Our theme for the month of March is “cities.”
It wasn’t until grade nine that my family got a dog. My sisters chose the breed—I chose the name (at least phonetically)—christening her after the capital of Ecuador (though we forwent its spelling: my sister—quite rightly—objected to “quit” in the name of such a lively creature). I’d never been to Quito (still haven’t), but it just sounded like a great dog’s name. My relationship with cities has always been thus: I like the sound but inevitably find that a name never quite captures the experience.
You could say I’m a “country mouse”—only rather less adaptable than those incredibly resilient creatures. I’d lived on the outskirts of Calgary for most of my life when I moved to Grand Rapids, and despite the apartment-feel of the dorms, I interacted only sporadically with the city beyond the campus bubble. It was a different matter when I moved to Boston, where I scarcely slept for the first two weeks, having never lived anywhere whose traffic noises didn’t abate when the sun went down. Even so, I survived—more than can be said for the city mice in our apartment: the rental company aimed to dispatch them with horrible glue traps, but we covertly replaced those with a cat.
I’m not exactly at home behind a wheel (my husband can attest), so city living best suits me when there are plentiful bike lanes and motorists who understand them. Commuting was a breeze in Boston, where my route took me straight past lane after lane of standstill traffic, whereas I had the clearly delineated and generally respected bike lane nearly to myself. New Haven was similarly well-endowed with such lanes (at least along my route), and getting around there was a cinch—at least until I stood from locking my bike to an outdoor fire escape and accidentally cracked my forehead against the rusty stair above, necessitating an emergency tetanus shot one year earlier than intended. The last emergency shot I’d needed was two decades previously—in the country, as it happens, and because of (go figure) a mouse bite.
I’m in Miami at the moment. It’s hot and humid and huge. Last week I went through a day’s worth of heartbeats in just two hours driving on Florida’s Turnpike—making at least two months’ quota of merges on a single stretch. It’s a marked contrast from Lubbock, where nothing’s more than a fifteen-minute drive away and no road has more than three lanes of traffic—though the cities do share a curious (for Lubbock, anyway) abundance of nerve-wracking fancy cars.
Some months ago, I sat down to recreate my address history for USCIS. The fact that it was such a tedious chore, I try to remind myself, is evidence of astonishing unearned favor: how many people have the opportunity to live as many places as I have?
It isn’t just the government that’s interested in one’s home history; “where are you from?” is among the first social niceties of any novel conversation. And I invariably answer—though it’s been over a decade since I lived there full-time—“Calgary, Alberta; in Canada.” Sometimes a quizzical unfamiliarity clouds the questioner’s face; I see the follow up forming and head it off: “it’s just north of Montana.” But occasionally there’s a knowing grin instead: “Canadian, eh?” and I feel like I’m home.
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.
