My farewell to (my daughter’s) middle school

Happy Monday, DMV! It’s June 15.

This evening is my 8th grade daughter’s promotion ceremony, and the past week has felt like the culmination of a concerted community effort to get us all to this point. My family and I have spent the past several days celebrating.

On Tuesday, we went to a Latin-Mexican restaurant to support middle schoolers playing in the rock and jazz bands they formed in an after-school club. My daughter didn’t play, but we wanted to check it out. Band after band went onto the restaurant’s stage to strum, drum and belt out their tunes. We cheered them on.

Then Friday, I volunteered for the 8th grade dance. More than 200 8th graders — about two-thirds of their class — came dressed to the nines for their last hurrah at school. I dished out pizza in the cafeteria and stayed away from the dance floor in the gym to give my daughter space. She said the kids did the Cha Cha Slide. She had fun.

All this to say … we made it, together. It has been a rough ride. I remember her last day of in-person class in second grade, in the spring of 2020, the parents who did pick-up gathered on the playground, saying our farewells as the pandemic lockdown began.

In Zoom school, I remember hearing my daughter upstairs in P.E., jumping in front of her laptop. One day she told me she learned how to “play volleyball” and demonstrated, holding her hands together, straightening her arms and bumping an imaginary ball in the air. Why is it this memory that tugs at my heartstrings? I was so proud of her for giving her all to learn this new skill … on a Zoom call.

Since then, we’ve weathered so much. You know.

So tonight at my daughter’s promotion ceremony, I can’t wait to clap wildly for her, of course, but also for every kid, every parent, every teacher, every staffer and our wider community. Because we wouldn’t have made it without you.

Onward.

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Eve Ness, 77, took this photo facing northeast from her 8th-floor apartment in Arlington, Virginia, Friday at about 8:30 p.m.

“As the big storm passed through, right at sunset, a rainbow appeared. Then, due to the setting sun, the clouds reflected a very unsettling blood-red hue that I've never seen in combination with a rainbow,” Eve wrote in her photo submission.

“It seemed paradoxical somehow, and more than slightly Armageddon-y.”

Share your recent photos of life in the DMV here.

🙏