Editor’s Note: Four 22nd Judicial District Court judges are retiring. We sat down with three of them recently to talk about their experiences and their plans. A fourth, Judge Larry Green, did not want to be interviewed.

(First of three stories)

A miniature masked man from Zimbabwe. A tiny blue man from Morocco. Folk figures from Egypt, and a Buddhist statue from China.

Judge Patricia Hedges

One glance at the dozens of knickknacks in 22nd Judicial District Court Judge Patricia Hedges’ office and it’s evident: the woman is a world traveler.

At 65, Hedges, who for 12 years has ruled over everything from murder cases to the “man spitting on the sidewalk,” has managed to be stern and decisive on the bench while on her own time acting like a free spirit. She’s visited more countries than most Americans can pick out blindly on a map.

And in January, on the day she retires alongside three other judges at the 22nd Judicial Court in Covington, she plans to set out to see the rest of the world.

“I’ve got to retire so I can get going,” she said with a chuckle. “There’s a whole lot of world to see.”

Hedges, who has made a name for herself as a stern, but fair judge while becoming the first woman to ever sit on the bench in Division G, can talk for hours about trips to far away lands. She’s been to Antarctica, China, Morocco, England, Scotland, Ireland, Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Australia, New Zealand, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, South Africa and a few more places she can’t rattle off immediately.

On one solo trip, she dined and drank wine and laughed heartily with complete strangers while on a cross-country train trip through Bulgaria. She paid no mind to the fact they didn’t speak English, she said.

She also once visited a synagogue in Budapest chocked full gravesites of Jews slain during World War II. Later she met and ate lunch with a man from Switzerland who worked in a labor camp during the Holocaust.

She’s even taken a dip in Romania’s Black Sea, she said.

“I’ve never been bored,” she said.

One would think a day filled with grisly murders, rapes, drug offenders, burglars and batterers would offer enough excitement for a woman who was a housewife and didn’t attend law school until she was in her 40s.

Many may say she’s making up for lost time. After all, her long and storied career — first as a private practice lawyer in Slidell and then as a 12-year district judge — almost never was.

After meeting her husband, John, at a fraternity party at Georgia Tech when she was 17, Hedges was content to be a wife and mother.

They married. She had three children, Paula, Ellen and Lloyd, and bounced around from city to city with John, who often moved around in his career as a civil engineer before his death on Dec. 25, 2005.

Hedges, originally from Atlanta, finally started taking graduate school English classes when the couple settled in Slidell, a “southern girl back home in the South,” she said.

But she dropped out before writing her final English thesis. She played wife some more, she said, joking, only to later enlist in law school as a “purely academic pursuit.”

“I had no intention of ever practicing law, much less becoming a judge,” she said.

When she graduated a friend suggested she work for ACORN, a non-profit law agency for the poor. She was 48, and her kids were halfway grown, she said. She agreed.

A year later that same job almost killed her.

Driving from a court hearing in Belle Chasse, her mind, like always, focused both on the case and the client she just dropped off at home.

Then, suddenly snapping out of a fog, she noticed the red brake lights of a dozens stopped cars in her path. She zapped back to reality, screeched her breaks and swerved at the last minute.

“All I could do was stop. I have to stop,” she thought. “I can’t hit this car. I may go off the side (of the Twin Span).”

Her job stress had started to affect her life, she said. She resigned the next week and opened a private practice.

Later she took a job as a judge’s clerk.

The judge bug had bit. When a slot opened at the 22nd Judicial District Court she campaigned for a seat and lost. Six years later, when her boss retired, she campaigned again. This time she won. And while at times she downplays her position’s importance as “a job and not your identity,” it’s obvious the law has its grip on her.

“You see history of mankind as it develops (in court), and you can participate in that development,” she said, smiling. “And somewhere along the line you just may touch a life and make a difference.”

It seems she has. Over the years, she’s gotten thank you cards and Christmas cards from people she’s disciplined. She seems to feed off the people she works with.

“I think you get strength from the people around you,” she said.

Come January however, those people aren’t going to be in the courthouse. They’ll be in distant lands in distant cultures.

So far, Japan, Prague and Thailand are on the short list to visit.

And who knows, “maybe I’ll finish that English thesis,” she said.

Coming Wednesday: Judge Donald Fendlason.