Yoga with Grandma

After dinner, Grandma and I usually retire to the lounge to just rest and talk and watch some of the news or read something. Last night I began on Phillip Sidney’s ‘Astrophil and Stella’, which is on my reading list for Renaissance literature next term. After about 15 sonnets worth of professions of love, I felt rather saturated with love poetry and decided that now, if ever, was a good time to practice the headstands I had learnt in my yoga lesson last week. And so I carefully arranged my hands in a cradle for my head, turned myself upside down, and slowly drew my legs up so I was in a headstand.

Grandma watched my antics with the greatest amusement, commenting on my form ‘Your feet are ever so near the wall but not quite!’ ‘And all your weight must be on your arms and head - imagine!’ ‘Your tummy muscles must be quite strong to do that!’ As I wobbled and quivered and tried not to crash onto anything!

After a couple of headstands, I moved into a sun salutation (despite it being utter darkness outside) After three rounds of the sun salutation, I asked Grandma if she’d like to do some yoga, and so we both sat down on the floor and did meditative breathing, and then some stretching side to side, and then we stretched our neck muscles by drawing a big circle with our heads from the ground to the right side and over our heads and to the left. It’s funny, but when you are in that sort of relaxed and meditative state, you tend to recognise things you wouldn’t usually - such as the pattern on the ceiling. Grandma’s lounge ceiling is patterned in a way such that it looks like the painters threw the paint on the ceiling and made it dry in tiny peaks and waves across the ceiling. I can’t think of another way to describe it but a water dappled effect.

In fact, I told Grandma, it reminded me of what it looks like when you are under water, looking at the underbelly of the surface skin of a pool, as rain drops fall on to it. It has the same pricked, water-dancing look. That under-water-looking-at-rain feeling is such an odd one - you are completely enveloped by warm water, but if you venture near the surface, where the rain is, it becomes cold, because the rain is cold. And so you dive down into the warmth and stay there, safe. And strangely enough you feel almost dry, simply because you aren’t being touched by the rain.

Grandma told me then of how, when she was little, when it rained she would beg her Mum to be allowed out into the rain. ‘Oh Mum, oh mum’ and her Mum would wrap her in her mackintosh, make sure she was wearing her welly boots, and give her an umbrella, and she would sit, completely dry, with rain pouring down all around her. She mimicked her posture of holding the umbrella and sitting in the rain right there on the lounge floor, and from the brightness in her eyes and the grin on her face you could imagine she truly was there, a child in the rain.