This week, in the orthodontist’s office, I picked up a women’s
magazine and guiltily read an article on hormone replacement
therapy. Guiltily, because I had work with me that I should have
been doing: writing this article, balancing the checkbook,
correcting Oliver’s calculus, sewing a different White Stag patch
onto Anne’s Venturing Crew shirt.
This week, in the orthodontist’s office, I picked up a women’s magazine and guiltily read an article on hormone replacement therapy. Guiltily, because I had work with me that I should have been doing: writing this article, balancing the checkbook, correcting Oliver’s calculus, sewing a different White Stag patch onto Anne’s Venturing Crew shirt.
It seems that HRT, long touted as the greatest thing since sliced bread, is now being associated with significant health risks. Instead of taking hormones to slow the aging process, one should eat sensibly, exercise, and stay mentally alert. The article mentioned solving puzzles, and gave a few examples.
As I read and glanced at the puzzles, I felt a bewildered, incredulous smile creep across my face. Once again, the lifestyle I adopted out of necessity was proving to be, not only tremendous fun, but good for me.
Eating sensibly? When I quit work, lo these 18 plus years ago, to stay home and raise pedigreed children in my spare time, we quickly discovered that we could no longer afford to eat out three times a week on a single income. Consequently, we eat rice and beans and chicken and vegetables and milk – and occasionally Halloween candy, but not much fast food.
Physically active? I have this crazy friend who insists that I get out of my lovely warm bed at six in the morning a few times each week to take a brisk one-hour walk with her.
We saw the most marvelous sunrise today: the eastern sky, curtained with rose and saffron stratus, lit up the liquid ambers at Third and Carmel with flame and gold. The air was suffused with flamingo light, the roses glowed, the trees blazed brighter and brighter, brighter to the full day.
Then we went to Garlic City Coffee and Tea on Monterey Street to have cappuccino.
Furthermore, this year I foolishly managed to talk myself onto Adult Staff for White Stag’s Phase III. Phase III takes a serious hike: four days, three nights, about 40 miles, climbing mountains, fording rivers. So perforce, I will be in training for the next several months.
Mentally active? I’m teaching Algebra I to five homeschooled students, Algebra II to three more, Calculus to three more. I’m tutoring another in trig. Forget the puzzles; math keeps my mind alert. I recommend it to anyone in need of a serious mental challenge.
Solving the problems myself is easy, compared to figuring out how to explain them to students of varying mathematical abilities. It keeps me thinking, as does the Roman history seminar I’m hosting for two homeschooled students.
But the biggest mental challenge of the year is Latin, which I’m tackling with my 12-year-old daughter. Her idea, not mine.
We’d been puttering along in Powerglide Spanish for years, a course that required little to no effort on my part. This year, Oliver’s other classes were onerous enough that I allowed him to drop his foreign language. And on Labor Day night, as we drove home from a family barbecue, Anne suddenly expressed a strong desire to learn Latin.
So the next day, the first day of our homeschool year, in between checking math and washing dishes, I called some friends to see if anyone had a Latin curriculum she was willing to sell. The second lady I called did, and Anne and I were soon conjugating verbs and declining nouns.
Never having studied an inflected language before, it took us a little while to figure out what declining nouns meant. In English, a noun’s function is determined mostly by its position in the sentence. In “The farmer milked the cow,” the farmer is the subject, performing the action; in “The bull gored the farmer,” the farmer is the direct object, receiving the action of the bull.
In Latin, instead of memorizing position in a sentence, one learns a different case ending for each noun function. There are 14 case endings per declination, and five declinations, and now that Anne has the hang of it, she is much faster at memorizing declinations than I, which is a little humbling. Latin is interesting, though. I wouldn’t miss it for the world. Maybe next year we’ll learn Greek, for a treat.
Cynthia Anne Walker is a homeschooling mother of three and a former engineer. She is a published independent author. Her column is published in The Dispatch every Friday.
