A year ago, when the kids were nineteen and twenty-four, I wrote a post about what was going on in their lives, my life, and my mother’s and maternal grandmother’s lives at those ages. I thought I’d do it again, because just as nineteen and twenty-four were pivotal summers for me, so were twenty and twenty-five. This time it will be just me and the kids, though. While my grandmother was pregnant with her second child at age twenty, I’m not aware of any milestones in my mom’s life at twenty-five. She was still living in Los Angeles with me (age one) and my father. They didn’t move east until I was two and a half. She was still a nurse.

Act 1: 1987

The summer I was twenty, I kissed a girl for the first time. I had a boyfriend at the time, but I was spending the summer in Oberlin, and he was spending it at home, plus I was leaving for Spain at the beginning of the fall semester, so we’d agreed to see other people during our long separation. In a funny coincidence, his first name was the same as Beth’s last name.

Several of my friends were staying in Oberlin that summer. I was living in a small housing co-op with just five other people. Two of my housemates were good friends whom I called the Jims—Jim B and Jim K. Beth was living a few blocks away with her cat Emily (who looked remarkably like a bigger version of Willow) in an apartment where she’d lived the previous school year and would live for two more years, the last one while waiting for me to graduate. I had decided to stay at school because the previous summer at home had been so lonely, with few of my high school friends at home. This arrangement suited me much better.

I had three part-time jobs that summer, all in food service, and they still didn’t add up to forty hours a week. The main one was working behind the deli counter at a convenience store. Being accident-prone by nature, I was something of a danger to myself with all those sharp blades and heating elements and I did sustain frequent minor injuries, but nothing serious. More annoying was that the store engaged in wage theft, by not paying employees for the half hour or so we spent closing the store every night. I had the five p.m. to midnight shift three days a week. I also waited and bussed tables (mainly the latter) at a diner-style restaurant and worked in the serving line at a dining hall during occasional weeks when conferences or camps made it busier than an average summer week. None of these jobs was particularly fun or challenging, but I didn’t mind. They paid enough so I could cover my room ($60 a month!) and board ($15 a week!), plus I had more leisure time to spend with the Jims, another housemate Elizabeth, and Beth than I did during the school year.

Beth and I had been friends for my whole first two years of college. She was the first person I met when she checked me into my first-year dorm (Noah Hall—and yes, that is how he got his name). But in the spring of my sophomore and her junior year we started to get closer. She came to Keep as my dinner guest most Friday nights. We rode an overnight bus to D.C. to attend a march protesting U.S. military actions in Central America in April and I fell asleep with my head on her shoulder and it felt comfortable and right. I frequently confided in her about my messy romantic life. (I had a boyfriend for most of my sophomore year with whom I broke up a few weeks before that march and by the time of the march I already had another one.)

By summer, though, I was developing feelings for Beth, and I thought she was for me. Jim B said it wasn’t worth risking the friendship. Jim K thought I should make a move. It’s relevant to mention here that Jim K was in love with Jim B, who was straight and had a crush on me, which I did not reciprocate, so possibly neither of them was an impartial observer.

Sometime in late June we went on a group expedition to see a Paul Klee exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Art, with some people from my house. We took a co-op truck, and Beth and I rode in the back, which smelled like tamari from a recent spill. This may not seem like the most romantic mode of transportation, but it had gotten to the point where a tamari-soaked truck seemed as good as a gondola in Venice.

Beth went home to Wheeling for the Fourth of July weekend. I think the brief separation and both of us realizing how much we missed the other may have accelerated events when she got back. Around this time, she wished on a star for me to fall in love with her.

One night in mid-July I invited Beth to sleep over at my house. I don’t know why I did it on a night when I was working because by the time I got home and showered off the fried chicken smell, as I did after every convenience store shift, it must have been one in the morning at the earliest. I guess I just couldn’t wait any longer. We had our first kiss that night, but not before talking about it for hours. I had already come out to her, but she had never come out to me. Backstory: I’d never had a girlfriend, but I was in love with my best friend in ninth grade. In fact, I thought I was a lesbian until I fell in love with a boy a little over a year later and decided I must be bisexual. Hours into the roundabout conversation, Beth finally said she “wouldn’t mind” if I kissed her and luckily, I thought it was supposed to be coy understatement and went for it. She later told me she was too terrified to be any more encouraging than that. Well, it was a good kiss, worth the wait.

In August, as I mentioned a couple blog posts ago, we went to the Lorain County Fair and joked about running away with the fair so we wouldn’t be separated when I left for Spain, but we didn’t and soon after that I spent a week in the Outer Banks with my mother, sister, and stepfather.

At the beach, I came out to my mom and sixteen-year-old sister. I think I let my mom tell my stepfather. I don’t remember doing it myself. Sara said she’d known for years. Her evidence was that I once checked a YA book about a teen lesbian romance out of the library and read it in the living room, rather than hiding it in my room. While my mother had also harbored suspicions since I was little, she didn’t take it as well. I think the boys that came in between my ninth-grade crush and Beth gave her a false sense of security. She did eventually come to terms with it. After an awkward week in North Carolina, I went  back to Oberlin briefly and then Beth drove me back to my mom’s house for a short visit before I left for Spain. Beth’s parents had just given her a car, her first, and she needed to learn how to drive a stick to get me there. We stayed in a hotel, though my mother would have let Beth stay with us, because things were still a bit tense on that front and I didn’t want that for the last night of our first summer together.

That summer was over, but several decades of romance, marriage, kids, and cats were yet to come.

Act 2: 1992

The summer I was twenty-five, Beth and I had been living in D.C. for a year, we’d celebrated our commitment ceremony the previous January, and we both had politically oriented jobs. Beth worked for The Human Rights Campaign Fund (pre-name change) in the membership department. I worked for the now-defunct Project VOTE!, a non-profit that registered low-income African Americans to vote. I worked in the development department, writing direct mail, applying for grants, and managing the donor database. I worked there from December 1991 to September 1994, but no time was more exciting that the summer and fall of 1992, because there was a Presidential election going on, and one that at the time, seemed high stakes. We’d had Republican Presidents for going on twelve years, almost half my life, and for more than half of the time I knew or cared who was President. My, how the goalposts for what counts as a high-stakes election have shifted! Don’t get me wrong. Both Bushes were awful, but they weren’t an existential threat to democracy. Sigh.

Anyway, the organization was non-partisan, but I wasn’t, and the work mattered a lot to me. Beth was in a similar position, and we were both working long hours, as young, childless people at D.C. non-profits tend to do. As a result, we didn’t take much (any?) vacation time that year until after the election, when we took a trip to San Francisco. Paging through a photo album recently, I saw we did take three weekend trips that summer. One was a work trip for Beth, to New York Pride where she staffed a table and I tagged along. The second picture is Beth at Pride that year. Wasn’t she adorable? Another trip was to Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, which I don’t even remember, but we seem to have gone to the Paw Paw tunnel, where we’ve been a few times with the kids, most recently last fall.

A getaway I do remember was a weekend at my father’s vacation house on French Creek in Chester County, Pennsylvania. My father and I were estranged from the time I was sixteen until I was twenty, and even when I was twenty-five, we were still somewhat tentatively re-connecting, so spending that weekend with him was important. It wasn’t the first post-reconciliation overnight visit with him—we’d had that at his house in Philadelphia just the fall before—but it might have been the second one. The French Creek house was also the last place I’d spent time with him before the estrangement, so going back felt big.

I have to say I loved that house. It was rustic, in the woods right by the creek (which you could hear inside the house) and there was a picturesque, covered bridge a short walk away. My sister and I spent a lot of time in the creek when we were kids, sitting on the rocks and talking or singing. Beth says Sara was there that weekend, but neither Sara nor I remember, which I guess is less awkward than if one of remembered and the other didn’t. Beth is positive, though, so I believe her.

Act 3: 2026 

Like me, North spent their first summer away from home at age twenty. Some of you may remember that two summers ago, they were a counselor at a Girl Scout overnight camp, but they came home almost every weekend, between groups of campers.

Our twenty-year-old summers may have been more different than similar, though. I stayed in Oberlin to hang out with friends, not for the minimum wage jobs, while North had no friends in Wyandotte and went for the job, which was more professional than mine. Working with senior residents of the housing co-op and office staff who were all middle-aged, North never met anyone their own age (except for one person they met through an app and who ghosted them after their first date). Not being able to drive, they had to rely on ride shares to get around, so they ordered their groceries to their apartment, and limited their outings to the coffeehouse and park they could walk to, a weekly Friday night trip to the movies, and one expedition to a wildlife refuge. It was a solitary summer, but they said the experience was “useful,” because they were living alone and had to learn to manage their own meals and life independently.

Also, they are nothing if not resilient, so I was never that worried about them. At the very beginning of the summer before their apartment was available, they spent a few days in a hotel room, on the housing co-op’s dime. When they moved from the hotel to the apartment, their stuffed monkey Muffin, who has been their companion since they were two, got lost. This is what Beth had to say about it on Facebook:

Muffin has been on countless road trips and stayed by North’s side during their hospital stays. Muffin is an international traveler-he accompanied North on their middle school trip to Colombia where North’s host family put him in the laundry without asking. He survived the ordeal.

I have logged many miles retrieving Muffin when he has been left behind in hotel rooms and restaurants. Over time he grew thinner and lost his clothes. But Muffin was always there with North even when I couldn’t be.

Earlier this summer, when North was moving from their temporary summer lodging to their summer apartment, Muffin himself was irretrievably, heartbreakingly, lost. Lost beyond even my ability to rescue him.

North was bereft. But also, North being North, they took action. They found and purchased a duplicate Muffin on eBay and when he arrived they were pleased to discover that Muffin’s spirit had migrated to this new body.

The new Muffin came with a banana velcroed to his hand that we don’t remember from the original Muffin so I think of him as Banana Muffin.

So much has happened in the 12 years since I took this picture. The resilient, determined eight year old kid has grown into a resilient, determined twenty year old young adult. Thanks Muffin for accompanying them on their journey.

North is happy to be settled in at school now with their friends and Banana Muffin.

Like me at twenty-five, Noah has a politically adjacent job. Since late May he’s been working as a junior video editor at the same media company where he worked in the summer and fall of 2024. Part of the company’s work is producing political ads for Democrats, though they also produce video for unions, non-profits, and businesses. It’s a decent job, but not as much responsibility as he wanted, and also temporary. It will end after the midterm elections.

We’d all like him to find something more stable, but I can’t deny it was a huge help having him living at home this summer because it meant Beth and I could be gone a month and a half at the same time without having to hire a cat sitter or someone to take care of the garden and mow the lawn. But because he spent half of the summer alone in the house, he was more alone than I was the summer I was twenty-five, when I lived with Beth, our housemate Kris, and Emily the cat. In an unusual twist, though, my more introverted child probably socialized more than his sibling this summer because there are people his age at work, he was going to his games gathering every Sunday, and he went to at least one concert while we were gone.

Noah is happy we’re home, and especially appreciative of the fact that when he gets home from work there’s dinner waiting for him. I think being responsible for the house was probably a good experience for him. Even though he has had his own or shared apartments (in Ithaca and Los Angeles) or a room in a boarding house (in Australia), he’s never had sole charge of two animals, a small house, and a large yard. When I asked if it was a lot of work, he said yes. But I know if we have another extended stay in Wheeling, the house will be in good hands.

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“Kathy”, I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh
“Michigan seems like a dream to me now”
It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw
I’ve gone to look for America

From “America,” by Paul Simon

Saturday

Two weeks after our visit home, we drove to Michigan to fetch North and deliver them to school. We crossed the Ohio-Michigan border around 4:30 in the afternoon and less than an hour later we were pulling up to a coffeeshop where North was sitting at an outdoor table. They’d walked from their apartment but had requested we pick them up because they didn’t feel up to the walk back.

North had called in sick for the whole last week of their internship because of abdominal pain that had sent them to the ER Monday morning after keeping them up most of the night. All they learned at the hospital was that it wasn’t appendicitis. The pain got better over the course of the week, but never completely went away, so I was glad they felt well enough to go out. We swung by their apartment to get their bathing suit and then went to our hotel, where we got Chinese takeout and then swam in the hotel pool.

Sunday

We spent the next morning and early afternoon helping them pack and clean their studio apartment, with a break in the middle to get coffee at North’s favorite coffeeshop in town and to take a stroll in a park by the Detroit River. Just before we left, we stopped at a gift shop we’d visited in July, and I got a jar of cherry-fig jam. On our last visit I’d bought chocolate-covered dried cherries and cherry-flavored lip balm. I guess Michigan is famous for its cherries.

I felt a touch of melancholy clearing out the apartment and walking around Wyandotte. The idea of leaving a place probably forever does that to me, even if I’m experiencing it secondhand and even if it wasn’t a particularly beloved place. Going to the coffeehouse and the river were my suggestions. North was happy to do it, but they didn’t seem sad to be leaving. It was something of a lonely summer for them and they were eager to get back to school and friends. When I asked if there was a restaurant that they wanted to patronize one last time for lunch they said they’d rather just get Panera on the road, so that’s what we did.

After lunch we drove a few hours to a rental house in Lorain, Ohio. It was a charming little brick house, unexceptional from the outside but full of beautiful woodwork and quirky antiques on the inside. We got Indian takeout for dinner and then went out for ice cream, which we took to the shore of Lake Erie to eat.

It was a beautiful evening, and we walked around on the sand and a rock jetty after we finished. We couldn’t swim because of a riptide warning. Proximity to the lake was one of the reasons we’d chosen the house, since North didn’t get to swim much this summer (only when we visited them), so that was disappointing, but it was still a lovely place.

Back at the house we watched an episode of Gilmore Girls. In it, Lorelai acknowledges to her mother that it must have been hard for her when she left home. Since we about to say goodbye to North after a too-short visit, I thought that was a little on the nose. Of course, North is not a pregnant high school dropout, estranged from her parents, so I guess it wasn’t that close to our situation.

Monday

In the morning we checked out of the house, got coffee and pastries from a nearby coffeeshop and took them to a different lake beach, one Beth and I used to frequent in college. It has a beautiful rose garden I remember not at all, though the sign said it was established in the 1930s. Beth wondered if it had fallen into neglect and been restored. We walked along a concrete sidewalk near the beach. When I saw the sign that called it a boardwalk, I turned back to protest to Beth and before I could even say anything she said she knew it was not a boardwalk, that a boardwalk should have boards and North said, “Your wife knows you.” It was chilly and windy and sand was blowing onto our legs, so we didn’t go wading. But North said if the riptide warning wasn’t still in effect they would have gone in the water. I wasn’t that surprised.

From there it was a short drive to Oberlin. As soon as we stepped onto the porch of Keep, people were greeting North and then more people greeted them in the lounge and then we went to see their room. They’ve wanted this room, next door to the one where they lived the second semester of their first year and all their sophomore year, for a long time. It’s a little smaller than their old room and doesn’t have a walk-in closet like many of the rooms in Keep, but it does have a bay window with a buckeye tree right outside. I asked them to send me a series of pictures of the tree as it changes color this fall and they said they would.

Beth unloaded the car and North and I carried their bins and bags of things inside. As always when I am in Keep, I had to take a little tour of it, visiting the kitchen where I used to cook and wash dishes, the second-floor bathroom I used to clean twice a week, the doors of my old rooms and those of my friends. It almost undoes me every time. This is probably North’s last semester in Keep, as they intend to go abroad in the spring and they are hoping to get into apartment housing their senior year, so I won’t be making this sentimental journey many more times.

By the time we were finished with moving North into their room and wandering the halls of Keep, no one was hungry for lunch, so we took a walk in the arboretum. North commented that they had not yet broken up with anyone or been broken up with in the arb, knowing I had both these experiences during my first two years of college. I mentioned that in all the times we’ve come to the arb with North I’ve never found the meadow where I once sat and read a very mean letter from a then-recent ex over and over. And I must have subconsciously known where we were because right after I said that we stumbled across it. Beth said it was “the meadow of sadness.” It was pretty, though, full of purple flowers.

After our walk we went to lunch at the Feve. North is less enchanted with this restaurant now that they no longer serve fried pickles, but I enjoyed my spinach-feta pie and salad with blue cheese dressing. North had arranged to meet friends for coffee at two, and that was just about what time it was when we finished our lunch, so we said goodbye at the car outside the restaurant. It’s easier now than it was when we first left them at school two years ago, but it’s still not easy. But we all keep moving on to what’s next, leaving what’s over behind.

Speaking of what’s next, Beth and I are headed home on Saturday. Beth will stay until mid-September before returning to Wheeling. It will be nice to have that stretch of time at home as a threesome with the other kid.

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We just got back from a quick trip home; we spent just under three days there. We were busy bees during that time, but I think we achieved a good balance of chores, recreation, and family togetherness.

Thursday

It was a longer trip home than usual because we made stops to get the car inspected and to get the title transferred from Ohio (where Beth bought it) to Maryland, plus there was traffic at the end. We left around 8:30 and got home around seven. Noah was still at work, so my first priorities were to greet the cats and check on my flowers (five red and orange zinnias and one sunflower in bloom in the back yard, plus slightly past peak pink lilies and some Black-Eyed Susans in the front yard).

Next, I set to work making dinner out of what I could find in the fridge and freezer. It was pretty good for an improvised meal: tostadas with refried black beans, zucchini, cheese, cilantro, and pineapple salsa from Trader Joe’s. It was kind of interesting to take stock of what was on hand and see what Noah’s been buying. After he got home and we’d all eaten, we watched a couple episodes of Hacks, while Willow slept in my lap. I’d forgotten we were watching that show it’s been so long since we’ve all be together, but that was fun.

Friday

It had been almost two months since Beth had been home, and a little over three weeks since I had, so there was a lot we wanted to accomplish. While Noah was at work, Beth went grocery shopping both for our visit and to pick up some food for Noah; I cleaned the kitchen; and we both did a lot of weeding. Noah had done a good job keeping on top of the areas of our large, weedy yard I’d asked him to prioritize (the ones most likely to get us cited by the city), but there were other areas that needed attention and between Beth and me we filled a half dozen yard bags. It was hot in Takoma, hotter than Wheeling, and we were not acclimated so by mid-afternoon I needed a nap and a shower.

I also had to call the company that makes my continuous glucose monitors to request a replacement (the second in a row) for a malfunctioning sensor. I returned three out of the last batch of seven, which is an unusually high rate and annoying. Not to mention that I am having trouble getting the prescription delivery company that supplies me with those same sensors to charge me the right price and I saw the wrong (much higher) price in my bank account right after I made the call. It was not a good day for diabetes.

Beth and I went out for pizza at Red Hound, a favorite place, and we brought home a couple slices and some chocolate cake for Noah, who ate his when he got home. We watched Arco that night, after some extended technological wrangling to get it to play in the original French and not the dubbed English version. I recommend it if an animated French movie about ecological disaster seems up your alley. The gist of it is that the Earth is much worse off fifty years from now and partly healed almost a thousand years from now.

Saturday

Beth and I went to the Silver Spring farmers’ market in the morning. Among our purchases were peaches and blackberries I used to make a cobbler that afternoon. I often make this cobbler when we are all reunited (after someone’s been to camp or on a work trip, etc.) but the four of us are not going to be reunited at any point this summer, so it seemed as good a time as any. Also, it won the coin toss when I was trying to decide whether to make a cobbler or a kuchen. (Noah likes cobbler better and Beth prefers kuchen.)

Beth and I did more weeding, and at one point all three of us were working in the yard. Beth was altering the mesh enclosure in the garden because the sunflowers were straining at the ceiling and needed to be set free; I was hanging a load of laundry; and Noah was mowing the lawn.

Late in the afternoon we set out for Butler’s Orchard, our traditional spring and summer berrying spot, but we weren’t there for berries. We were there for the Sunflower Spectacular. For a week while the sunflowers are at their peak you can walk though paths in the fields, take pictures with props, and pick some if you want. It’s a big field and pretty to walk through in the golden light of early evening. We took a lot of pictures but didn’t pick any blooms because we have sunflowers in our garden and it seemed cumbersome to transport big cut flowers back to Wheeling.

We had dinner at the snack bar and listened to the tail end of a band playing Grateful Dead. I got a peach creamsicle slushie for dessert. It was pleasant to eat outside on a pretty evening.

Sunday

We had our video call with North in the morning. They told us about a PowerPoint they had to make with the other interns about their summer’s work. (They are all leaving at different times, but North has two weeks left.) After lunch, we dropped Noah off at his games gathering and hit the road for Wheeling, where we will spend another couple of weeks before we set out for points West to collect North and take them back to school.

Before we went home, when we were discussing the trip, Noah texted me that it was “too bad you can’t stay longer.” And it would have been nice, but I think we made the most of the time we had. It’s true, there’s no place like home.

The post Three Days in Takoma Park appeared first on All For The Love Of You.

First Week

We got back from Wyandotte the third Monday in July and over the next few days I started to settle into a routine. I got back to work, writing web copy for a vitamin and mineral line and a purple tea product. I took walks in the neighborhood or Wheeling Park every day. I read two issues of The Atlantic cover to cover and realized I am more likely to read it when there’s a paper copy available. (I’d also read some of my mother’s copy of a different issue at the beach.) This has made me think we should switch our digital subscription to a print one.

On Tuesday, Beth’s aunt Carole and cousin Sean invited us to go to the public library to hear Palestinian poet Zeina Azzam read, and we didn’t go but it was streamed so Beth’s mom and I watched it while we ate lunch. Beth did water exercises in the condo complex’s pool most days and I joined her a couple times, but I found I wasn’t as motivated to swim laps without my Fitbit (it broke in June), so I ordered a used one, plus a kickboard in hopes that these purchases would help get me into a swimming routine.

Beth took her mom to a few medical appointments, and they also went to the farmers’ market in Washington, PA with Carole on Thursday, and to the Grecian Festival on Friday, bringing back food for dinner. We didn’t eat it until Saturday, though, because that night Beth and I went to What’s Your Queer History?: A Night of Storytelling and Comedy at the Capitol Theater Ballroom downtown.

This was a fundraiser for the Friendlier City Project and NAMI. There was a buffet dinner and seven local people, who ranged in age from a twenty-something to a senior citizen, did stand-up, based on their personal experiences, with photographs of their younger selves projected on a screen behind them. They were coached over the course of several days by a professional stand-up comedian, who did his own set at the end of the event. I thought all the amateurs did a great job, especially considering they were all brand new to comedy. Their sets were funny and moving and relatable (and some were on the raunchy side). Topics ranged from coming out and love stories to struggles with substance abuse and mental health.

Saturday morning Beth and I went to Goodwill to buy shorts. I’d packed light when I came to Wheeling, because I was trying to do it without checking bags and I soon realized I didn’t have enough socks or underwear. I ordered these online, and Beth bought me some plastic sandals for the pool because I hadn’t brought any pool-appropriate shoes. Then when one of the two pairs of shorts that I’d packed ripped, I decided I needed to replace them. I ended up with a pair of jeans, too, and Beth got a long-sleeved shirt. After that, I was set for clothes.

That afternoon Beth and her mom and I went to the Marshall County Fair (one county over). We wandered through the animal barns, looking at cows, sheep, goats, and rabbits; admired prize-winning vegetables, canned goods and baked goods in the 4H building; rode the Ferris Wheel; and got ice cream. We won’t make it to the much bigger Montgomery County Fair at home this year and I had no interest in the fake Great American State Fair on the mall earlier this summer, so it was nice to go to a real county fair. It was also a little romantic because the summer Beth and I were twenty and newly in love, we went to the similarly sized Lorain County Fair in Ohio, and we joked about running away with it. (I was about to leave for a semester in Spain, and I was half-regretting that decision because it would take me away from her.)

On Sunday morning we had a video call with the kids. We’ve been having these calls from three locations since mid-June, and I’ve been moving through the locales, the only one of us to have participated from all three—as of that day I’d done five calls from Takoma Park with Noah, one in Wyandotte with Beth and North, and now the first one in Wheeling with Beth. That felt like a strange little milestone.

After lunch Beth and her mom and I went to the Italian Festival in hopes of finding some food to bring home for dinner. It did not disappoint. We came home with an eggplant parmesan sub, gnocchi with alfredo sauce, apricot cheesecake, and a slice of chocolate-hazelnut cake. We strolled along the river past the craft booths and thought about staying to hear some music at the stage, but the next group wasn’t starting for a while, so we headed back.

Beth went to tread water in the pool that afternoon, as was her wont. By then my new (to me) Fitbit had arrived, though not the kickboard. I’d taken a walk in the morning and had walked around the Italian Festival as well, so I wasn’t short on exercise, but I joined her in the pool and swam for fifteen or twenty minutes anyway. Then I read in one of the lounge chairs until it started to drizzle and we left.

Second Week

Beth’s mom had a couple medical appointments, including a late afternoon one in Morgantown on Monday, so she and Beth had dinner there afterward. I had the house to myself for five hours. Left to my own devices, I had grilled cheese and leftover green beans for dinner and finished reading The 1619 Project, which felt like a satisfying way to spend an evening.

Over the course of the week, I wrote web copy for creatine and silicium and started a blog post about heart health. I’d been working on my laptop from a recliner and later a camp chair in our bedroom and on Wednesday, Beth’s mom fetched a card table from storage and Beth set up a nice workspace for me. I swiped a chair from the dining room, and it was complete. It’s nice to have room to spread out papers, and the table faces the green space in the middle of the condo complex.

That same day after I finished working, I was walking from the condo to the pool to meet up with Beth and her mom when I spied Carole’s daughter Meg, who had recently arrived for a two-week visit, on Carole’s porch. So, I dropped in on them and chatted with Carole, Meg, and Meg’s daughter Holly. When I got to the pool Beth and her mom had left, but I decided to stay to soak my feet and legs in the water and then read my next, lighter book in one of the lounge chairs. My kickboard arrived Thursday evening, so I got a chance to use it on Friday.

Removed from domestic chores (except laundry and cooking, which Beth and I have been sharing, much to her mother’s delight), and I guess because I wasn’t reading the Post every day, I found I had more time to read other things. I finished The Formidable Miss Cassidy Thursday afternoon at the pool and found myself almost out of books. Partly this was because Beth and her mom were watching The Residence at night and I bowed out of that because I just couldn’t bear to watch a show set in the White House. It’s set in the future but was written before the current occupant of the White House tore down a third of it, and Beth says she thought the intact East Wing might have been too much for me. Anyway, she says it’s good if you’re interested and not as sentimental about iconic D.C. architecture as I am.

We went on a couple evening outings—for ice cream on Wednesday night and to a weekly free concert in Wheeling Park on Friday night. They have these at the bandstand in Wheeling Park from late May through early September. We got pizza from a stand and listened to a country singer called Gage Joseph sing covers (one by Zac Brown) and originals. It was a pretty evening, warm but not hot, and it was nice to listen to live music.

While we were listening to the band, I was watching a gaggle of middle and elementary school-age girls trying to execute a shaky cheerleading-style pyramid, with the smaller girls taking turns on the top. From their execution, I’d guess they had some but not a lot of training, maybe a week of cheer camp. They were giving it the old college try, though, and I had to admire their persistence and enthusiasm. When we got home, we watched the first half of Enola Gay 3, which was entertaining.

Saturday was a busy day. In the morning Beth and I went on a very productive series of errands—to the farmers’ market, the public library where I used her mom’s card to check out Lord of the Flies and Emma (feeling like a teen tackling her summer reading list a few weeks before school starts), a fruit market, a cheese shop, a bakery, and a coffeeshop, where I got a latte to bring home. The last three stops were all under one roof, in a charming old market house.

Soon after returning with our spoils, we headed back to Wheeling Park for the Wheeling Arts Festival. It was bigger than I expected, with food, multiple stages with live music and other acts, craft booths, and readings. We got vegetarian hot dogs and ice cream for lunch. I took a risk on a strawberry shake because I’d been craving one and I hadn’t had a milkshake in the almost five years since my diabetes diagnosis. I went rather high on it but not out of range (a fifteen-minute walk four times around the little pond in the park soon after probably helped), so I considered the experiment a success. Beth’s mom bought a Mothman magnet for Noah because he was into the West Virginian mythical creature when he was a kid; Beth got some reusable cloth bags for bulk food with patterns of corn and flowers block printed on them; and I got four stickers to put on my water bottle. I chose one that reminded me of each family member: ocean waves for me, a mountain stream for Beth, a turtle for Noah, and a heron for North. (These animals were their symbols in preschool, and I have remained attached to them as totems for each kid.) I got the bottle at Niagara Falls, so it has a picture of the falls on it, which gave me the idea to build a pleasing watery theme around that image, plus it’s a water bottle.

We ran into Carole’s family at the festival and sat with Carole, Sean, Meg, and Holly to listen to series of bands. There was a jazz trio, a Latin band, and a hip hop group. During the Latin band’s medley of “Guantamanera” and “La Bamba,” I was watching two kids dancing on the back seat of a paddle boat on the pond that a man, presumably their dad, was paddling. I found it amusing that they were wearing life jackets while engaged in this risky behavior. Anyway, they didn’t fall into the water. We did get a little wet, though, because it started to sprinkle, and kept it up on and off for a couple hours. It was the lightest possible rain, though, and kind of refreshing.

At four we all left the music stage and went to see a reading of selected works by Edgar Allan Poe by an actor dressed as Poe and accompanied by another man carrying a giant raven head and wings on a stick. He read mostly poems: “Annabel Lee,” “The Raven,” “Lenore,” etc., and one story, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and in between took questions, mostly autobiographical, from the audience. He was committed to his role and quite dramatic in his readings. I used to teach Poe and most of what he read was deeply familiar and close to my heart.

Toward the end the rain started to come down harder and the audience crowded under a nearby tent with the actor as he continued. Carole, Meg, Sean, Holly, and I were either under the tent or under the shelter of a nearby tree, but Beth and her mom were further away on a patio where they’d settled because the chairs were more comfortable. They couldn’t hear much after the reading moved into the tent, so they took advantage of a break in the rain to start their walk home. We ordered Italian that night and finished watching Enola Holmes 3.

Sunday was more low-key. We had a call with North, which Noah couldn’t join because he had to work. Beth went grocery shopping and I read half of Lord of the Flies. My reason for reading it was that Noah and I recently watched the television adaptation and as I hadn’t read the book since I was a teenager, I wanted to see how the show compares. Pretty faithfully but more fleshed out, is my judgement, at least as regards the first three-quarters, which is how far I am now.

Sunday evening Carole celebrated her eighty-ninth birthday with a dinner at the Garden Bistro at Oglebay Park with two of her three sisters, both of her children, one of her six grandchildren, a cousin, a niece, a nephew, and a couple in-laws. Holly (the grandchild) took the picture of the rest of us.

We were to be seated on the patio, then rain caused the restaurant to push our reservation time back because earlier outside diners had to be moved inside and that created a shortage of tables. The rain had cleared by the time we arrived, and we had hoped to eat outside and be able to hear the Eagles tribute band playing at the amphitheater adjacent to the restaurant, but at the very last minute, the show was canceled. People headed back to their cars carrying camp chairs, thinking we were going to the concert, kept telling us the show was canceled as we made our way to the restaurant. We were initially seated outside, but when the rain started back up, we moved inside, but not before taking pictures of the big rainbow in the hills behind the restaurant. A couple people commented it was a good omen for Carole’s upcoming ninetieth year.

Several of us (including me and Beth) got the burrata-stuffed tomato, which sat on a bed of rye crumbs with a puddle of pesto and pine nuts next to it. The chef came to the table to cut them open. It was quite the production and tasty, too. For dessert, Sean, Meg, and Holly brought a beautiful cake from a local bakery, lemon with Swiss meringue frosting. We all thought the flowers pressed into the sides were real, edible flowers at first, but the eventual consensus was that they were made of paper. It was a lovely effect, though.

During dessert, Carole and her cousin Richard told stories about how both of their sets of parents met, how both of Richard’s parents served in World War II (she was an army nurse), and Carole’s memories of traveling to see Richard’s father off when she was five or six and how eating ice cream in a hotel seemed like a special treat back then.

The restaurant staff offered Carole and those traveling in her car a ride to the car in a golf cart, which I think she enjoyed. As we left, we admired the mist wreathing the hills in the aftermath of the rain.

Upcoming Travel

We might be leaving in a couple days to take a brief trip home. After we moved North from Oberlin to Wyandotte in May, we took some of their stuff home and we need to fetch it so we can bring it back to Oberlin when North’s job ends in a few weeks. We were originally thinking of doing it all in one massive road trip (WV to MD to MI to OH to WV). But since Beth needs to get the car that she bought before I got here inspected and the title transferred in Maryland and she has appointments to do those things Western Maryland on Thursday, she’ll be partway home anyway, and it made more sense to do this part of the trip now. It will also give us a chance to spend a couple days with Noah, and the cats, and the garden. I am looking forward to seeing all of them.

The post Two Weeks in Wheeling appeared first on All For The Love Of You.

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.

The post Side Quests appeared first on All For The Love Of You.

Before She Left: Early June

Beth is in Wheeling again, taking care of her mom. She’s been gone three and a half weeks. She had four days at home after we got back from the beach and before she left for Wheeling and she was a busy bee during that time. She stocked the house with food, a week’s usual groceries plus extra non-perishable staples. She installed a new toilet valve, tightened a loose doorknob, and fixed the dishwasher when a screw fell out of the frame, causing the dishwasher to list out of the counter. But the biggest project was building a mesh enclosure for flowers and vegetables to protect them from garden pests.

Since mid-April, Beth’s been shuttling back and forth between Wheeling and home—plus side trips to Oberlin (to see North’s play), Chicago (to see a friend), Wyandotte (to get North settled for the summer), and Rehoboth (for vacation)—so she hasn’t been home much. This was part of the reason for all the home repairs and garden construction. She hadn’t had much of a chance before. Also, acts of service are her love language. And this departure felt different than the others because it was open-ended. We didn’t know when she was coming home.

Before she left, Beth, Noah, and I found time to watch up to the middle of the current season of Hacks, and she and Noah finished For All Mankind. On her last day at home, we went out for ice cream at Koma. The morning that she left, we hugged for a long time in the driveway. Neither one of us wanted to let go.

But we did and she left. Here’s what happened on the home front.

The First Few Days: Mid-June

On the first Friday she was gone, Noah and I watched the first half of The Northman, a more violent film than we’d select if she was home. Noah had texted that North we were going to watch it, and North had passed that intel onto Beth, telling her we were going to watch “a stabby Viking movie.” When Beth texted me to ask how it was, I responded:

Very bloody, kind of artsy. Björk has a small part in it. Plus Nicole Kidman and Anna Taylor Joy. And some men

Who are often shirtless and covered in blood

Not your thing

Nope, she answered.

On Saturday Noah and I finally gave the porch its annual swabbing. We usually do this in May when the pollen has stopped falling. If you don’t live in place that experiences what some people call “the pollening,” you should know pollen is sticky and a dirt magnet, so the porch gets filthy in late spring. Sometimes we don’t get around to the big clean until June, though. It’s a time-consuming job, involving taking everything off the porch and wiping it down and then cleaning the floor and ledges with soapy water, waiting for it to dry and bringing everything back. (This year we added to the task list taking down the Christmas lights that had been wound, unlit, around porch columns for months and boxing them up and putting them in basement along with some stakes used for Halloween decorations that never got put away last fall.)

This chore made me miss North. Usually, both kids and I do the porch clean together and it involves a certain amount of water play. Noah and I were all business, though, which I didn’t think about at the time, but made me sad when I thought about it later. Beth asked me later, on our family video call, if I wished I’d sprayed him with the hose.

Sunday morning Beth texted me to say that she’d found a cheap ticket to Pittsburgh on the day in mid-July we’d set as a possible date for me to come join her in Wheeling and asked if she should buy it. I said yes. That made me feel better, knowing the exact day I’d see her next, but it was still more than a month away at that point.

We had the video call, a three-state, five-person (Beth’s mom joined) affair, later that morning. It was good to be together, if virtually. Beth was amused, and I think touched, that I was wearing one of her t-shirts. I’d worn it to sleep to comfort myself and left it on the next day. We exchanged news. Beth had been to Wheeling Pride. North had staffed a Plinko booth at a carnival for work. They had thus far resisted the urge to get a cat.

First Full Week: Mid-June

It was Noah’s first official week at work (for the hours covered in his contract), but he only worked two days and as he’d been in the office three days the week before, it wasn’t a big change. The job should eventually ramp up to full-time as elections get closer. Speaking of elections, he was working on an ad about a referendum concerning how justices on the Kansas state Supreme Court are selected (elected v. appointed).

I worked, too, though more intermittently than I expected. I went to the dentist on Monday because of sudden and severe tooth pain that developed over the weekend; by Wednesday I’d had a root canal and on Thursday a crown put on top of the affected tooth. Two of those appointments were lengthy ones and I had to get in and out of the city on public transportation, so I didn’t get much work done. Even Friday, when I had no dental appointments, I felt scattered and unproductive. That night Noah and I got cheap pizza and watched Late Night with the Devil, which was fun.

While we were watching, I texted Beth:

We are watching a horror movie that takes places in the 70s. Excellent nostalgia value. You would like the first third.

After that, not as much

Beth and I talked twice over the weekend. On Saturday morning we had a call just between the two of us. She told me about going to a West Virginia Day celebration with her mom—there was birthday cake for the state, plus a photo station where one could dress up as Abraham Lincoln, so of course, she did. We discussed cheering plans for my visit in July, some nearby country fairs we might attend, a possible overnight trip to Pittsburgh.

Second Full Week: Late June

Sunday morning, we had a family call. North had worked a table at Wyandotte Pride. They said it was in a very scenic locale, right on the river, and though it didn’t draw a big crowd, they talked to enough people about the housing cooperative to make it worth the table fee. They’d auditioned for a filmed reading of a screenplay (which will presumably be used to shop around the project) and they’d gotten a call back. Beth mentioned that she and her mom were leaving soon after the call to attend the symphony and go out for tapas in Pittsburgh with Beth’s aunt Carole and cousin Sean.

Because Noah goes to his games on Sundays and is usually gone most of the afternoon and evening, I decided I should start using this weekly block of alone time to tackle The 1619 Project, which has been on my bedside table for several years. But by the time I’d finished the grocery shopping (farmers’ market, co-op, and grocery store), it was late afternoon and I was tired, so only read the preface before moving on to lighter fare. Still, it was a start.

Noah only went into the office one day that week, but he had some work for Mike editing video for the Amalgamated Transit Union. (Mike’s wife Sara was a colleague of Beth’s at CWA, so Noah gets a lot of labor-related work through him.) I worked a little more than the week before because I didn’t have to go into the city three times for dental work. I finished a new product announcement and a product review sheet for an herbal product meant to boost testosterone and then revised a booklet on homeopathic remedies for menstrual and menopausal complaints. I found this pairing amusing. Balance in all things.

In the evenings, we watched the Lord of the Flies miniseries. It only has four episodes, so we dispatched it quickly and moved on to Widow’s Bay by Saturday.

Third Full Week: Late June to the 4^th of July

On the Sunday family call, North told us about their hike in the Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge, where they saw herons and black raspberries (not quite ripe). Beth told us about an overnight trip she and her mom were going to take to Pymatuning State Park in Pennsylvania.

It was even later than the previous Sunday when I got home from grocery shopping, almost dinner time, but that evening I made good on my resolution and read the first three chapters of The 1619 Project. It turns out to be less dense than I expected for a work of history, and I was pleasantly surprised by that. (I am now about halfway through it.)  I managed to dip into four different books that day, the two I mentioned previously, Tokyo Express, which I am reading for book club (we always read a mystery in July), and The Rose Field, which Noah and I are reading together.

Noah worked Monday and Tuesday and then went to a concert straight from work Tuesday. There was a heat wave coming, so I decided to mow the lawn myself, even though it’s usually his chore because it seemed cruel to make him do it in 100+ degree weather.

On Wednesday, I started a new work project, writing web copy for fifty products for a company that supplies ingredients to supplement companies. Sara and I will be working on this until September. It’s good to have a big project because work continues to be scarce and Sara’s really had to hustle to find it. Nevertheless, I found it hard to concentrate because the heat was wearing me out.

This may seem odd because most of the time I was in the house, which is air-conditioned (if imperfectly by two window units), but I was still outside over an hour each day taking my morning walk, watering the garden, and hanging up laundry and that would drain me for the rest of the day. Walter snuck out one day and was out for hours before Noah noticed him in the side yard. He was panting, and clearly overheated, but he didn’t come to the door and cry to be let in—he’s that obsessed with being outside. When I brought him inside, he went straight for his water bowl, drank, and then fell asleep on the kitchen floor.

On Friday, Noah and I started watching Society of the Snow, which is about the Uruguayan soccer team whose plane crashed in the Andes in the 1970s. You probably know the story—it was the basis for Alive—but if you don’t, it goes to dark places. The survivors of the crash weren’t found for over two months, and the area was bitterly cold, prone to avalanches, and devoid of vegetation or animals or anything to eat. It was sad and moving and, unlike Alive didn’t feature a cast of white people. It also made a several-day heat wave seem like a small inconvenience.

The next day was the Fourth of July. Our celebration was underwhelming. I stuck some little American flags in the planters in front of the house and made a Facebook album of whimsical flag-related imagery I saw around town intercalated with progressive political signs because I don’t want to cede the symbols of patriotism to the right, but we didn’t do much to mark the day. Takoma Park cancelled its parade, due to the heat, and it doesn’t have a fireworks display. Noah and I considered going elsewhere to see fireworks—not the National Mall for obvious reasons—but in the end we didn’t feel up to a public transportation odyssey and gave up on the idea. I was disappointed, both about the parade and the fireworks, but more so about missing Takoma Park’s quirky and charming parade, because I do love it and I’d been expecting to go.

The other thing we usually do on the Fourth is a backyard picnic, but it was just too hot. We made picnic food (veggie dogs, devilled egg, green beans, homegrown new potatoes, corn on the cob, and watermelon) but we ate it inside.

While we were eating, North texted pictures of their own similar dinner—veggie dogs, baked beans, corn on the cob, watermelon, and the same dessert we would soon eat- vanilla ice cream with sour cherry sauce and blueberries. I sent pictures of our dinner back. It was a fun moment of connection. Beth said later she was sorry she hadn’t photographed her own dinner, which she’d already eaten with her mom, Carole, and Sean—veggie dogs, baked beans, corn, and potato salad.

We got some rain in the evening and after dinner I noticed on my weather app that the temperature was falling—all the way down to the mid-eighties—so we ate our ice cream on the porch, waiting for the rain. We gave up on it before it finally came and went inside to watch the rest of the movie. And that was our Fourth. Beth and her mom did manage to see fireworks from the banks of the Ohio River, which she noted was the same spot where she’d watched the fireworks during the Bicentennial.

Meanwhile, white supremacists were roaming DC, and the President had turned the pre-fireworks celebration into MAGA rally. (The DC fireworks didn’t start until almost midnight because of his rain-delayed speech.) In the days before the Fourth, the mediocre Great American State Fair had replaced the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, which we attend almost every year, usually not on the Fourth, but either shortly before or after to listen to music and eat food from other cultures and to get a picture by the Washington Monument. I was sad not to be able to do that this year. It’s a small thing, almost trivial when things are so dire on the home front of our nation, but small disappointments are still disappointments.

In eight days, I’m leaving to join Beth in Wheeling, possibly for the rest of the summer. We’ll be leaving Noah to tend the home fires. I’ll be sad to leave him and the cats and the garden, but I will be very glad to see Beth (and North when we road trip up to Wyandotte for a weekend soon after I arrive). If we must be in three places this summer, I will just move between them.

The post The Home Front appeared first on All For The Love Of You.

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.

The post Enough appeared first on All For The Love Of You.

Friday to Sunday: Pittsburgh and Wheeling

“Everyone’s flight was on time,” Beth said, sounding pleased. We were in the Pittsburgh airport, where her brother John’s flight from Savannah and mine from National had arrived within an hour of each other and, as she noted, both on time. Beth had been staying with her mom for two and a half weeks. I was joining her for a several-day road trip to pick North up from Oberlin and take them to their summer job in Michigan and then trek home to Maryland. John was taking Beth’s place at their mom’s house.

Aside from Mother’s Day and my birthday, the weeks Beth had been gone were uneventful. I went to the dentist twice (once for a checkup and once to replace a filling) and to book club twice. At first my work was slow and Noah was busy, working six days in a row. Then his work slowed down and mine picked up. I wrote a 3,000-word booklet on homeopathy for menstrual complaints in less than two weeks. We watched Snowpiercer, Kiss of the Spider Woman, and all the available episodes of The Testaments. There was a three-day heat wave with temperatures reaching the mid-nineties, which was kind of miserable because, having no idea it was going to get that hot while Beth was gone, she and Noah had not installed our window AC units before she left and that is a Beth-and-Noah job.

Our dinner plan for Friday was for me to pick up pizza and bring it out to the baggage claim area where Beth and her mom were waiting, but I couldn’t find any place that sold slices to go, just a sit-down Italian restaurant, and I was carrying a heavy, cumbersome duffel bag and didn’t want to schlep it around any further than necessary, so I gave up and went through the Gate of No Return pizzaless. There was a little café by the baggage claim, so Beth got pasta salad and I got hummus with crudités. When John arrived, we got into the car and drove to Wheeling. I’d slept poorly the night before and Beth was also tired, so we went to our hotel almost immediately and were in bed before 9:30 and asleep soon afterward.

Saturday, we passed a quiet day, mostly hanging around Beth’s mom’s house. In the morning Beth and I took a walk in Wheeling Park, where we saw chipmunks and turtles sunning by the edge of Good Lake. John drove me back to the hotel in the afternoon so I could nap because I’d woken in at five that morning and been unable to get back to sleep and that wasn’t enough to get me caught up on sleep. That night we had Chinese takeout for dinner and paid Beth’s aunt Carole a brief visit.

Sunday to Tuesday: Oberlin and Vermillion

We left for Oberlin straight from the hotel and discovered on trying to get a podcast set up that the car speakers were broken. This led to a trial-and-error process of figuring out which podcasts in my lineup have good enough audio to play directly out of my phone. The answer was most of them.

The drive to Oberlin took three and a half hours. We arrived shortly before noon. The OSCA alumni picnic was scheduled for 12:20 and because North was organizing it, they were a little harried when we got there. At one point someone came over to tell them she couldn’t find the paper plates, while it did seem to be true that they weren’t in the order, enough plates were discovered in the OSCA office and the crisis was averted. The turnout was big, several hundred people, and the meal was vegetarian ba minh sandwiches, a zucchini sauté, and pineapple upside down cake, all of which would have been hard to eat without plates, so that was a relief. All the food was all very good and the weather held, despite some ominous looking clouds.

We were sitting at a table with a couple women from the class of 2001, as it was Commencement and fifty-year and twenty-five-year reunions that weekend. They asked North if they’d been a cook on the meal and when they said, no but they’d budgeted the meal, ordered the food, and gone on emergency grocery runs for missing ingredients, they seemed impressed. Meanwhile, it was kind of blowing my mind that people who graduated in a year that starts with 2 are legitimately middle-aged now. How can that be when I graduated in 1989?

After the meal and a speech from the outgoing president of OSCA, North went around the crowd looking for friends so they could say goodbye and we went back to their room, and assessed the state of their packing, which could be described as in progress. Beth and I left them there and took a short stroll around campus and then we all went to Dollar General to get another storage bin. From there we drove to our hotel, which was closer to Cleveland than Oberlin because Commencement had made lodging scarce. We ordered the pizza we didn’t get Friday and ate it in the room while watching two episodes from the last season of Gilmore Girls. We’ve been watching this show since North was in eighth grade, and now they are halfway through college. Halfway through college, people! How did this happen?

Commencement was Monday morning and North wanted to go because some of their friends were graduating. Beth and I did not care to attend, because honestly, graduations are boring if no one important to you is graduating. We stayed at the hotel until 9:30 a.m. and then went to Keep where we did a load of their and our combined laundry. We took turns sitting on the porch, watching our belongings while the other walked around town. While I was walking, I stopped at Slow Train for coffee. I thought it wouldn’t be that crowded because everyone would be at Commencement, but it was jam-packed with people in academic regalia and at least one young person in graduation robes, who were skipping the speeches to caffeinate. I found this amusing.

While I was on the porch, I wrote a lot of this and listened to Patsy Cline. Keep is an old building, one hundred and thirteen years old to be exact, and I liked the idea of some long before-my-time Oberlin student on this same porch, listening to Patsy Cline, on a radio or a turntable rather than a laptop, but still… It made me feel part of a long line of Keepers, as if I needed any extra reinforcement.

When North got back from Commencement, having cut out after the last person who they wanted to see cross the stage had done so, we drove to Vermillion. North has become quite enchanted with this little town on the shore of Lake Erie. They have a fantasy about moving there after graduation and opening a marriage and family therapy practice.

We had lunch at a hot dog stand that serves vegetarian hot dogs and then went down to the beach. North and I waded into the water while Beth stayed on a bench by the lighthouse. The water was a little cold, but not too bad, considering it was still May. While we were in town, they said they could live in a little white clapboard house we saw but while we were in the water, they pointed to a brick mansion right on the shore of the lake and said they’d like that one instead. I pointed out they had not made much progress on their oft-stated goal to marry rich, preferably to someone they meet in college. “And you’re halfway through,” I said.

When I got out of the water, I saw some of the 250-year flags on the beach and I realized that while this branded semiquincentennial has been annoying me because the President is tying himself so closely to it, it doesn’t have to be partisan. It could just be a celebration of our country’s history, like the 4^th of July, in which I participate without crankiness, despite some of its problematic features. I concluded being in the water had made me mellow.

We got ice cream at the Ice Creamatorium. A few of the businesses in Vermillion have macabre names, based on the history of the buildings. This one is in a former funeral parlor. There’s a B&B in a former jailhouse called The Old Vermillion Jailhouse B&B. There’s also a tattoo parlor called Asylum Ink, so I checked to see if it was on the site of an asylum, but it’s not.

We went back to the hotel where we ordered Indian and ate that, plus leftover pizza for dinner, and watched three more episodes of The Gilmore Girls.

North had to be out of their room by nine a.m. We arrived to help them move out at eight and without any discussion all got to work in different roles. Beth and I carried items to the car until there was enough for her to get started loading the car while I carried the rest out and North swept their rapidly emptying room. By 8:45 we were finished and drove the heavily loaded car to Slow Train for coffee and pastries. The line was as long as it had been the day before and even slower. It took over a half hour to get our food and drinks. Luckily, we weren’t in a hurry, and we got to meet and hang out with North’s friend Eden (who had previously expressed interest in meeting “your lesbians”) and their mother. We talked about Eden’s post-graduation plans (they are going to student teach in Chicago), which made me wonder what a conversation like this with North will look like in two years.

Tuesday to Wednesday: Near Detroit

Then we drove to Wyandotte, Michigan, where North is going to be working this summer doing marketing and event planning at group of a housing co-operatives for senior citizens. Before they start the job, though, they have a few days training at headquarters in a different suburb of Detroit. The organization was putting them up in hotel in that town, so we couldn’t see or help them move into their apartment. (Several people from the office are going to help them do that on Friday.)

We’d gotten a room in their hotel for one night, but we wanted to have a look at the area where they’d be spending the summer. It’s a nice neighborhood right on the Detroit River. The housing co-ops, both high rises, are on a wide tree-line boulevard with a lot of Victorian houses, mixed with buildings in other styles. We had lunch at a restaurant with a river view and took a stroll by the river and to both the co-ops. North will live in one, but they didn’t know yet which one (they’re only a block or two apart) so I took a picture of them outside each one. (I’ve included the correct one here.)

We picked up some groceries for North to eat while they are in the hotel and some prepared food for dinner and ate at the hotel, watching still more Gilmore Girls. On this trip, we got from about a third of the way through the last season to almost two-thirds. Before we knew North wouldn’t come home this summer, we’d intended to finish the show, which was the reason for the binge.

Wednesday was North’s first day of job training. We dropped them off at their office and began our two-day drive back to Maryland. That wasn’t easy, but I am in no position to complain about them spending the summer away from home because I didn’t come home the summer that I was twenty either. While we were walking by the river I asked them if they were nervous or excited and they said, “Both.” It’s quite the grown-up adventure and just the right time of life for it. They are right on time.

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Mother’s Day

It was a strange Mother’s Day and birthday. North’s still at school and Beth’s in Wheeling with her mom, who has not been doing well. And then on Mother’s Day Noah and I were only awake and in the same place for a couple hours. I returned from a mostly unsuccessful trip to the farmers’ market around eleven-twenty. I’d failed to find strawberries, which they’ve had the past two weeks, and which were my main reason for going. I did buy a little basil plant and got a latte from Takoma Beverage Company, so the trip was not completely in vain.

At eleven-thirty we had a three-way video call with participants in Oberlin (North), Wheeling (Beth and her mom), and Takoma Park (Noah and me). Beth and I opened our Mother’s Day presents from the kids. I opened one of Beth’s for her because it had not arrived when she left. I got two jars of fancy nut butters and Beth got some dark chocolate bars and drinking chocolate.

Noah left for his games gathering shortly after one, and I went grocery shopping, first at the co-op and then at the grocery store. Because I don’t drive and a week’s shopping is a lot of food to carry on foot or on the bus, I came home between legs of the trip to drop off my purchases (and to grab a quick, late lunch of apple slices with my new honey-peanut butter and Babybel). I was tired when I got home from the final leg and I felt a little sick, like I might be having a blood sugar crash, but I checked and I wasn’t. I lay down for a while and eventually felt better.

Early in the day I’d been wondering what to eat for dinner. Sunday is normally a leftovers night for us, but I was tired of the leftovers we had (having eaten both the lentil soup and the white bean-cheddar-broccoli casserole multiple times for lunch during the week before) and I wanted a treat. So, when I was at the co-op, I looked for something that would pair well with one of those dishes and I brought home bake-at-home spanakopita and pistachio shortbread cookies to have with the last of the lentil soup. It made a nice meal. After dinner, I talked to my mom on the phone and then read a few chapters of Julia for book club.

It wasn’t a bad day, and I did get to touch base with my wife, kids, and mom, but it made me think how a day mostly to myself seemed the height of luxury when the kids were small and I was a stay-at-home mom, but now it’s not as precious.

Birthday

My birthday was the next day, and it was less solitary. We had another video call for me to open birthday presents in the morning, I had lunch with my friends Megan and Becky, and Noah was home all day and made me a birthday cake.

On the call, I opened more nut butters, gift cards to two different coffeehouses in Takoma Park, a book, and new bath towels. (I had recently decided my towel, which is older than Noah and is ripped in two places, needed to be retired.) It was a pretty good haul.

On my way to lunch with Megan and Becky, I stopped at Starbucks and picked up my free birthday drink, a half-sweet coconut latte. I am still (mostly) boycotting Starbucks, but a free drink is a free drink and puts no money in their coffers.

Megan and Becky are both friends who date back to North’s preschool days. Megan’s daughter Talia was in North’s class and Becky taught both of our kids in Kindermusik and music classes at the Purple School, so they know each other, but they hadn’t seen each other in years, and they both seemed excited about the gathering.

We ate at the covered tables on Laurel Avenue because it’s less than two weeks until I will see North so we’re in the masking-and-not-eating-inside-restaurants window. The day was damp and cool, but not too cold for outdoor dining. Also, the arrangement allowed us to order from different establishments. Megan got a salad from Takoma Beverage Company, and Becky and I got Thai from Kin-Da (which I later realized was exactly what she and I had done for my forty-ninth birthday). We covered a lot of ground but talked mainly about our kids (who range in age from Becky’s twenty-eight-year-old daughter Eleanor to Megan’s sixteen-year-old son Nate) and about our aging parents and in-laws.

I’d taken the day off work so in the afternoon I spent hours reading Julia and finished it. I highly recommend it and I also recommend re-reading 1984 beforehand if you do. The plot fits very intricately inside the plot of 1984 in a delightful way. While I was reading, Noah was making my birthday cake—chocolate with strawberry frosting. Beth had entrusted him with the recipe and some tips for making it.

Noah and I ordered Indian takeout for dinner, ate the delicious cake, and then we watched an episode of The Testaments. I was glad about this because we were not making as quick progress through this series as I thought we would with Beth out of town (we were only up to the second episode that night—but now we’ve watched four).

I started blogging in 2007, the year I turned forty, so I have now blogged about every birthday in my forties and fifties. Instead of a toddler and kindergartener, I now have two grown kids. My wife has retired and turns sixty in the fall. Time marches on. Thanks for sharing the journey with me, whether you’ve been reading for years, or just joined.

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Beth, Noah, and I spent a lot of time together the past two weekends, leading up to his birthday. We went to a film festival and a music festival, and we ate out four times. (And in between, Beth took a whirlwind trip to Chicago and she and I went to a poetry reading together.)

On the last Saturday of April, we took an expedition into the city to attend Filmfest DC and to have dinner at China Chilcano. We did the same thing (same festival, same restaurant) last year, on Noah’s birthday. This year the festival ended before his birthday, so we went the weekend before.

Film

We saw a film from Argentina, Risa and the Wind Phone, which takes place in a town in Tierra del Fuego that is still recovering from a catastrophic fire ten years earlier. Many of the characters lost relatives in the fire. There’s an out of commission phone booth where people go to talk to their dead family members. The protagonist, a ten-year-old girl, while using the phone to speak to her father, discovers that unlike other people who are using the phone as a therapeutic device, she can actually talk to the dead and the dead have requests—a lot of requests—and messages they want her to deliver. This becomes her summer project, in which she is accompanied by her babysitter and a hamster. Over the course of the film, she develops a father-daughter-like relationship with the babysitter and learns some unexpected things about her own father. It was magical and not just in a magical realism way. I highly recommend it, if it becomes available to stream.

China Chilcano is a Chinese-Japanese-Peruvian fusion restaurant. We got a lot of the same dishes we got last year, starting with yucca fries and cilantro-squash dumplings. I got Brussels sprouts with chili glaze, peanuts, and a fried egg. Beth got a cauliflower dish, and Noah got a vegetable-noodle bowl. I had a condensed milk custard with meringue and passionfruit sorbet for dessert. It was a fun outing, movie and meal both.

Theater and Novels

Sunday morning Beth left the house at dawn to fly to Chicago to see her high school friend Michelle act in Follies that afternoon. She only decided to go a few days ahead of time and stayed just one night. It was an unusually spontaneous decision for her (she kept exclaiming about it), but she was able to fly with miles, so it felt affordable.

That morning since she wouldn’t be going to the farmers’ market, I delivered baked goods (almond flour banana-chocolate chip muffins and matzoh toffee bark) to a bake sale there to benefit the Montgomery County Immigrant Rights Collective, where Beth has been volunteering since retiring. They were so grateful for the donation (which almost doubled their stock) that I felt I was getting undue credit (having only baked the muffins—Beth made the toffee bark) and I had to keep saying it was from her, too.

I spent much of the rest of the day reading, first Charterhouse of Parma (still slow going) and then 1984, finishing the second half of the latter pretty much in one sitting. I rarely read in long chunks like that anymore and it was nice.

Poetry

Tuesday evening Beth and I went to Favorite Poem Night at the library. Usually I read a poem, but I decided to just go and listen this year because I couldn’t manage to pick one; nothing was speaking to me. I think it was because two years ago I read “Hope is the Thing with Feathers,” with hope in my heart for the election and last year I read “The Mary Ellen Carter,” inspired by its message about rising up in the face of challenges, but this year I am just tired, not as fired up as I was a year ago.

I realized later this was the poem I should have read. It’s by Langston Hughes.

I am so tired of waiting.
Aren’t you,
for the world to become good
and beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife
and cut the world in two—
and see what worms are eating
at the rind.

I enjoyed the event, but I was hoping there would be a poem that would make me feel better about the power of the human spirit and that didn’t really happen. “That’s a heavy lift,” Beth said when I mentioned it in the car on the way home. Poetry does sometimes do that, though, I said. It just didn’t happen to do it for me that night.

Birthday Dinner #1

Noah turned twenty-five on Sunday. We celebrated by going out to dinner three nights in a row. We started Friday with pizza at Roscoe’s. We go out for pizza or get takeout pizza every other Friday (making it at home on the alternate Fridays), so it wasn’t unusual, but we did let him choose where to go. Earlier in the day Beth went to a May Day rally in the city, which I considered attending, but I skipped because I still had a lot of reading for book club, and I knew I wouldn’t get much of it done over the weekend because we had plans. (As it turned out I ended up taking Tuesday off work because that was the only way I was going to finish The Charterhouse of Parma in time, I had sunk way too much time into this book not to finish it, and it was looking like a slow work week anyway).

Music Festival

Saturday afternoon, we went to Porchfest in Adams Morgan. I found it a little ironic that Takoma Park has its own Porchfest we’ve never attended, and we went for the first time to a different one, but Noah wanted to go to this bigger one and we weren’t all going to be in the same place on the weekend of Takoma’s Porchfest anyway. Some of the bands do play on porches or stoops on residential blocks; others play on the sidewalk in front of retail spaces. A jazz group was playing on the balcony of Madam’s Organ.

We saw a few acts. We caught the tail end of a group called Freezer Burn playing classic rock (Beatles and the Romantics) on a stoop, before moving on to Indie band called Staring in Spaces, playing in front of a bookstore. There was a beer pong table set up in front of the tent where the band was playing. It was quite crowded and I couldn’t see very well. I could actually see the beer pong game better. But the next singer we saw, Bryce Bowyn (synth pop), was playing in a plaza in front of a bank, which was more spacious. Also, we found a concrete rectangle where we could sit and I could see, so that was nice. The singer had good stage presence and was quite the energetic dancer.

On our way to the final band that we wanted to see, La Unica (Latin-Irish), we ran into some trouble. Between people watching the band playing at Madam’s Organ and people trying to get in or out of a bar across the street or people trying to walk from point A to B (or B to A), the street and sidewalks were a total logjam. It was almost impossible to move in any direction. I have to say most people were considerate, even solicitous, but there were a lot of people and most people doesn’t translate to all people, so there was pushing and yelling. I got yelled at for not moving and for trying to move. The three of us tried to stick together but we all got separated. I finally got out of the crowd by getting into the slipstream of a big man who was managing to part the crowd. Almost immediately, I found Noah, who was waiting at the edge of the scrum, but Beth was nowhere to be seen.

Because of the size of the crowd, our phones were useless for texting, so after waiting a little while we decided to proceed to the next stage that we’d agreed upon in hopes of finding Beth there. It was in a plaza in front of an elementary school. We tried to text every now and then, but the texts would not go through. I had Noah stay in one spot in front of the stage, so I could find him, while I wandered through the crowd (looking for Beth) and then waited in a long line for the porta potties.

Through all this, I was also listening to the band, which was more Latin than Irish. There was a fiddle, but more Latin instruments. They were singing Celia Cruz and Harry Belafonte songs, among others. People in the audience did a conga line. When they finished, we waited for the crowd to clear out so we could see if Beth had been there all along, but she wasn’t. Noah finally got her on the phone, and we managed to meet up on our way to the restaurant where we’d planned to have dinner. Poor Beth had the worst of it, being more freaked out by the crush of the crowd than either Noah or me—she’d turned back, which is why she didn’t make it to the next stage—and then being alone for at least an hour while we were all trying to contact each other.

Birthday Dinner #2

It was a relief to be reunited. We had a relaxing dinner at Bua, a Thai restaurant in Dupont Circle, near the apartment where we lived from 1991 to 2002, the last year with an infant Noah. We picked it because we’d eaten dinner on the balcony of this establishment the night before Noah was born (on the day my obstetrician told me—“This baby isn’t coming any time soon”).  I used to maintain it was the strong Thai iced tea that put me into labor. As a result, we have an on-and-off tradition of having Thai food the night before Noah’s birthday. We managed to get a table on the same balcony where we ate that fateful night twenty-five years ago, which made me happy. From Bua, we headed to Kramerbooks for dessert, another nostalgic spot for us. Even though Noah does not remember living in this neighborhood, it still evokes his baby year for me, so it was fun to be there on his birthday weekend.

Presents, Cake, and Birthday Dinner #3

On Noah’s actual birthday, we had a video call with North, and he opened his presents on the call. He got two gift cards to Panera, one Apple gift card from my mom, a check from YaYa, a new mouse and keyboard, and three books. It was a pretty good haul and he seemed pleased. After lunch we had his birthday cake, a strawberry lemonade cake Beth made.

In the afternoon he went out shopping for presents for Mother’s Day and my birthday and we met up in the city for dinner at an Italian restaurant we’d never tried near Union Station. It was a little higher end than our usual spots, the kind of place where they replace the silverware and wipe down the table between courses. We had focaccia, arancini, and pasta. Noah and I got the same dish, a ricotta-goat cheese ravioli in a lemon-cream sauce with spinach. While we were eating, we saw a couple tables get a flaming chocolate dessert that intrigued us. Turns out it was a piece of tiramisu enclosed in a globe of chocolate. When the server sets it on fire, the chocolate melts and reveals the tiramisu. Of course, we got it, along with a rice pudding brulée with edible flowers, and they also brought a tiny slice of complimentary chocolate cake with a candle and a birthday card for Noah. I thought the card was a nice touch.

This is what Beth posted on Facebook on Noah’s birthday:

A quarter century ago, on May 3, I ate dinner alone at a restaurant across the street from the Columbia Hospital for Women. I had a window table and I will never forget looking out onto M Street and feeling like the whole world was entirely different. And it was. I had become a parent.

Tonight I had dinner with the boy who was born that day, who has grown into a kind and thoughtful young man, and with Steph, who was recovering from an emergency c-section 25 years ago. We capped off a lovely meal with a flaming tiramisu.

So much has changed during Noah’s lifetime. In 2001 I was not his parent in the eyes of the law. But the fierceness of my love for him is the same today as it was on that very first day.

Beth left for Wheeling yesterday, two days after Noah’s birthday, and she’ll be gone a while, so it was nice to spend the last two weekends with the boy who was born that day.

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