The nest is empty... again...

.
Do you HAVE to do that?” Mrs Ed asked.
I raised my eyebrows resignedly, what was it this time?
“What is it this time?” I said, coincidentally echoing my thoughts.

You see it's February…. Sigh, and Mrs Ed and I are back to that dark and scary time where our home is far too empty and far too quiet. That time when the kids and all 475 000 of their friends are no longer 'in da house'.

Yes, The REE (Resident Expert on Everything) is back in Cape Town, blessing the Mother City with his infinite wisdom, and Fear Factor (still learning to drive) has sauntered off to stay with a friend in Jo'burg for the first few weeks of her 'Gap Year'.
“I think I'll work there for a while, and come back when I've earned enough money to buy a car…. And a ticket overseas,” she said.

Because, as everyone knows, Gauteng businesses are queuing up to employ matriculants from the Garden Route with no experience in anything except cell phone messaging and facebook updating. (I agreed to let her go in the vain hope that she will get used to using public transport and thus shelve the idea of getting her driver’s license until she is 75 and I am pushing up daisies.)

So the house is empty, the peanut butter jar is full, and Mrs Ed and I get to hear one another's noisy little habits .... ad nauseam.

“It's that eyebrow twitch you do when you're watching TV,” she says, “It rustles so much every time you do it, and it drives me MAD! Look, you're doing it again.”

I look at my eyebrow. Well I try. It's not very easy, really, without a mirror, though there is one individual brow-hair that, I'm rather proud to say, I can actually see if I pull it out straight. That's the one, coincidentally enough, that Mrs Ed calls my 'wayward eyebrow' because she reckons it has a life of its own, wandering around my forehead with no sense of direction or indeed destination. She hates it.

“Can't I just cut that one hair, PLEASE?” she often says. Of course I say no. What do us men have left if we can't even hang on to our own eyebrows? I say. Can we afford to relinquish such precious things to our women-folk? First they wanted to wear trousers, then the vote, now Absolute Eyebrow Control?

I swear sometimes I fall asleep on the couch (after an exhausting morning on the hammock) and wake up to find Mrs Ed hovering over me with the hedge trimmers.

But even that was in the good old days when the kids were at home and we got to look at one another. Now it seems we just listen to each other's noises,.... and complain.
“I am surprised you can hear my eyebrows at all over that racket your tongue makes against your teeth when you're reading,” I say, “Even the neighbours are complaining, and they're on holiday in Addo!”

I think wistfully back to December and January, when we used to sneak off to the bottom of the garden to eat our breakfast in peace and quiet, because 27 adolescents had somehow spent the night (I think they slept standing up) and were busy crunching and schlurping and guzzling and sucking their way through our grocery cupboards. “I can't hear myself think,” Mrs Ed used to say.

Now it's so much worse. Now I can hear her think.

“Will you STOP it with those toes of yours!” She screeches, shattering my thoughts and, I'm sure, the last remaining wine glasses;- a shame because these same glasses must have just been congratulating one another on their survival of the kids' latest homecoming. You see because some where it is (apparently) written that no-one under 23 is allowed to go through the motion of washing a glass of any sort, once the normal run-of-the-mill tumblers (and I use that word with great accuracy) have er... tumbled, wine glasses are fair game- despite their delicate nature and the fact that they have perhaps been handed down to you by a great aunt.

But now I long to hear the pleasant tinkle of a wine glass exploding on the floor. Because it would at least be a sign that someone else other than Mr and Mrs Ed are resident.

I switch the TV off. It had been on silent anyway - I was watching the 7de Laan omnibus and reading the English subtitles because I imagined that Fear Factor - our family's soap addict - might just be doing the same.

Now I can give my undivided attention to the study of my foot digits - just to ascertain why they are, according to Mrs Ed, breaking the municipal Sunday afternoon noise restriction levels.

I wiggle them one at a time:- backward and forward and left and right, and marvel at how silent they actually are. Indeed it even crosses my mind that I should perhaps embark on a career in cat burglary, so silent are my extreme appendages. I do a whole group-wiggle thing and I still can't hear anything. Remarkable I tell you!

Mind you, if there had been the minutest click I might not have picked it up with Mrs Ed noisily turning pages of her book like she does. I have complained in the past, but she says I'm being ridiculous. She says she can't be making any noise because she's reading it on a Kindle, but from where I’m sitting, every little click of the 'next page' button is enough to wake the dead.

In sheer desperation I get up to go and check the peanut butter jar. (Who knows- perhaps The REE has driven up from Cape Town for a surf without telling us). Alas, it's still full. The cornflake box sighs the sigh of the redundant victim (now the cereal killer is no longer resident), and the coffee cups I washed earlier in the day are still far too darn clean.

Mrs Ed frowns loudly, puts her kindle down and gets up to stretch. Her bones creak at a volume that makes me glance nervously at the main beam supporting the roof above our heads.
“Shall we go and visit my sister?” she suggests, scratching her tummy deafeningly.
“That depends,” I say, but there's already a palpable excitement in the room, “Are her kids home?”
“Yes, I think so,” she smiles, and the crackling of her make up doesn't even annoy me one little bit.
“Yes!” I say, grabbing for the car keys, “Yes let's!”
But she doesn't hear me, because she is already sprinting to the car, shouting (quite understandably) at the top of her lungs
“We'd be mad if we didn't!”