We stood on the street corner, full from a late lunch, just looking at each other silently.
It had been a long day.
We had driven two and a half hours with a carload of our son’s favorite possessions, and spent another three hours taking them up to his new dorm room in four trips. The last, inadvisable, one was after I talked the boy into eschewing the line at the elevators and opting to carry the last few items up fifteen flights of stairs instead.
Essentially, what I had done was condemn us to climbing in circles up a dimly lit, non-air-conditioned stairwell. My armload of feather-light things had me feeling like Sisyphus.
I made it to the eighth floor before I realized I would have to sit down and rest.
The boy sprinted onward with his much heavier boxes and returned a few minutes later to find me at the 9th floor, making slower and steadier progress.
“Boys are different,” I tell myself on a loop. Nearly everything we unpacked was a thing he argued he didn’t need.
The afternoon was turning to evening, and we had done what we set out to do.
In his new room on the fifteenth floor of a building that also houses a burger chain restaurant and a bank, his bed was made, his bags unpacked, and his computer was set up and working on his new desk.
I had hidden the cleaning products he didn’t want to bring in the back of the wardrobe he insisted wasn’t included, behind the three-tiered shoe rack (that he also thought was unnecessary but his father had dutifully assembled at my insistence).
I want to say this is not my first rodeo – and that in time my son will come to rely on the surprising comfort of a few unnecessary things, like his sister – but I’m not sure it’s true.
Once we’d finished, I took a last look around. His first-year room looked sparse in comparison to hers. He looked happy.
His father pressed the hex key that came with the shoe rack into the boy’s hand, and, in a hushed voice, instructed him to tuck it away despite the likelihood that he would never need it again. Our son smiled and closed his hand around the tool.
It was time to say our goodbyes.
There was no sadness. No tears.
He accepted his dad’s bear hug with a quick release and double shoulder taps. He agreed to call or write with news of his first few days, lest we worry. He didn’t need to be reminded that his parents would miss his presence … even though I kept saying it … like a skip in a record.
He hugged me last. Holding on a little longer than I know he is comfortable. All for me.
Maybe he knew I would spend the next few days immersed in his childhood, cleaning his room and finding a small lifetime of treasures and literal trash … not to mention seven water bottles, a mostly uneaten Easter Basket he received in 2021, and MY long-lost backpack under his bed.
Maybe he didn’t know that’s how I would have to get through the first few days of call waiting.
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