3 Minutes With Your Neighbor: Terri Scadron, Cultivating Her Own Garden — Inside and Out

Introducing your Montgomery County neighbor, Terri Scadron:

What's your morning routine?
I get up at 5:30 a.m., feed our cats, skim the newspaper, and on most weekdays, go for a 6 to 8 mile run. On weekend mornings, I meet my running friends for longer distances, usually in Rock Creek Park or the Capital Crescent trail.

What do you do for a living? And what's he best thing about your job?
I’m a supervisory attorney in the Department of Justice’s Civil Division. I manage a team of about 15 attorneys in appellate litigation before the federal circuit courts. The best part of my job is mentoring younger attorneys, doing what I can to ensure that they stay excited about the law.

What's the hardest?
Getting rammed by judges who don’t want to hear what we have to argue!

How long have you lived here?
Except for a one-year judicial clerkship in New Jersey, I’ve lived in the Washington, D.C. area since 1986.

What's your favorite thing about living here?
The parks are amazing – I love that you can start at Lake Needwood, out in Derwood, and run or bike continuously to the National Mall and beyond, all the way to Mt. Vernon if you’re feeling super energetic.

If you had to arrange a secret meeting here, where would you have it?
Hmmm, I bet I could find a pretty isolated spot somewhere in Seneca Creek Park along the dirt trails. But if we were exchanging secret documents, they could get kind of muddy.

Tell us something about yourself that most of your neighbors don't know.
I’ve committed to running back-to-back marathons in March, as a leukemia fundraiser through Team in Training. That’ll be a challenge, 52.4 miles over the weekend, but I'm ready. I'm highly motivated to do this because I myself have chronic lymphocytic leukemia - still asymptomatic, knock on wood.

When you want a really indulgent snack here, where do you go and what do you get?
Maybe not a snack, but the deep-fried watercress at Ruan Thai is totally worth the calories.

What's the best piece of advice you've ever been given?
My mom used to tell me to cultivate my own garden – develop myself inside and out, and good things would come naturally. So far, that’s generally been true.

What are you doing after this interview?
Oh, I’ll probably try to get in a couple miles before dinner. And then do some fundraising for Team in Training. Here's a link to my page.