A Semester Abroad
Buttercup had her head on my lap and her drool was dampening my jeans. Scratching behind her ears with my left hand, I flipped through the brochure with my right. She was a cute dog, and a family dog, but we’d never been particularly close. She belonged to my sister, Cynthia. Maybe that was reversed, and Cynthia belonged to Buttercup. If you saw one, you invariably saw the other. It’s odd to ascribe such motivations to a dog, but I think that we took each other for granted. When I moved to...