Christmas in the Snow With Casey

Leading up to the holiday with my dog of a lifetime

This Christmas of 2023 will be my first Christmas without Casey in fourteen years. My beloved dog passed away in June.

Thankfully, I have lots of photos of him — literally thousands. In this story, I look back to November and December 2010.

I was in my second year of my Masters degree for English literature, living in the lonely little apartment Casey and I shared on the ground floor of an ancient white house in Pullman, Washington State.

In addition to my classwork, I had to teach two sections of English 101, freshman academic writing, all by myself, with no professor to supervise me.

I disliked the teaching because we grad students had had no proper training and I had no clue what I was doing. That fall semester of 2010 I was floating along, mentally and emotionally exhausted, driving the four hours back home to my parents in Montana every weekend because I was so depressed and lonely.

My only respite in Pullman was Casey. He was my whole world.

Casey loved the snow. A Husky/Chow Chow mix, he was most comfortable in cold weather and would roll around making “snow angels” in the yard. I’d stick him out the front door on his rope and he’d wander around, sniffing happily at the new scents that had come over night.

My grandma had had a stroke the year before, which left her paralyzed on one side and completely bedridden. Most of her possessions had gone in storage, but she insisted I have her artificial Christmas tree.

I was grateful for the gift. The Pullman apartment needed livening up. I decorated the tree with Grandma’s lights and ornaments for Casey and I to enjoy.

Now we had a warm, cozy room to come home to after our long walks in the late afternoon darkness.

I put up lights on the bookcase, too, to make the living room more festive and to stave off the darkness within me. At night, I wound down by sitting on the couch to eat and watch TV.

I would have liked to get the over-the-air broadcast channels like NBC, ABC, and CBS so I could have watched The Big Bang Theory and the nightly news, but my apartment only picked up PBS.

Casey liked that channel. He would sit and stare at the talking heads, looking away only when the program turned to Masterpiece Theatre.

One night, we got almost a foot of snow. The sidewalks were all shoveled by the time I took Casey for his morning walk, leaving us to enjoy the winter wonderland.

We had our regular walking route, a circuit through our neighborhood, that Casey liked to follow without deviation. People along the route knew his name and he knew all the dogs in the yards along the way.

Casey and I came together through serendipity. When he was three months old, someone took him into the woods and shot at him. He was rescued and taken to an animal shelter, where an older couple adopted him. They loved him, but decided that he had too much energy and dropped him off at a different shelter — where I arrived a week later.

I had been due to come home from my year of graduate study in Scotland in June, but due to my mental health issues, I decided to return in May. I’d been longing for a dog, so less than a week after I got back, I went to the shelter to adopt one.

I had composed long lists of potential names in Microsoft Word, but as I rode in the car up to the shelter, I suddenly thought, “If it’s a medium-sized, light-colored dog, a good name would be Casey.”

When my parents and I pulled up to the shelter, six or so dogs bounded out of a row of sheds and into chain-link dog runs, barking excitedly. At the end of the row was a white and tan dog with a curly tail, about forty-five pounds. “That’s Casey!” I thought.

And the rest was history.

In Pullman, Casey and I went for runs together on the country lanes. He helped me motivate myself to get out in the cold, jogging into the wind as I listened to The Great Courses lectures on my iPod.

Casey was ever-cheerful, pulling me along when I got tired. Gradually, we worked up to longer and longer runs, going from two miles to four to seven.

The day I ran seven miles for the first time, I stopped in a gas station store on the way back to the apartment to take a lovely warm shower as my reward. Bursting with pride, I told the cashier, “I just ran seven miles!”

Of course, I wouldn’t have been able to do it without Casey.

I loved to take Casey to the dog park seven miles away in Moscow, Idaho, where he could run free. There, he played with other dogs in the snow as I sat huddled on the bench nearby, watching with a smile.

You could always tell which dog was Casey. He speeded around faster than a greyhound, leaping and bounding in astonishing feats of athleticism.

His favorite game was getting other dogs to chase him. He’d whirl in the snow until he had the others tied in knots. I loved to watch him.

Safe in the apartment at night with our glowing Christmas lights, I gave Casey his new toys. I was always buying him things, so much so that the entire living room floor was covered. I didn’t mind the mess, as long as he was happy.

Thanks for reading! This story is my entry for In Living Color’s December ‘Bright Lights or Snowy White’ prompt.