move every hour, I did often forget.
In the afternoon, I worked a little. I hardly ever work on vacation, but I have a big set of medical abstracts about probiotics and prebiotics to rewrite into plain English. The project is due in a few weeks, and I wanted to chip away at it. (I ended up working four days, never more than an hour.) Meanwhile, Beth’s aunt Jenny set up a station with white baseball caps and fabric pens for people to use to decorate them. People were doing this throughout the day and evening.
We celebrated Carole’s eighty-seventh birthday that night. It was the biggest gathering of the reunion, with perhaps fifty people. There was Italian takeout and birthday cake and Carol’s grandsons Tristan and Eanna played “Happy Birthday” and then “We Are Family,” on the piano while people sang. This was an appropriate choice with the lyrics “I have all my sisters and me” because Carole’s three sisters were all there. Sean gave a sweet speech he often gives at his mother’s birthday celebrations about how though the family moved around a lot during his childhood (to places as diverse as New York, Montana, and Ireland) that she always made wherever they lived feel like home because “home is where the love is.”
Afterward Carole exclaimed “I couldn’t be luckier” to have so many people she loved gathered in one place.
Sean then gave a half-hour presentation on family genealogy. He started with photos of the four sisters in high school in the 1950s and 60s and then dove into the past—nineteenth-century German immigrants who opened a store in Wheeling, seventeenth-century New England Puritans, and soldiers who fought in wars from the Norman Invasion, through American Revolution and Civil War (on both sides of the latter). The family can trace its ancestry directly to Edward the III and is distantly related to Audrey Hepburn, Charles Darwin, James Taylor, Jane Austen, and Meghan Markle. Sean then distributed bound copies of his research to all four sisters and one of their cousins, who has a particular interest in genealogy.
Monday
I didn’t sleep all the way through the night again, but I did sleep until 7:45, which is quite late for me. Beth did me one better and slept until 8:15. We learned soon after waking that Jenny had tested positive for covid. That was sad because she’d have to stay at home for the rest of the reunion (she lives in town) and she really likes organizing activities. She’d had a tie-dye event planned for the kids. (She sent the materials later in the week and it went on without her.)
That morning Beth and I were both struggling with balky internet (she to work, me also to work and to edit and post my last blog post to Facebook). While we were doing this there was a group yoga session on the upper deck—I was on the lower deck and could hear mysterious thumps as people moved the furniture around—and a bunch of people left for the pool.
Beth and I finished what we needed to do and went for a hike in the woods. The trail was sometimes gravel and sometimes dirt and went along a creek. We had to ford the creek a couple times—no problem as it was low—and cross little bridges or step from tree stump to tree stump that had been set into a path in a marshy area. We saw a couple small waterfalls plus the innards and one leg of a dead deer, so picked apart by vultures (perched nearby) that it took me a few seconds to realize it was a deer. That’s part of nature, too, I guess.
After lunch Beth and I went to the pool, encountering three different groups of people from our party on their way back to the cabin on the path between the cabins and the pool. Beth loves the pool at Oglebay. It’s a large rectangular pool with pretty stone building behind it. It was built by the CCC in that architectural style so common in American municipal and state parks. We talked about what an act of optimism that was in the Depression, imagining people would have the space for leisure in their lives. It’s a real gift from the past.
Beth’s mom worked at the pool snack bar as a teenager, so there’s family history there, too. We soaked in the pool for a while and I tried to swim laps, which involved dodging people left and right because there’s no lap lane. I did about a dozen laps the short way across the pool. It was nice to stretch my muscles and feel the sun on my back, but I gave up it up as too hazardous. Then we lay on towels in the sun to dry off and I read a little.
When we came back, Ailble, Michael’s middle daughter, who’s five, gave Beth a long, complicated update about the Grinch, who had apparently been skulking about the cabin and trying to steal things. The upshot was that she and some of the other kids had put a spell on him, which resulted in him returning a hat he had stolen from her. As she was talking, she saw a doe, got excited and confessed to us that “I have a crush on the deer.” She claimed to have kissed one and then she approached the passing deer, edging closer and closer. Eventually the deer loped away. Deer are everywhere in the park and very tame. Probably too tame for their own good, as the park last fall organized a bow-and-arrow hunt to cull their numbers.
Before she’d finished everything she wanted to say, Ailble had to leave because she was in a group of people who were going paddle-boating. Beth and I helped her mom and Carole’s late husband’s sister Pat shuck corn for that night’s cookout on the upper deck.
There was a huge spread for the barbeque—burgers, salmon, hot dogs, veggie hot dogs, and haloumi—plus many sides. Michael manned the grill and people ate both inside and out on the deck. After dinner there was a sing-along and dance performance. Michael’s wife Orla and their two oldest daughters Aishling and Ailble all took turns demonstrating step dancing, while their youngest daughter Eadadoin and another toddler girl (Fia, Tristan’s daughter) joined in, both clearly understanding this activity involved a lot of kicking.
The singing kicked off with “Country Roads,” because so many people had traveled such a long distance back to their ancestral home of West Virginia. Fia had a look of comic surprise on her face when everyone around her burst into song, but she quickly got used to it.
Over the course of the evening Sean and his sons Eanna and Tristan played the piano, clarinet, guitar, and a small Chilean stringed instrument to accompany the singing, and Carole’s grandchildren Kawika and Holly both sang solos. The singing went on for hours. The songs were mostly in English, but there was an Edith Piaf song in French and another in Irish. One of my favorite moments happened right after we finished “Sweet Caroline” because Fia kept on singing the “Oh oh oh” part. When it was my turn to make a request, I suggested Joni Mitchell’s “Chelsea Morning,” but the musicians asked for another choice, so I chose “Big Yellow Taxi,” which is more sing-along-friendly. I decided to go to bed once we’d all sung “Hallelujah,” because it seemed like a good closer, at least for my part in the event.
Tuesday
The next morning, we found out another member of our party had covid. This time it was Gina, who’s the sister of Aine, Sean’s ex-wife. Gina had traveled from Ireland and couldn’t go home, so a couple people who were staying at the cabin decamped for Carole’s house so bedrooms could be re-arranged to allow Gina her own room where she would isolate. I did wonder at this point if a sing-along in a group of covid-exposed people had been the best idea, even in a spacious, high-ceilinged room, but what was done was done. From then on, I started spending a lot of time outside or in our room. I didn’t avoid other people completely—after all, seeing people is the point of a reunion—but I did try to avoid large groups inside and ate most of my meals outside.
In the morning, while people were leaving for the pool, Beth and I went to her mom’s house for the internet, and during the hour and a half we were there, her mom popped over to Carole’s house (two doors down) and Susan, Susan’s son Scott, and Carole’s daughter Meg all came by. It was like a mini reunion there.
In the afternoon, Beth went back to the pool, and I took a walk around the pond and the gardens behind the nature center and saw people paddle-boating, a lot of ducks, a pollinator garden, and metal sculptures of bugs and animals.
Dinner that night was an Indian feast, cooked by Sean. It’s his signature meal—several curries (most vegetarian), dal, naan, and apricot chutney, delicious as always. He’d been in the kitchen for several hours making it. A large group had gone mini golfing and didn’t get back until 7:40, so we ate on the late side. While we were eating, Ailble informed us she’d been nuzzled by a deer, and she thought she might be the first person ever in the whole world to have this experience and she also thought there should be a celebration to mark this event. Fortunately, there was birthday cake for her grandmother Aine after dinner and after everyone had sung “Happy Birthday” and she’d blown out the candles two cupcakes were presented to Ailble with their own candles to blow out, so I guess that was her celebration.
Beth and I went for an after-dinner walk. We left around nine and there were still streaks of pink in the sky. Wheeling is west of Takoma Park and the sun sets later there. A cold front had come through, though without the expected rain, and it was nice weather for walking.
Wednesday
There were no new covid cases.
This was the designated day for excursions to Pittsburgh and its environs. There was a group that went to a children’s museum in the city, a group that went to Kennywood amusement park, and a group that went to see an evening Pirates game. I think Holly was the only one to go on two of the excursions (the park and the game). Orla stayed behind and had her first child-free day in eight years (!). She spent it walking, swimming, and reading and she said it was lovely. Beth and I went to Kennywood.
This wasn’t the main amusement park of Beth’s youth (that would be Cedar Point) and we never took the kids there, opting for Idlewild when they were small and we were in Wheeling, so I’d never been. It’s a medium-sized park, but when we got there, we realized it lacks some of the attractions Beth likes best—like a Ferris wheel, a mine ride, or an internal waterpark. (There’s one outside the park, but it’s a separate ticket.) We had lunch and rode the carousel together, and then she started waiting for me outside rides. I rode two small wooden coasters (the Jack Rabbit and the Racer), both of which dated back to the 1920s. The Jack Rabbit was scarier than I thought it would be, given the size, but that might be because I was alone in a seat for two without a divider and I felt like I was sliding around in the seat. The Racer has dividers. I was pleased to see so many small wooden coasters—there was at least one more I didn’t ride—because wooden coasters are my favorite and as I get older, I’m not as keen to ride the big ones. I always have to psych myself up to ride the even smallest ones at Cedar Point and Hershey Park, which are about twice the size of these.
Speaking of Hershey Park I was wearing a t-shirt I got years ago at Hershey Park that says, “I Survived the Sooper Dooper Loooper” and for the first time ever a stranger commented on it, saying, “I survived the sooper dooper looper, too!” Later while we were having ice cream, I saw a small boy at the counter wearing a shirt with the same slogan. When I bought it, my kids insisted that in adult sizes it’s ironic, but it is not for me. It identifies me as someone who likes roller coasters, but only smallish, usually older, ones. That’s my sweet spot.
I rode the swings, taking my shoes off so I could feel the wind on my bare feet, and I was sizing up the flume ride, trying to decide if it was small enough for me when we finally met up with the group that had come in the other car—Meg, her daughter Holly, Sean’s daughter Rebecca, and Aisling. They recommended the raft ride as something that might be tame enough for Beth and we headed that way. It was a good ride for her. You get into a six-person boat, and it floats down a river with some gentle rapids. It wasn’t too scary, and we all got wet.
After the rafts, four of us (everyone but Rebecca and Beth) braved the haunted house. Rebecca bought us cheese fries to eat in line because the others hadn’t had lunch yet. We thought we’d have to throw them out at the entrance but to our surprise, none of the staff said anything, so we kept them for the first part of the house.
The haunted house is mostly the kind where you ride in a car, but you start by walking into a room where a ghost on a screen informs you he is the spirit of the original owner of the house and everyone else who has lived there has remained as a ghost and he wants them evicted and then asks you to shoot them with laser guns provided in the buggies. It was a competition within each car and the ghost said each winner will be invited to stay in the house with him forever. Aisling said she wasn’t even going to try because she didn’t want to be stuck in the house. She did end up shooting, though. Holly won the competition in our car, with Meg a close second, and me a distant third, with Aisling not far behind me. I think Aisling might have had the right idea at first, though, because it was hard to appreciate the decorations while looking for green lights to hit.
By the time we finished, it was past five and we had a long drive home, so Beth and I left and drove back to a buffet of leftovers someone had set out, and a leisurely dinner on the upper deck, chatting with Sean, Carole, and Beth’s mom, and listening to the cicadas.
After dinner I showered and put on a new sensor, which we’d just picked up at CVS on the way home, after several days of wrangling with medical bureaucracy to get one. I was mostly happy to have it, because I’d wondered about my blood sugar a lot during the past few days, but it can also be nice to have a break from knowing, especially on vacation. I’m pretty sure ice cream followed by cheese fries would have produced a number I didn’t want to see.
Thursday
This was a laid-back day, at least for me. (Beth cooked for a crowd and had some work drama.) Some of the kids went on an expedition to the climbing wall with Carole and their parents and got their faces painted at a Family Day picnic a local retirement home was having in the park. (Orla said they crashed the party, but Carole knows some people who live there who invited them to join the fun.)
I took a walk past the lake to the park mansion, trying to find gardens I remembered there from previous years, but there was construction, and I didn’t end up finding much planted. On the way back, I stopped at the lodge to work, thinking the internet might be better there, and it was. When I got back to the house, I had lunch and helped Beth pick cilantro leaves off the stem for the cilantro-garlic sauce she was making for dinner.
In the afternoon, while most people were at the pool, I started A Haunting on the Hill, which I’ve had in my to-read pile for a long time (since Christmas maybe?) and put a good dent in it. I haven’t read for such a long stretch in ages, so that was satisfying.
Beth served her signature dinner for big gatherings—gazpacho and salt-crusted new potatoes with cilantro-garlic sauce, served with a cheese plate, baguettes and olives—to an appreciative crowd. Later that evening, Beth’s high school friend Michelle dropped by the cabin while most people were out on an ill-fated stargazing outing (it was cloudy and the park cancelled the event, so they salvaged the expedition by taking a walk instead), and we had a visit with her. As I was falling asleep, I noticed my throat was sore, but I was too sleepy to get up and take a covid test.
Friday
I took a test on waking—negative. I went for a walk that took me by the tennis courts where Beth worked as a teenager, without even knowing I’d find them. Around ten-thirty we set off for Pittsburgh, where we were having a lunch-and-movie date. The movie theater was in Squirrel Hill and there was an abundance of interesting restaurants nearby. We chose a tea house where we got mezze—humus, tzatziki, baba ghanoush, raw vegetables, and pita with cookies (chocolate chip for Beth and ginger-fig for me). I also got a chilled ruby tea. After lunch we had some time to kill so we walked on mix of residential and commercial streets through the neighborhood, which seems vibrant and funky.
The move was Didi, which I recommend if you like coming-of-age stories and you can stand to watch a boy in his early teens make bad decision after bad decision that make you want to reach through the screen and hug him or try to talk some sense into him.
We got back to the cabin and headed to the pool for a quick, last swim. We ran into Michael and Orla and their girls there and learned that Marjorie was the latest of us to fall ill with covid. I was mentally crossing my fingers that we could escape infection in day and a half we had left in Wheeling.
Second Saturday
On checkout day, I took one last walk in the park on a path through the golf course and around the swimming pool, where I saw women doing yoga on floating surfboards. I walked around an old, abandoned frame house near the pool and found a big patch of mint growing behind it and picked a leaf to chew.
We vacated the cabin and regrouped at Carole’s house before people went their separate ways. One group was driving to D.C. in a rented van for a few days of tourism. Another group was staying with Carole in Wheeling for a few days. And we were headed for the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia just outside North’s camp, where we’d pick them up Sunday morning.
We made a pit stop at Blackwater Falls, where we walked down to the wooden stairway to the base of the falls. It felt strange to be there in the summer, as it’s almost always winter when we go, but the falls are beautiful any time of year and it is easier to descend the stairs when they are not covered in ice and snow. From there we got ice cream at the snack bar (usually closed when we’re there) and drove to the canyon overlook. There was a wedding taking place in the field by the overlook and Beth was so charmed by this idea she said she wanted to have a fiftieth anniversary party there in thirteen years. Mark your calendars.
It was almost eight when we got to our AirBnB, which was an apartment in a large Italianate house. There were balconies, a portico, a reproduction of the Venus de Milo, a pool, and deck on the roof of the portico outside our apartment with a view of the mountains. This was an excellent place to watch the sun set and later the stars, including the Big Dipper, shining brighter in the sky than at home.
In between the sunset and the stargazing, we sat with our feet in the pool, watching the crescent moon rise through tree branches and bats swoop over the pool, listening to the cicadas, and smelling the bank of lavender growing behind us. It was quite the romantic place to relax after a longish drive.
Second Sunday
At ten-thirty we arrived at North’s camp and collected them and a fellow counselor who lives in Takoma and packed both kids’ belongings into our car. Rose is the oldest child of Mike, the filmmaker who’s been a mentor to Noah, and Sarah, who used to be the Secretary-Treasurer of Beth’s union.
On excursions to town all summer North had been seeing signs for local attractions they wanted to visit so we hit up a couple of them on the way home. Our first stop was Natural Chimneys Regional Park. It’s just what it sounds like, giant limestone formations that look like chimneys, or (even more so in my opinion) the ruins of a castle. We admired them and then wandered down to the North River, which was full of water again after being dry for much of the summer.
North wanted to have lunch at a restaurant in Harrisonburg that specializes in grilled cheese, but it turned out it was closed on Sundays, so we headed straight to Luray Caverns and had (probably inferior) grilled cheese and soup at their snack bar before descending into the cave for a self-guided tour.
I don’t think we’ve taken North to a cave since they were ten and this was a nice one, with winding paths and majestic formations in a ten-story room and a pool that reflects the stalactites on the ceiling so they are doubled. North said they were tempted to touch the formations. Of course they didn’t, but we did see people disregarding that particular rule because people are idiots.
We listened to a couple of episodes of the Handsome podcast in the car and a couple hours after leaving the caverns we stopped for frozen custard. It was a fun ride home and it was nice to have Rose along for company.
We got home around five and were reunited with Noah and the kittens. I swear Walter grew perceptibly in the nine days we were gone. (The size gap between the two keeps increasing. North says at almost five months, she still looks like a kitten, but he looks like a half-grown cat.) In our absence they both learned how to get up onto Noah’s loft bed, which was a great triumph.
We now have twice the zinnias we had when we left and new blooms on the sunflowers, some of which are now taller than me. Plus, there were two cucumbers big enough to pick and about cup of cherry tomatoes and all the herbs are doing well. So, I think we can safely say Noah succeeded in his primary and secondary goals of keeping the cats and the garden alive.
It will be less than two weeks before we hit the road again, and that time we’ll be leaving our youngest at college, where with luck they will grow and thrive, too.
Update, 8/15: On Wednesday, four days after we got home, we learned that Carole and Santino both had covid, bringing the total to five attendees of the reunion.