The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

It didn't take me very long to pack. I hadn't brought that many clothes – a few tops, four pairs of pants, and my prized slate-gray skirtsuit – and I'd more or less been living out of my suitcase anyway. I'd been in Waitsburg for five days catching up with my family and going over my class notes, not really enough time to justify moving anything into my closet.

Normally, I wouldn't have gone home at all. Plane tickets from South Bend, Indiana, to Pasco aren't cheap. Perhaps more crucially, I lost a few precious study days to travel, and I didn't have access to my textbooks over spring break. (They would've filled half of my suitcase on their own.) But I had an interview with a judge at the King County Superior Court. If it led to a summer internship, the plane ticket would pay for itself, and the learning opportunity alone would be more than worth it.

I would be driving to Seattle on Wednesday, March 11, interviewing with the judge on Thursday, and flying back to school out of SeaTac on Friday, March 13. I'd cracked a few jokes about it before leaving Indiana: "Yeah, I thought about skydiving over spring break, but I wanted to do something truly death-defying..." My toiletries were back in their quart-sized bag and my laptop was stowed in my backpack. I was packed to fly. With a few minutes left before my mom and I were slated to leave, I decided to check my e-mail to make sure that the judge hadn't cancelled on me.

While there was no message from the judge, there was one from Notre Dame Law School titled "An Important Message – COVID-19 Update."

We students had gotten a couple of these already, and I more or less knew what they would say before I opened them: "No cases on campus, such-and-such overseas program has been cancelled, keep washing your hands, we'll send more updates later." This one, though, was a little different:

"Beginning Monday, March 23 and continuing through at least April 13, all in-person classes will be suspended, to be replaced with virtual instruction and other alternative learning options. Furthermore, there will be no classes in any format the week of March 15 to allow faculty time to make the adjustment to on-line instruction. [S]tudents are strongly encouraged to stay or return home rather than return to campus."

We collected our jaws off the floor and headed for Seattle. I spent the morning of the interview cancelling my return ticket and the afternoon on a video call with the judge, who was feeling poorly and couldn't make it to the interview after all. In a few years, I will doubtless appreciate the scrumptious irony of the whole situation. In the meantime, most of my mental energies are devoted to not touching my face. I'm back in Waitsburg now. I've got five days' worth of clothes plus the old ones that I left behind when I went off to law school. My extra week of spring break will be spent trying to get digital copies of my textbooks, which are safely quarantined in my Indiana apartment. I'm looking forward to classes starting back up but am not particularly looking forward to the fact that they'll be starting three hours earlier in Pacific Time. Seeing as I've got some unexpected free time, I'll check back in next week. Until then, stay safe and keep your noses clean-just be sure to wash your hands afterwards.