I stared at the computer screen in disbelieving delight one evening in mid-January, waiting to board my flight to Boston. I’d been checking my immigrant portal obsessively (as one does) for weeks, awaiting the date of our interview, but this was so much better. There was to be no interview. My case was closed: the card was on its way. I texted my parents, who had just boarded a plane in the adjacent terminal, a screenshot and three exclamation marks. Ironically, the approval of my U.S. residency meant I could go back to Canada.
Less than a week later, I had a Green Card in hand: it was officially time to plan a visit home. The AAAS conference John-Mark was presenting at in Denver was a month away; we shifted from checking the round-trip flights to a one-way return for him: we were going on a road trip—our first with a puppy.
From the human perspective, it was uneventful (as far as trips with puppies go); to Eden, it was a whole new world, but she took it (mostly) in stride. After her final puppy class the night before our departure, we checked the forecast and adjusted our plan: a Nor’Easter was barrelling toward Boston and we aimed to hit the road before the storm hit us. The next morning dawned chill and grey, with us already on the road and headed West. We passed the turnoff for Eden’s class—the furthest she’d ever been in a car—shortly after sunrise and kept on going. Every exit ramp held a phalanx of plows awaiting the storm to leap into action. They do snowstorms right in New England.
A pillowy snow hush settled over the roadway as the trees and homes around were blanketed and the roadway began to catch up; before it fully could, we were out of the snow’s path. Eden curled up at my feet and dozed as we launched our latest audiobook (Tim Alberta’s The kingdom, the power, and the glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism).
We drove to Ohio that first day, and it was in the hotel that Eden first registered her displeasure. Our normally silent-as-a-ghost puppy must’ve been hearing every sound in the curiously smoke-scented Super 8 and figured it was due for a howling doggy haunting—much to our chagrin (our sincere apologies to any fellow guests that night). Thankfully, she rallied, with each subsequent night’s complaining briefer and less voluable than the last; in Des Moines she resigned herself to all the new noises after only a few minutes, and by Denver she was back to her cautious but quiet self.
We spent three days on the road and three in Denver. The conference was a blast—John-Mark enjoyed presenting (and I very much enjoyed not presenting), and the sessions were great. Eden had her longest daytime stint in the kennel (hearing the entirety of Mere Christianity), but then enjoyed her longest walk yet, in Denver’s lovely Crown Hill Park (along with dozens of dogs and their owners).
Then, all of a sudden, it was time to drop John-Mark off at the airport, and pick up my mom for the drive North to Calgary. Two days later, Eden crossed the border for the first time and discovered the joys of running free in a fenced backyard.
It was a pleasant, brief interlude, but now it’s back to that looming dissertation deadline. With a little over a month to go before my defense (to quote the ubiquitous meme), I should be writing.
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.
