Post-pandemic, I’ve had occasion to go to Washington DC relatively frequently, for conferences, as part of my responsibilities as board chair for the Institute for Conservation Leadership, and even for the day to see exhibitions at the National Gallery. It’s an easy flight from Chicago. Although both Sean and I really like DC (I mean with all the museums it’s like free Disneyland for thinking people), we hadn’t really been there intentionally within the context of the National Mall being a unit of the National Park Service.

In both June and August of 2022, during trips to the District, I’d walked through the astounding installation, Raven and the Box of Daylight, by Tlingit artist Preston Singletary at the National Museum of the American Indian. I really wanted Sean to see it, and we were softly looking at weekends to spend in DC. In late summer, while telling Angela about the installation, she mentioned that she had never been to DC. So we three decided to go for a weekend to see the installation, to check off some National Mall stamps in our Passports to the National Parks, and to see the Space Shuttle Discovery, something all three of us had wanted to do ever since the Space Shuttles had been decommissioned. We chose a weekend in October, when it wouldn’t be too hot in the District.

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