August 31 is a big day for endings. It's the end of the month, the end of the summer — and the end of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan.
But it's also my first day of class. This evening I officially start the master's program I enrolled in months ago.
In a way it's just a return to the program I began a decade ago when I took a Georgetown class called A Sense of Place: Values and Identity. But it's been 10 years. The program has changed, and I have, too.
Now I'm enrolled in one of four required foundation classes, Science and Society. To prepare for it I've read four chapters of a book on the history of science, taking notes on Bacon and Newton and Tycho Brahe.
What will it be like to sit in a classroom again, to write papers, to be graded? I don't know ... but I'm about to find out.
(Lamplight on the Georgetown campus)