Rutina

To help you, this is a Spanish noun cognate for our English term routine. The well of relationship can be dug to be as deep as you have time and interest for a variety of words. Cognate itself comes from the Latin cognates which means blood relative. I chose rutina as a basis for the way Spanish is part of my routine of survival in a hot, dry summer of 2023.

Routine can be a fence that protects when life presses in or it can be the path we can follow when unsure or confused. For understanding how Spanish came to be that for me, start with the choice of an opinionated teenager in the early 1950’s. Remember, a group of 18 of us moved lockstep through high school mostly in the same classes. We were all exposed to Spanish I and II. I liked neither the language nor the teacher. For some reason the structure never made sense to me, so the grades messed up what was an easy more than acceptable average across the board. The low point for me was translating rio as I laugh instead of a flowing body of water. Onward to college. I tried three weeks of French til I realized I was too visual to manage a language that didn’t match sound and sight, and I was glad English was mostly an acceptable choice!

Time marches on. In Houston, I taught in Spanish neighborhoods and picked up vocabulary if not grammar. I married into the geography of El Paso and my husband, while not proficient in structure, loved the cadence of sentences and the culture they represented. Then for fifteen years I traveled at least once a year to Lima, Peru, to make sandwiches for a mission trip. My first competent sentence was “Dónde está el baño?” in the airport at midnight. In January , 2013, I started Duolingo. I now read fairly well, understand the structure of tenses, and still have difficulty with inserting que, de, a, al, del in proper places. Yet 10 years and much maturity since age 18, it is a pleasant requirement of each day to sit and do a lesson, a rutina that defines time and challenges my brain, and nourishes my soul. Es bueno!

Hechos 2:6 Y al ocurrir este estruendo, la multitud se juntó; y estaban desconcertados porque cada uno los oía hablar en su propia lengua.

Acts 2:6 When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment because each one heard their own language being spoken.