Inch Fifty-Six: Break

I have the next three days off from Juvenile Court, a prospect so glorious I glow just writing that sentence.

Don't get me wrong. I love my job. I'm just tired. A significant part of my job is mediating truancy matters in our county and city school districts, and this is a busy time. "Truancy season," I call it. March is typically the most grueling month of the season and this March has been no exception. This year, the four different districts are holding their spring breaks over three different weeks, and the only days I could squeeze some time out of without throwing my mediation calendar into total disarray are the next three.

I don't mind. I'll take them. Gladly. March has been a hard haul on top of it being the core of truancy season. There have been concerts, there have been rehearsals. There are oncology issues. There is the special court project I am contract advisor to, which I am finalizing for submission to the Ohio Supreme Court for its blessing. There are pressing legal clinic matters.

There have been too many too long days and I need a break.

Spring is struggling to gain a toehold around here.  Some spring flowers, frost-burnt on the tips, are trying to bud. The brutal cold of this year appears to have killed off this year's forsythia and we will have to wait to see that burst of yellow come again. My good friend Judy reports that the bamboo in her yard is dead and will need to be cut down to regenerate. After hearing that, I came home and looked in the kitchen garden, where we'd planted some late summer purchases to winter over. I feared the worst and was heartened to see green shoots coming up where we'd heeled in the plants last September. I am looking forward to walking around town over the next few days and seeing just where the season stands.

I wrote this post Tuesday night after a 9 hour day at work, after scheduling another nine truancy mediations after scheduling another six or seven just days before. A small bread pudding was baking, one made frugally from the stub ends of a loaf of Italian bread and one lone biscuit. I had a new book opened on my lap, The Selected Letters of Langston Hughes, a favorite poet of mine. I was meeting a friend for coffee in the morning, and the rest of Wednesday, indeed, the next three days, stretched out luxuriously in front of me.

It is early Wednesday afternoon as I type this. The bread pudding was delicious, the letters are engaging, my friend and I talked long and laughed a lot. I may take a walk after I post this and just savor the time. The sun is shining, National Poetry month is upon us, I have a break, and all's right in the world.