I'm Going To Talk About Wolves

On an otherwise uneventful 2nd grade day, Mrs. Rogers picked up a book and read to her class the story of a part-wolf, part-husky named Balto and the sleddogs that helped save the small Alaskan town of Nome from an outbreak of diphtheria in 1925. From there on, you would often find little 8-year-old Emily bothering the school's elderly librarian for books about wolves. Or, as said librarian would pronounce it, "woofs". And while wolves remained the center of my interest, a secondary interest (fueled by Balto along with other books, such as Julie of the Wolves and White Fang) became Alaska. The idea of riding a dogsled down the Iditarod Trail race path and yelling "mush!", the months without sunlight, more snow than I could dream of, and the most elusive and alluring of all - the Northern Lights, Aurora Borealis. Another lifelong love of mine has been the night sky, so the discovery of something so incredible as vibrant colors dancing across the stars seemed nigh unbelievable. And definitely something I NEEDED to see for myself.

After many stuffed toy wolves, taking extra long to clean the "Alaska room" at the Stucker's house (thank you to Mrs. Holly for my first job, being her house cleaner, and also for having books about Alaska in the downstairs bedroom), the wildly inaccurate 1995 animated movie Balto (which, despite said inaccuracies, I repeatedly rented from the library), pining after the small glittery snow globe of a wolf on my mom's bookshelf (where did that even come from, Mom? Do you still have it?), several zoo visits to see the wolves, complaining that wolves were always "the bad guys" in movies and games, two shirts with wolves on them (one of which I was wearing the day I met Christopher), and so on and so forth, eventually my interest in specifically Alaska did begin to wane. I learned there were other places that utilized sleddogs, other places with wolves, other places where the northern lights could be seen. And somewhere from there my fierce devotion to wolves also tamed, though they still remain a favorite of mine.

Last month, October of 2025, I carefully packed up a box of my mementos to send to Idaho with my parents. We were about to ship everything off to our new place in The Netherlands, but there were a few items I just couldn't bear the thought of sending off with even the slightest chance they'd get lost in shipping. Balto, a small stuffed toy no more than 6 inches long, was one of those items. He came from humble beginnings - the toy isle of WinCo - but had been my most faithful toy companion of any I'd ever owned.

And so we set off on our adventure. Our flight from PDX left at 1:25pm, so we had a few hours of light left before flying the rest of the 9 hours in darkness. After the in-flight dinner and a movie from a shortlist of options, we decided it was time to nap so we could wake up when we landed. With reclined seats, neck pillows, and eyemasks, we said "goodnight" and tried to sleep. But not before I took a final look out the window...
...and finally saw, for the first time, the northern lights.

The little airplane icon on the map showed us somewhere up to the furthest edge of Canada, headed towards Greenland, and there outside my window were the green ribbons of light I'd only ever seen pictures of.
I know that was a long walk to get to the point of this story, but truly, it cannot be overstated what a magical surprise and childhood dream come true that moment was. And unexpected, for sure - flying to Europe was not where I'd imagined I would finally fulfill this long wished for bucket list experience. Seeing the whole spectrum of colorful northern lights is still on the list, as this was somewhat dim and only green (yay for camera technology making it look brighter than it was), but for now, this was a lovely, lovely bonus to mark the beginning of our adventure.