Aging and the Good Earth

When my mother was in her seventies, I recall driving up to her house and admiring her roses. She had some 20 bushes, each bearing a vivid color still etched on my mind today. But seeing the roses was only one part of that memory, what I remember most was seeing her hunkered over a boulder the size of a bar fridge. I walked over to her and saw sweat beading down her lined face. I asked her what she was doing. Her eyes danced with excitement when she replied, "I move rock." She had heaved the chunk of earth some 15 feet, from one side of the garden to the other. "Looks better here."

I thought about her and her boulder when I read a recent report from the Archives of Internal Medicine. It suggested that people who are physically active during their leisure hours may well be biologically younger than those who prefer the couch. In the active, like my mom, chromosomes in white blood cells are more robust. Inactivity, on the contrary, only hastens the aging process. This makes sense to me. My mom is in her eighties now. While she isn't moving boulders anymore, her rose garden is still going strong—just like her.