Townes told me he preferred to call Washington, DC “the District of Columbia.” If only he knew how authentic that really made him. He wasn’t born there, but his parents’ relationship was. Joe and I met playing frisbee on the grassy parks surrounding the nation’s giant monuments. Biking and picnicking and rock-creek-parking this city was how we got to know each other, how we fell in love. Though museums were all closed, this DC felt more familiar anyways – to ourselves back then and to our current selves with our 17-year-cicada-finding babies in tow now.

We continued what we started in North Carolina, seeing some of the most important friends in our lives; being nourished, rejuvinated, and filled up by companionship, feeling known, feeling understood, laughing, and easing back into the ten-years-advanced version of ourselves.

And, on Cinco de Mayo, we had lunch at the same place as Joe Biden on his first visit to a local restaurant since entering office

• We stayed: a friend’s apartment, while some “road friends” let us park Chrysalis on their land in Leesburg.
• We explored: Rock Creek National Park, our old neighborhoods: Woodley Park, Adams Morgan, Woodley Park, Capitol Hill, and Shaw, the Wharf and other professional projects of Joe’s, the National Arboretum
• We biked: the National Mall (Lincoln, WWII, FDR, MLK, Jefferson, the Capitol)
• We hiked: Rock Creek park trails around the Nature Center
• We ate: La Consecha (with Joe Biden), Teaism, Thomas Sweet, Baked and Wired (five stars, always and forever), Union Market, Tiger Fork, Timber Pizza, Pappe Indian
• We drank: DC Brau, our friend’s homemade chai, our first batch of road-made kombucha, some bourbon with friends