Letter from Home appears weekly in Flagstaff Live! each Thursday, and is written by a rotating cast of Flagstaff-based writers, including Tony Norris, Shonto Begay, Jean Rukkila, Peter Friederici, Darcy Falk, Laura Kelly, Kate Watters, Margaret Erhart, Allison Gruber, Stacy Murison, and an occasional guest writer. Click the Read More button below any of these posts to read the full version and view any images that the authors have shared.
Dammed
There wasn’t a good place to be in the days after the election. For someone who believes that the candidate we’ve just elected disqualified himself years ago when he forsook his oath to defend the Constitution by choosing to watch TV while his supporters ransacked the Capitol, there was no escaping a sickening feeling of doom, or a feeling of uncanniness that tens of millions of fellow citizens somehow felt OK enough about that option to fill in that particular bubble on their ballot. And even some people I know who did so admitted to dismay...
read moreThe Pine Tree Out Back
The dead pinyon pine behind my shack still looks sturdy. For now, at least. Short and stout in the way of its kind, the tree is more than a foot in diameter, but just 25 feet tall. When I bought this place ten years ago it was almost dead, battered by the one-two punch of drought and beetles. It finally gave up the ghost during an especially dry summer a few years ago. I had planned to cut up the tree for firewood–pinyons make dense and fragrant fuel–but changed my mind. Why? Because I could only burn the thing once. After it had...
read moreAll Mirrors
At the hot, laid-back music festival in Arcosanti last month, I was struck by Angel Olsen’s haunting lyric: “All we’ve done here is blind one another,” from her song, Lark, on the 2019 album All Mirrors. Words have always resonated deeply with me, often overshadowing everything else in a piece of music. Olsen’s ethereal, brass tacks voice—both frank and dreamy—floats me right into the heart of my indie music sweet-spot. Her words echo a duality I can’t help but contemplate. Blinding someone can be a protective act, shielding them from...
read moreMess
The story goes that when my father’s parents divorced when he was eight, the reason given was not infidelity, moral lassitude, or drunkenness, but messiness. Theirs was an example of the inability of two people to share a life when one was messy and one was neat. There are many apocryphal stories in my family and this may be one of them, but I suspect there’s truth at its core. I remember my grandfather as a buttoned-up man whose passion was fishing. He tied his own flies—an incredibly exacting art—and was a beautiful skier. If you could meet...
read moreA book, a garden, a life
I had the privilege of introducing a friend at her book launch celebration in Flagstaff a few weeks ago. I admire her writing, and her. The essay she read that night is one that I teach in my class. Seeing the essay as part of a whole collection—a book that I could hold in my hands—delighted me. Many will now get to read her beautiful words and ideas. A friend sidled up to me after the reading and asked, “when is your book coming out?” I never know how to answer this question. The lack of a published book by me is not for lack of trying. I...
read moreWild Horses
On a July day before my fifth grade school year began, Mom and Dad circled my three brothers, my sister and me. They told us we were moving to Indiantown, a one-stoplight village in rural South Florida. We’d be moving in a week to my grandfather’s cattle ranch, which was acres of palmetto scrub. We’d live in a doublewide trailer encircled by some scraggly pine trees in the agricultural flatlands that are the interior of southern Florida. Indiantown is a former Seminole Indian trading post, a midway point between the Atlantic Ocean and Lake...
read moreSome Things Fade
Shady Acres was exactly what I needed in August of 1995. That spring I had been living out of my pickup truck while waiting tables at Grand Canyon. In July I quit the job and set out to bicycle across the Great Basin desert–a fool’s errand writ large. On the afternoon that I peddled into Laughlin, NV, the temperature spiked at 117 degrees. Four searing days and 200 miserable miles later, I called my best friend in Flagstaff, pleading for a rescue. She obliged, and on the drive back from Nevada mentioned that the cabin next to hers...
read moreThe Testiest Prodigal Daughter
Let me introduce myself. I moved to this area in 1996, growing up with this column as a familiar voice. I’m feeling like I finally got invited to a cocktail party because it was weird not to. My son and I went to Jerome’s second annual music festival last weekend; we enjoyed the temperature in the shade and the jaunty vibrations of Jerome’s relaxed haunting. I watched the frisbee being tossed across the street in the same way I may head nod to a particularly chilling folk ballad. The music festival on wrap-around winding streets got me...
read moreWay Stations Remembered; One traveler’s tollbooth fandom
Every summer I make a pilgrimage to New England where I did some of my growing up. In a rented car I drive the familiar roads of Massachusetts and Maine, reacquainting myself with humidity and the color green. The farther north I go the fewer people there are, and along the coast the air cools and becomes salty. I don’t pull off the highway to find a bowl of fish chowder or a lobster roll, though I wish I were the kind of person that did that even just once. One thing I’ve learned about travel is it puts you right up against who you are,...
read moreBeauty and fear go with the job; Sweet dreaming follows
Stepping to each direction, pausing with both hands on the catwalk railing, softening my eyes, I pour all of me into one leg, then the other. My day on duty at the fire lookout begins with looking in the four directions before calling the dispatcher, “Flagstaff, Turkey Butte.” “Turkey Butte.” “I’m in service, winds NW at six, precip .35 inches.” He reads it back. Elden, O’Leary and East Pocket lookouts report their rain which I jot down, interested in the on-going story of moisture in the woods over summer. Then I put on my good...
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