New Beginnings

 My yoga workout this morning, specially chosen for me by the YouTube algorithm, was new beginning.

It was a serendipitous choice because I was feeling a little sad that today I was planning to break the law. It is the day my son moves back for his final year of University. Due to COVID-19 and the lockdown, we’ve had him home long enough to know that we will miss him when he goes back. My lawbreaking will arise because we are going to help him move and and then go for lunch together. He will be living in a house of six and although I will definitely keep a good distance from them, there will be some polite mingling. 

The yoga reminded me that this is not an end but a new beginning.

I will miss him though, my eye rolling partner. Dinner times won’t be the same. It is only dinner times where he will be missed because that is the only time we see him, even then he’s usually quiet. His lifelong curse of being the second child when the first hardly pauses for breath in a stream of conscious talking has made him a taciturn young man, with a good range of eye rolls. We sit round the table discussing the world. There has been a lot to discuss. When things get a bit fraught, as they sometimes do when people have strong opinions, we sometimes share an eye roll. I expect when I’m the one going off on one he shares the expression with the Long Suffering Husband. 

Being a person of few words, when he does speak he often seems to make us laugh. The other day at dinner he sat down, still flicking through his phone and said, “Well, they’re cheaper than I expected,”

This isn’t a phrase you can ignore.

“What are?” we all asked at the same time.

“Wings.”

You see, he is a man of few words and so we tried to draw out of him what he was actually talking about. He showed his sister the picture on the phone. I was still thinking chicken wings but the LSH was more on his superhero wavelength. 

“You see they’re nice,” he said, “And I’d thought they’d be more expensive, as they’re from a specialist shop.”

“A specialist wing shop?” his sister asked with incredulity in her voice.

We all laughed.

We laughed for a very long time. We still laugh two days later if someone says, “specialist wing shop.”

It doesn’t seem so funny, written down but it is those moments I will miss. Still, at least he’ll probably have a nice, cheap set of wings to fly home and see us if he misses the dinner time banter as much as I’ll miss the eye rolling.