Summer School

We were playing pool the other night in a rented log cabin on the top of a mountain in Blue Ridge, Georgia, about an hour and a half north of Atlanta. We go about once a year and toy with thoughts of moving there permanently. It is beautiful, and yes, the mountains are bluish in the morning when the mist rises from the rivers and creeks and lakes.

Anyway, the ball I wanted to hit was blocked so I banked the white ball off the opposite side of the table to come at the ball from a different angle. It somehow miraculously worked and the ball I was trying to hit snapped out from the wall where it was blocked and rolled effortlessly into the far hole.

"Trigonometry," I told my older daughter, who was my partner. "Just think triangles." And so, right there, right then, a year of math came alive and made sense and had purpose.

The hammock on the lower deck had a rope hanging above it that was attached to the bottom of the deck above. If you pulled the rope, you caused the hammock to sway.

"Physics," I said.

The path down the steep slope to the whitewater creek was lined with shiny rocks that my younger daughter noticed flaked and fell apart. She also discovered that, when used like chalk, they write in silver and can make interesting pictures. It was muscovite mica, the crystals of which are six-sided and soft, measuring 2 to 4 on Mohs' hardness scale. The name mica apparently comes from the Latin word micare, meaning "to shine."

Geology. Art. Latin.

Along the creek, rhododendrons were in full bloom. Turns out this species, the Rosebay Rhododendron, dominates the "understory" of the Appalachian forest. This, of course, led to discussion of the movie we saw the night before, Wall-E, at one of the last drive-ins left in the United States (the Swan Drive-in in the town of Blue Ridge) and which characters were the "supporting characters," and about supporting characters in film and literature in general.

Language Arts.

The hike back up to the cabin from the creek, on a path of switchbacks, caused muscles to burn (mostly the glutamous maximus!).

Anatomy. Physical Education.

And then, of course, there were the sounds--the rushing water, the birds, and the varying beat of the gravel against our car tires on the unpaved driveway when we zoomed up it (a necessity in order to make it to the top) or drove carefully down it.

Music.

And finally, on our trip home, we stopped at Mercier Orchards, a family-run orchard since 1943 (History), where the first crop of peaches of the season were for sale, as well as delicious fudge. We got home right before a storm that watered my garden for me, I turned on the movie James and the Giant Peach, which is based on the book by Roald Dahl (who also wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), and we all kicked back and relaxed, peach juice running down our chins, with a chaser of fudge.

Homework.

Now, that's my kind of summer school.