I’m in Wheeling now and will be for probably another month or so. Today was the first day I worked because the week since I’ve been reunited with Beth has been eventful, with two short trips, one to Pittsburgh and one to Wyandotte, Michigan.
Before I Left: Saturday to Tuesday
A few days before I left for Wheeling, I sent Beth a list of groceries. She had asked me what I wanted her to have on hand for me when I arrived. In a pleasing parallel, I was doing the exact same thing at home, shopping and filling the house with food Noah likes, particularly non-perishables. (Vexingly, one of the items he requested, a sweet potato, didn’t make it home from the grocery store, but otherwise I got everything he wanted and some of it in large quantities.)
Then I made a batch of vegetable stock to leave for him and wrote instructions on how to make more when it runs out. I made chocolate-covered peanut clusters with the tag end of a bag of chocolate chips and split them between some to leave and some to take.
I dug up the last of the new potatoes (Noah and I had the first half of our small crop for our Fourth of July dinner) to take with me and I cut some chives and rosemary from the garden, also to take. Noah and I tidied up the flower bed, tying back the Black-Eyed Susans that had fallen over on the not-yet blooming sunflowers so they could have some breathing room. I asked him to send me pictures of the sunflowers and zinnias when they blossomed because I was afraid that I’d miss much of the bloom period of my two favorite flowers. (He came through with pictures of two sunflowers yesterday.)
Monday was my last day of work and my last night of cooking at home. I finished some web copy for a black ginger product and made quinoa-veggie bowls with chickpeas. My flight didn’t leave until late afternoon, but I took the whole day off Tuesday to pack, do a little more last-minute shopping, and meet my friend Becky for coffee.
My flight was uneventful, though my backpack got pulled aside in the security line. The agent asked if I had a squash in my bag, which was puzzling because I did not. I was curious what she’d seen, but when she inspected it, she had nothing to say on the subject.
I arrived at the Pittsburgh airport in the early evening and while I was inside the doors waiting for Beth’s car to pull up to the curb, I noticed sunlight from the windows or maybe a skylight was casting rainbows on the floor. It felt like a welcome. Soon Beth and her mom were welcoming me, too. Beth and I hugged behind the car (a new one she just bought because of the car trouble we had coming home from dropping North off in Michigan in May) but briefly to avoid holding up traffic.
We had dinner at a diner with a lot of Greek and Italian specialties so between the three of us we split a huge platter of eggplant parmesan, the biggest piece of spanakopita I have ever seen, plus two salads, a piece of cheesecake, and a dish of ice cream. It was later than we usually eat, I was hungry, and it was delicious.
As we drove to Wheeling, the sun was setting and it was huge and fiery red. Beth thought it might be because of the wildfire smoke that was drifting down from Canada. When we got to Beth’s mom’s house we went almost straight to bed. We’d all been up early—Beth took her mom to a 7 a.m. medical appointment and I’d also woken early, fretting about my journey, so we were all wiped out.
Before I went to bed, though, I made a discovery in my backpack: the missing sweet potato! It must have fallen out of one of the tote bags full of groceries I had inside my backpack on Sunday. I sent Noah a photo of it and he responded, “Enjoy.” I was sorry I’d inadvertently swiped his tuber, but at least now I knew what the TSA agent had seen in my bag. I wondered if she came home and told her family in an exasperated tone, “And when I asked if she had a squash, she just said no…” But honestly, it probably wasn’t the strangest thing she saw that day.
Anniversary Getaway in Pittsburgh: Wednesday to Thursday
Wednesday was the thirty-ninth anniversary of Beth’s and my first date/kiss, so we took a quick overnight trip to Pittsburgh to celebrate. Before we left Beth’s mom’s house, we went to the condo pool. Beth treaded water, I swam laps, and her mom sat under an umbrella and read sections of the Post I had brought with me. Beth and I left for Pittsburgh in the mid-afternoon.
Our hotel was a former monastery in the North Shore neighborhood. It was very charming. If you’re thinking austere monk cells, the rooms were not like that. Those monks had it good. Our room had a bay window that looked out onto a very pretty courtyard with flowers and a fountain. We settled into the hotel and rested a bit before dinner.
Dinner was at a funky little vegetarian restaurant. It was price fixe with three appetizers and two more courses. Beth chose the zucchini pierogies and the cabbage pastrami. I had a Ceasar salad with sugar snap peas, and Lion’s Mane mushroom on a bed of a bed of masa. Everything was very good and it’s nice to be at all all-vegetarian restaurant where we can eat anything on the menu. Oddly, though, the whole menu was light on protein and given that we went out for ice cream afterward and I forgot to take my diabetes medication until a few hours after dinner, I suppose it’s not surprising that I went out of range, but not by much and it was a special occasion. I have no regrets. We’d considered reading in the courtyard after dinner, but when we got back to the hotel it was still around ninety degrees, so the air-conditioned room seemed more appealing.
We did eat breakfast in the courtyard the next morning. You had to order the night before and specify a time to eat and then you could pick up your food in the breakfast room. I had an egg and cheese croissant, a clementine, and tea. I went out of range yet again on a meal it would have been fine for me to eat any time other than breakfast when I am particularly reactive, but other than bringing my own food, it was the best option for me.
The courtyard had some interesting plantings, with flowers spilling out of open suitcases. The main fountain was being emptied and cleaned, but there was a little fountain with water coming out of a stone lotus flower. I was also taken with a little statue of a griffin (maybe because Noah and I are reading a book in which some of the characters are griffins). After we checked out of the hotel we went to a nearby grocery store where we got two pairs of reading glasses for me, as mine had broken the night before, and I go through them quickly between breakage and loss.
The Warhol Museum was our next stop. I highly recommend it if you’re in Pittsburgh. They have an interesting collection, and we learned a lot about Warhol. There was only one soup can painting, but a lot of other commercially themed art and many portraits (including Jackie Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Natalie Wood, Mao, plus too many others to list). There were films running and a room of silver balloons floating around you were allowed to touch. There were also raised, tactile versions of several painting on every floor for the blind.
Warhol was a second-generation immigrant from a working-class family, and it made me think with sadness and anger about how as a country, we are devaluing and persecuting people just like that, who contribute so much to our culture. It’s so self-destructive, the direction we are headed…
After the exhibits we visited the gift shop and the snack bar where I got an iced latte and Beth got a coke in a glass bottle, because the coke painting had put her in the mood. She said it was the first coke she’d had in years, and it was “an elixir.” Then we took photos in the photo booth as an anniversary memento.
Just around the corner from the museum, a pickle festival called Picklesburgh was taking place. It was all over the city, but the part we transversed was on the Andy Warhol and Roberto Clemente bridges and along the waterfront between those two bridges on both sides of the river. It was a very scenic place for a festival and people were really into it. The crowd was decked out in pickle headbands and pickle t-shirts with many more for sale (some more suggestive than others—e.g: “I’ll Pay You a Nickel to Tickle My Pickle”). There were also more people in green than you’d expect in a random crowd; we saw one whole family in different shades of green pose by the giant pickle balloon on the Andy Warhol bridge.
There was all kind of pickle merch for sale (we got earrings for North after considering several t-shirts) and pickles to consume of course—pickles on a stick, pickle eggrolls, pickle beer, pickle lemonade, etc. We almost got a pickle grilled cheese sandwich but went with the more unusual pickle pierogies and a half portion of pickle-and-cheese-stuffed potato waffle with ranch dressing. If you think this sounds good, you would have liked it.
Just as we were leaving, I realized I had already lost one pair of my new reading glasses. We retraced some of our steps and went back to the museum to check the lost and found, but without any luck. The staff was very nice, though, offering to let me back into the museum for free to search. Well, at least we got two pair.
Before we left Pittsburgh we visited a high-end chocolate store. I bought a chocolate and caramel-covered honeycomb bar and some dark chocolate with sour cherries and gold dust, which I didn’t even realize was in the confection because I didn’t have any glasses with me, having left the other pair in the car. We were an area with a lot of interesting shops, but it was hot and starting to get mildly hazy with smoke from the wildfires, so we decided to go back to Wheeling (where the air was better). On the way home we stopped at a farmers’ market in Washington, Pennsylvania where we got corn, apricots, nectarines, and lemonade. We were home by four, just twenty-five and a half hours after we left.
For dinner we had vegetarian fish filets, green beans, tomatoes, and the new potatoes and chives from our garden. Lunch, while tasty, had not been the healthiest, so it felt good to eat some vegetables. Beth’s aunt Carole and cousin Sean, who is spending the summer with Carole, dropped by after dinner, to pick up some extra ears of corn we bought for them and to visit. Then we started to pack because the very next day, we were leaving on another trip, to visit North in Wyandotte.
Road Trip to Michigan: Friday to Monday
For the past few days, North had been sending us pictures of the wildfire smoke, which was much more intense in Michigan than in West Virginia. They worked from home and didn’t leave their apartment from Wednesday to Friday night, when we arrived. I took my daily walk in Wheeling that morning (masked) before we hit the road because while the smoke was worsening there, at Very Unhealthy, it was better than anywhere else we’d be that day.
The day we traveled, the worst of the smoke had shifted away from the Detroit area east to Toledo and that was good news because we weren’t spending long there, but we did pass through it. Much of Ohio and the first part of Michigan were Hazardous. The smoke created an eerie haze, and Beth said it looked like a post-apocalyptic movie. When we were approaching Cleveland, we could barely see the skyline. We masked whenever we were outside, though few other people did.
The smoke in Wyandotte was about equivalent to what we’d left behind in Wheeling. We arrived at the big condo building where our rental unit was, dropped off our things, and then went to pick up North from their studio apartment. We’d seen it on video calls, but never in person, so that was nice. We ordered pizza from North’s favorite pizza place and ate it in our more spacious quarters (you can see the haze through the window in the picture of North eating pizza) and watched Clueless because it was on North’s list of 90s and aughts movies they wanted to see.
By Saturday, the smoke had cleared, and air quality was now better in Michigan than it was in Wheeling (Moderate and Good at different times in the day). This was good news because going to a lake beach was North’s top agenda item for the weekend. In the late morning, after coffee at North’s favorite coffeehouse, and picking up some groceries, we drove to William C. Sterling State Park, where we spent several hours wading in Lake Erie, picnicking, sitting in the shade of the trees, walking along the shoreline, and wading again. The air and water temperature were just perfect, warm but not hot and cool but not cold. I saw some red-winged blackbirds on my walk and some interesting driftwood tree stumps with twisted roots. (I also saw people in beach chairs in water up to their waists reading on tablets. It made me nervous just to see that.)
It was a very pleasant outing, only slightly marred by the fact that I got a bee sting walking barefoot through the grass on the way to the changing rooms when we were leaving (against the advice of my mother-in-law, who I will say for the record was right). North got the stinger out for me, and it wasn’t until later that I reflected on what a role reversal that was. They are a capable grown-up person with an apartment and a job, but I had to wonder, what happened to my baby? We stopped for ice cream on the way back. My foot still hurt, which may have led to my indulging myself in a hot fudge sundae. That makes sense, right?
Back at the condo we called my mom because it was her birthday. All four of us sang “Happy Birthday” to her and chatted about her birthday plans to go out to dinner in Sacramento with her gentleman friend Paul. Beth made a delicious dinner of barbequed tofu, fried green tomatoes, and corn on the cob for dinner. We went down to the condo’s pool after dinner. North and I got into the water again and Beth and her mom hung out in a poolside cabana. I swam laps for five or ten minutes but mostly hung out with North, talking about various things, including some of their frustrations with their job. North loves to be in the water and without a car or much in the way of public transportation they haven’t had much opportunity this summer, so it was nice for them to being able to do it twice in one day.
Sunday was a more low-key day. We went out for brunch—I got waffles with blueberries and whipped cream—and then I took a walk along the Detroit River and observed the geese, ducks, and seagulls. I also walked by a marina with small boats and houses built on platforms in the water instead on the ground, which I thought was interesting.
North did laundry at our place (it costs money in their building), and we went grocery shopping with them so they wouldn’t have to order groceries online this week. We watched two episodes of Gilmore Girls and then went out for ice cream again because it was National Ice Cream Day. We had it late in the afternoon, so no one was very hungry for dinner. We ordered a modest repast of soup, sushi, edamame, and seaweed salad from a Japanese restaurant after frustrated attempts to order from two different Thai places and a Chinese one—they were all either closed or not accepting online orders. The vivid sunset that night looked a lot like the one we’d seen on the way home from the Pittsburgh airport. It’s funny how something so destructive as wildfire can also cause beauty.
On Monday morning we met North for coffee before work and went with them to see their workspace and meet some of their co-workers. Then we packed up the rental unit and drove away. We took our time on the way home, stopping for a couple hours in Vermillion, Ohio to eat lunch at a hot dog stand and soak in Lake Erie. It was a nice way to break up the drive and Beth was proud of herself for being spontaneous.
Still, it was sad to leave North. Also, Maya and I had hoped to meet up on this trip, but it didn’t work out. But we’ll be back in a month to collect North and take them back to school so maybe we can connect then and either way we will see our youngest again before long.