Full Circle
A lot has changed since I was here in the Midwest.
Natasha (Strydhorst) Unsworth (‘16) is a science communication researcher and practitioner working on her Ph.D. at Texas Tech University. Natasha hails from Calgary, Alberta. Some of her favo(u)rite authors are C. S. Lewis, Francis Collins, and Bill Bryson. Her favourite earthly place is the Canadian Rocky Mountains, and her favourite activities are reading and enjoying the great outdoors—preferably simultaneously.
by Natasha (Strydhorst) Unsworth | Jul 25, 2024 | 0 comments
A lot has changed since I was here in the Midwest.
by Natasha (Strydhorst) Unsworth | Jun 25, 2024 | 0 comments
He extended his index and the remaining three-quarters of his middle finger: “that’s two—not one and a half!”
by Natasha (Strydhorst) Unsworth | May 25, 2024 | 0 comments
He paused contemplatively before bellowing, with evident relish, “I’m TOO LOUD!”
by Natasha (Strydhorst) Unsworth | Apr 25, 2024 | 0 comments
I’d done a virtual run through of the presentation (so called, I like to think, because it’s the part of the process that most feels like being run through with a sword)
by Natasha (Strydhorst) Unsworth | Mar 25, 2024 | 1 comment
We know our lives here are fleeting, but it’s the sort of knowledge we don’t care to call up that often—as if mortality were a somewhat shameful secret.
by Natasha (Strydhorst) Unsworth | Feb 25, 2024 | 0 comments
We passed the turnoff for Eden’s class—the furthest she’d ever been in a car—shortly after sunrise and kept on going.
by Natasha (Strydhorst) Unsworth | Jan 25, 2024 | 0 comments
She chases her tail methodically, in a neat, measured, business-like circle, like a tiny site inspector
by Natasha (Strydhorst) Unsworth | Dec 25, 2023 | 0 comments
The fronds always put me more in mind of Easter.
by Natasha (Strydhorst) Unsworth | Nov 25, 2023 | 0 comments
She has yet to shred her first roll of toilet paper, or textbook, or slipper.
by Natasha (Strydhorst) Unsworth | Oct 25, 2023 | 0 comments
She bargained her services as a biology editor in exchange for a small lab and single technician and doggedly continued her science.
by Natasha (Strydhorst) Unsworth | Sep 25, 2023 | 0 comments
There were pandemic quarantines; were it up to her, they would have never ended.
by Natasha (Strydhorst) Unsworth | Aug 25, 2023 | 0 comments
I, too, am a member of the convenience cult.
by Natasha (Strydhorst) Unsworth | Jul 25, 2023 | 2 comments
If I had to describe it in a single word, I’d probably choose quirky, but it is, of course, so much more.
by Natasha (Strydhorst) Unsworth | Jun 25, 2023 | 0 comments
“Do you know Father Gabriel?” she asked me.
by Natasha (Strydhorst) Unsworth | May 25, 2023 | 1 comment
You’ve been a pleasant surprise.
by Natasha (Strydhorst) Unsworth | Apr 25, 2023 | 0 comments
“That’ll burn for hours—we’ll be here all night!” someone would observe. But no one ever minded.
by Natasha (Strydhorst) Unsworth | Mar 25, 2023 | 0 comments
Even so, I survived—more than can be said for the city mice in our apartment
by Natasha (Strydhorst) Unsworth | Feb 25, 2023 | 0 comments
I felt the grit on my teeth and imagined it in my lungs.
by Natasha (Strydhorst) Unsworth | Jan 25, 2023 | 2 comments
“Grand Canyon? More like Bland Canyon.”
by Natasha (Strydhorst) Unsworth | Dec 25, 2022 | 0 comments
It puts me in mind of Christmas in Canada: joy in enormous measure, coupled with the inescapable aches of cold
by Natasha (Strydhorst) Unsworth | Nov 25, 2022 | 0 comments
I am not the same as I was at four years old, but I am the same person. Right?
by Natasha (Strydhorst) Unsworth | Oct 25, 2022 | 1 comment
Cyclists know a city very differently than motorists do—as ants know a backyard very differently than squirrels do.
by Natasha (Strydhorst) Unsworth | Sep 25, 2022 | 0 comments
I guess I’ve reached the point of news media consumption at which I expect the phrase “juicy secrets of stars” to concern some vapid, nosy meddling in some stranger’s affairs—my science communication background and research focus notwithstanding.
by Natasha (Strydhorst) Unsworth | Aug 25, 2022 | 0 comments
I don’t know whether the driver even saw me after the fact, or if he ever registered the uncouth bird I flashed at him.
by Natasha (Strydhorst) Unsworth | Jul 25, 2022 | 0 comments
We are notoriously poor followers of instructions. Even simple ones. Even conspicuously beneficial ones.
by Natasha (Strydhorst) Unsworth | Jun 25, 2022 | 1 comment
We can be lamentably blind to the blood on our hands
by Natasha (Strydhorst) Unsworth | May 25, 2022 | 1 comment
We stood at the summit of the 8,424-inch-tall Cliffs of Moher for an interminable stretch, taking in the majesty of lush green pasture giving sudden way to jagged, vertical, bird-nest-spotted stone yielding in turn to frothing, unabating ocean.
by Natasha (Strydhorst) Unsworth | Apr 25, 2022 | 0 comments
My mind has been absorbed with the things of the screen, always in the presence of, well, what feels like everything.
by Natasha (Strydhorst) Unsworth | Mar 25, 2022 | 0 comments
Our thoughts need company as desperately as we do.
by Natasha (Strydhorst) Unsworth | Feb 25, 2022 | 0 comments
Each of those shorn poplars may well have been genetically identical, but those of us in the serious tree-climbing business knew that didn’t mean squat.