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.
Thirty Years, and Counting
I first heard about the Master of Liberal Studies program at NAU not long after I moved to Flagstaff, in the person of a woman whom I would eventually marry. Well, that sounds interesting, I thought, adding it to the list of things I found interesting about her. The program was focused on good and sustainable communities, she said. As a writer I loved the combination of adjectives—not just the word sustainable, which even back then sounded well-intentioned but also a bit technocratic, bloodless, but the word good, which rang with depth,...
read moreOn Nicolett Avenue
“With malice toward none, with charity for all…let us strive…to bind up the nation’s wounds.” — Abraham Lincoln After buying an Amtrak RailPass in February I spent a month criss-crossing America on trains, admiring my country: its tall mountains and broad plains, the great Mississippi and Columbia rivers, major cities like Chicago, St. Louis and L.A. On a layover in Washington D.C. I walked the National Mall for hours to soak up the beauty, and felt grateful to be an American. But gazing up at the...
read moreSpring Break, By Hand (Mostly)
This spring break, we decided on a loose theme: old-fashioned toys. Just a tilt, really. A mother’s attempt to pass the increasingly cyphoned-out time by hand. A deck of cards. A backyard trampoline. A jump rope. And one very modern electronic toy, immediately sacrificed to a Ponderosa. The stick flip is a small handheld game that beeps and keeps track of how many flips you make. It was launched by my preteen on day one and lodged straight into a spring pine. Clean shot. It’s still up there. The speed with which we lost it makes me want to...
read moreLending a Voice to the Moment
A snapshot: A woman walks down the road outside a small California town. She walks with a swing of her body, a comfortable yet deliberate walk. As I drive by I notice on this December day that she is barefoot. My passenger cries out, “Stop the car! Do you know who that is?” I don’t know who that is. “It’s Joan Baez!” To my passenger’s dismay I didn’t stop the car that day. Because what does a person say to a voice, a voice so emblematic of a time, a movement and a country trying to find its way? I grew up on Joan Baez. The words freedom and...
read morePlunge
The night the police helicopter dropped from the west Flagstaff sky I was lying in bed, trying to get my mind off the disturbing flow of local news updates by immersing myself in a long magazine article. The piece was about Greenland. But it wasn’t one of those articles about Greenland, the ubiquitous kind exploring the politics or the psychology of a rapacious toddler-king seeking to blow up NATO in pursuit of real-estate glory and a compelling plotline in the long-running reality show we’ve all become a part of. No, this story was...
read moreThis Train
When the 2008 financial crisis hit, I didn’t lose a thing. There was nothing to lose. No house, no 401K, no stocks or bonds. My minimum-wage job at the bakery still paid minimum. My battered old truck had quit on me, but my bicycle tires still held air. I was doing OK Nonetheless the Great Recession was a wakeup call. For decades I had been enjoying life, not planning for a future. So at 53–lacking health insurance and dragging around a decades-old student loan–I went looking for a grown-up job. The unemployment rate stood...
read moreMephitis Mephitis and the Lessons of Liberation
The guy on the TV screen tells me two things I didn’t know. One, I almost certainly have a skunk under my house because in winter that’s where skunks go, under houses. And two, if I don’t already own a Skunkinator, I need to run out and get one right now. Salesman he is, but the way he phrases it is more like two of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism: We suffer; there is an end to suffering. We have a skunk; there is a way to get rid of the skunk. This appeals to me, a kind of esoteric sales pitch designed for those who would like a smattering...
read moreShowing up
It was fairly clear on Sunday night when I rolled the recycling bin to the curb. It had been another unseasonably warm day, which seems to be the description of every day in Flagstaff since December. Looking up, I could see the Orion constellation tilting toward our house and I stood, bin tipped, to admire the formation and the bright star, Betelgeuse. The street was quiet except for the bin’s wheels grinding on cinders as I edged it closer to the curb. As I walked up the driveway and back to the house, I kept my eye on Orion until the...
read moreA Call to Kindness
The writing assignment for my second-year university students was an opinion piece. I instructed them to select an issue they genuinely care about so their passion for the subject would animate their work and fuel them through the research and writing. When I read their submissions, I sifted through the usual topics reflecting Gen Z university student concerns: the call for increased LGBTQ+ rights, the burnout of hustle culture, the unfairness of unpaid internships, and the lousy food in the cafeteria. But Ivan’s piece stood out from the...
read moreISO Season, Cold but Beautiful
As someone who lives by choice at high elevation, I know the happy truth that those of us who are lucky enough to live up here are simply closer to the sky than most other people. Which according to my dermatologist and eye doctor alike is not always a good thing. But I will take the trade, paid off in fresh air, mountain vistas, nighttime dark skies. And in the sense that when you live at over a mile high winter is always nearby. Even on a hot summer day it’s up there not that far above us, in some unseen atmospheric layer cold enough to...
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