Law, Partially

As a northern hemispheric country, just as in the U.S., summer's heat wears away and leaves change color as fall arrives in the U.K. In my years abroad I've learned how memories of time and place attach to seasons, with seasons becoming markers on the timeline. Your perception of seasonal change is shaped by where you've spent most of your years, especially where you grew up. Shaped by the American Midwest, the autumnal months remind me of baseball season's end, football season's start, school terms commencing, green leaves becoming red and orange, Thanksgiving, and Christmas shopping. We find some parallels between the U.S. and London. Fall brings cooler temperatures, although summers are never as hot and winters never as cold here as we'd get in Iowa. This year, fall brought Christine's return to school, this time at the London School of Economics, alma mater of Mick Jagger and JFK, both of whom didn't earn degrees there (hopefully Christine will be...

We had several goals in visiting Paris this fall: introduce the city to our new travel buddy, hazard a trip to the Louvre with a toddler in tow, and find some parks, pastries, and wine. In all regards, the trip was a delirious success. Paris is the most favored city -- after Tokyo -- for Christine and me. We both studied here: me during the autumn several years before Christine in the spring. We also passed some time here with my family during another deliriously successful trip in 2014 (also in the autumn). Bobby even visited the city when he was just a little pain au chocolate  baking in his mum, and she and I came for the French Open during the famous spring 2016 floods in central Paris (lots of rained-out tennis that week...). The Louvre is a particular favorite of mine. As a student, I had class in the Louvre most Wednesday nights. It's easy to dismiss it as "touristy," but it is also an unrivaled trove of the world's cultural artifacts kept in one of the gra...