Day 93: Halfway

Photo by Kerstin Wrba on Unsplash

Through the semester, that is.

My Administrative Law students will take their midterm tomorrow. They’ve added a few skills to their ninja toolkits that can become their secret weapons for their clients in dealing with agencies, and they’ve started to see how the questions involved have profound significance for our constitutional system.

My clinic students are fully underway and getting increasingly independent. They’re working with their clients, developing facts, researching law, and crafting the case theories that will anchor the narratives they present to agency decisionmakers.

Calendars and Seasons

I’m tired, but deeply appreciative of the seasons, as marked by both the academic calendar and the Gregorian calendar. Today is the first day of October - so named because it was the eighth month of the Roman calendar - but the sun was shining like a summer day as Gary and I walked down to the Morgantown Wine & Jazz Festival today. We feel blessed to live in a small city that invests in face-to-face community.

This fall, I’ve been walking every morning and evening, a front-row seat for the theater of color just starting to play out in the trees. I find myself yearning to decorate the house with pumpkins and cornstalks and strings of tiny acorn-shaped lights (though so far I mostly just look at decor online, which is cheaper and almost as satisfying).

I’m grateful, too, for the seasonal markers in the academic calendar, which have always seemed to me the most natural way to live. During the ten years of my adult life that weren’t planned on an academic schedule, I felt a little off balance. Shouldn’t summer be a time of release, of complete change of focus (even less focus)? Shouldn’t the holidays be carved out for a different pace? Shouldn’t the times in between, the spring and the fall, have a defined beginning-middle-end?

Happy midterm, happy fall.