Car Dates

 One of the casualties of pandemic life at la casa Bryant has been date nights. As people who have never been married without children (I already had a daughter when I married Sweetman), date night has been essential to us from the get-go. We work to make sure we get some quality us-two time alongside work and family responsibilities, even when we can't afford anything fancy.

We have a teenager still at home, and while we do all try to give each other some space here during the pandemic, we've only been home without her about three nights in the past year (when she had a sleepover with her college-student-sister). It's not an option to send her on a sleepover, or even just to a friend's house for the afternoon like we're used to. 

Most of our favorite dating options, such as movies, restaurants, and theater outings have either been unavailable, or have not be available in a way that we feel safe about utilizing. So, what's a couple to do?

Image source

Sweetman and I value our date time, and though we try to capture a bit of it at home by getting special takeout and watching movies at home, playing games together, and banishing the teenager to her room for a while so we can feel alone, it's not the same. 

We're both bad at separating from the to-do lists and practicalities when we're at home, so it's hard for us to capture a sense of fun and romance without going somewhere. 

Some months ago, though, we came up with the car date. 

Basically, we pick something to go see, and a scenic route to get there, hop in the car and drive (leaving the teenager home with the dog to YouTube unfettered for a a few hours). 

Along the way we talk, play songs for each other, hold hands over the gear shift and seek new experiences together. 

While we have a destination, it's generally something we found on Atlas Obscura, involving driving by something or getting out and looking at an oddity, not something with tickets and timetables, so it's okay if we stop anywhere along the way just because we saw something interesting or if we fail to find the thing we were looking for. 

If the weather is nice, we get some takeout and find a place to picnic. If it's too cold or rained too recently, we get some takeout at the end of things, and take it back home to enjoy. 

This week's date took us on a lovely sunlit drive through muddy storm-bedraggled countryside to Shangri-La…the miniature stone village built by a retired farmer and available to admire and explore for free. It's adorable! A series of small buildings made of stone and brick, arranged in a tiny village. Toys strewn throughout add to the whimsy and crocus sprouts were just poking out their heads, so I intend to come back soon to see them in bloom. 

We were both completely charmed by the project and the results. Along our drive we found a local cider producer we didn't know about and found out where exactly a nature area I'd heard about was located. So future small adventures are afoot!

How about you, people of the internet? How do you keep a little romance in your lives under current circumstances? 

D is for Duke Gardens: A to Z Blogging Challenge

It's April and you know what that means: The AtoZ Blogging Challenge! For those who haven't played along before, the AtoZ Blogging Challenge asks bloggers to post every day during April (excepting Sundays), which works out to 26 days, one for each letter of the alphabet. In my opinion, it's the most fun if you choose a theme.

My theme this year is Places in my Heart, all about the places I've been and loved and that have mattered to me in a lasting sense.

For my regular readers, you'll see more than the usual once-a-week posts from me this month. I'm having a great time writing them, so I hope you enjoy reading them, too.

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D is for Duke Gardens

I got married in Duke Gardens, so obviously this is a special place for us. 

The first weekend my husband and I ever spent together, we had a picnic there, sitting near the lake. Throughout our long distance courtship, while he was in grad school at UNC Chapel Hill, I'd come visit him, and we'd keep coming back to Duke Gardens for long walks and talks in a beautiful setting. So, when it was time to marry, it made sense to do so in a place that had been such a part of our relationship. 

Since we ended up settling in the Triangle of North Carolina, we still get to visit Duke Gardens regularly. We have a relationship with the ducks, who spotted us a mile away as suckers who will buy multiple bags of duck feed. We named the Heron in the lake (Harry, of course). We have a particular bench inside a magnolia tree where we like to sit and people and bird watch.  It's beautiful in different ways throughout the year. 

It's both cultivated and wild, organized and chaotic. Just like us. 

C is for Carolina Theatre: A to Z Blogging Challenge

It's April and you know what that means: The AtoZ Blogging Challenge! For those who haven't played along before, the AtoZ Blogging Challenge asks bloggers to post every day during April (excepting Sundays), which works out to 26 days, one for each letter of the alphabet. In my opinion, it's the most fun if you choose a theme.

My theme this year is Places in my Heart, all about the places I've been and loved and that have mattered to me in a lasting sense.

For my regular readers, you'll see more than the usual once-a-week posts from me this month. I'm having a great time writing them, so I hope you enjoy reading them, too.

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C is for Carolina Theatre

The Carolina Theatre is a lovely old dame in downtown Durham, North Carolina. We discovered her some time shortly after moving to this area and are now regulars for many of their events.

We spend the most time enjoying their Friday night retro film series, which plays both classics and cult classics and everything in between. It's a favorite date night for the husband and me, and sometimes we take the kids, too, especially when we feel their pop culture education is at stake! Recently played films I've enjoyed include: The Princess Bride, Bladerunner, Cowboy Bebop, The Secret of NIMH, The Evil Dead, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Gaslight.

The theater itself is beautiful, designed in the 1920s in the Beaux Arts style. There are several different performance spaces inside, for movies or stage events. Besides the retro series, we've enjoyed multicultural performances like Japanese drumming, musical performances by Big Bad Voodoo Daddy and Madeline Peyroux, and presentations of various sorts.

Between the events, the lovely people who run the place, the gorgeous venue, and the yummy snacks, the Carolina Theatre is definitely my kind of place.

Flash Fiction Piece #4

This week, I'm participating in the Flash Fiction Project founded by +Becket Moorby. Each day, there's an image for inspiration and we all write a piece. I'm excited about participating just for the promise that I will, indeed, write something every day. 

Today's image is: 

Image courtesy of TheDreamSky on Flickr Creative Commons (Attribution Link)

My piece:  Falling in Love

It had come to that moment.

It had been an excellent dinner full of light banter and flirtation. She'd been pleased to find that the step between "friend" and "date" hadn't been as awkward as she'd feared. She could still eat in front of him like a normal person and laugh at her lack of grace with chopsticks. He still ducked his head when he said something witty, just as he always had in all the years of their friendship. If anything, it was less awkward now. They could acknowledge the subtext.  It was the first time they had both been free at the same time.

After dinner, they decided to walk a bit. He offered his hand, and she took it, pleased at the way her fingers fit into his. His hands were very warm. Hers were usually cold. It was nice. It felt so easy. It scared her at little. Love had never been easy. She worried there would be a catch.

He suggested a direction leading to an overlook, a view of the city below. She wondered if he was staging a kiss. She hoped he was. She knew him to be a man of romantic gestures, a man who thinks about things like lighting and ambiance, who holds snapshots of memory in the deep pockets of his heart. She giggled a little nervously.

He began to swing her arm, like they were children skipping together. She laughed again and, looking up into his face felt a lurch, a tug somewhere in the depths of her. It was then that she tripped. He followed her a step later, stepping into the same hole. Somehow they didn't end up on the ground, but  standing holding each other's arms for support. The world stopped and they breathed together, still giddy.

If this had been a movie, they would have kissed there. But, this is real life, and they both felt suddenly shy, so they linked elbows and walked around the hole in the sidewalk together, to the overlook. Standing, looking at the lights of the city and its bridges below them, she slid her hand around his waist in an easy way, as if she'd always known how to fit their bodies together. "You think that's why they call it falling in love?" she quipped.  He laughed. And that was when he kissed her.

Our Latest Shakespeare Date

It was time for date. T & I hadn't been out alone in too long. It doesn't have to be all that long to be too long for us.  More than a week is too long. We have this horrible buildup of too many unfinished sentences and a lack of quiet moments. Children are lovely, but they can make it hard to have a conversation and conversation is at the heart of our attraction.

So, we talked about what to go do. Luckily, we live in a great area of the country full of wonderful things to do.  We thought about going to see a double feature big screen showing of Bela Lugosi's Dracula and Lon Chaney's Wolfman at the Carolina because I am a big old movie fan and T's appreciation is growing.  But babysitting was going to be a problem on Friday night.  

We thought about just walking around Franklin Street looking at stuff and talking, but T's got a foot problem right now, and it was supposed to rain. Walking was going to be a problem at the art museums, too, and no one had anything we were really drawn by right now and hadn't already seen. We didn't really want to just go eat.

Then, T had the thought that we hadn't seen a play together in a while (this is how lucky I am--I have a husband who has "theater" in the top five list of places to take me on a date night).  Fiasco Theater was doing a production of Cymbeline at Duke.  Shakespeare. Shakespeare that neither of us already knows by heart.  Perfect!

Shakespeare is special to T and I. 

First off, we are both tremendous word nerds. We drive our tween crazy when she wants help with her vocabulary homework because we can go on for fifteen minutes about the various ways a word might be used and where that word came from.  We email each other articles about new language items we see on the Inter-webs.  We quote from Much Ado About Nothing to flirt.

Second, we are both romantic saps. We're a collective sucker for happily ever after.  But at the same time, it has to be a believable happily ever after.  We're not an easy sell.

Then, there's the coincidences of Shakespeare for us.  Our first real date (the one where we both went in knowing this was going to be a date and not just friends getting together) was on Shakespeare's birthday.  Our first couch-movie together was 10 Things I Hate About You. Our first dress-up date was Twelfth Night at Playhouse in the Park.

Cymbeline, by the way, was amazing! It was a lot of fun to hear echos of other plays and other lines that I knew better. I figured it would be worth seeing, because I have enjoyed every Shakespeare production I have ever seen--even the bad ones. The writing is that good--it's hard to kill if you have any talent at all.

And Fiasco Theater is a group of six very talented and versatile actors, who each played multiple roles in the production. One man was the king, the doctor, and Cloten the oaf/villain.  Another was a servant, the long last Prince, a rich Italian host, and a pompous Italian general. One of the women was the evil stepmother queen, the runaway kidnapper of princes, and a couple of different men.

Costuming was simple. Additions of jackets, hats, or small props were made on stage as actors transitioned from one role to another. The actors made the transformations with body language and voice. Costuming was just a nod for the less observant audience member. Or maybe they just like to play dress up a little.

All six actors were also amazing singers and musicians and the production made wonderful use of this with a variety of music--madrigal, martial and bluegrass--all worked naturally into the show.

The untangle at the end, the reveal of who everyone really was and how they relate to each other, was brilliant.  I laughed aloud to the point that I snorted.

So, another wonderful date, brought to us by William Shakespeare, and Fiasco Theater. Thank you!