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.
Language in the Crosshairs
In the first four minutes of our Spanish class, I have managed to confidently declare more ridiculous statements and ask more impenetrable questions than any of the other students who are very wisely holding their tongues. A rough translation of my gibberish would be: I have a little spoon. May I borrow your hair today? Is the fruit seller awake? The little dog is driving the red car. I plunge forward, at one point puzzling the teacher (she’s good at guessing, but even this question leaves her stumped) with my request to borrow a lie...
read moreMoon Joy
There are times when words fail this writer, and trying to describe the Artemis II mission is one of those times. While I missed a lot of the day-to-day mission milestones in real time, I found myself catching up before bed every night. Some of the most striking images were unexpectedly non-moon related—Christina Koch’s braids at zero gravity, a jar of Nutella careening through the small cabin, a small plushie named Rise, and Victor Glover twirling in space. There seemed to be so much joy and goodwill between the astronauts in space and the...
read moreDo You See What I See?
In our darkened classroom, this striking image of a boy fills the screen. It looms, oversized and mesmerizing. His doleful eyes are downcast. Angular shadows of light stripe the wall behind him. Stubs of what used to be his arms protrude from his T-shirt. Two dozen university students and I are silent as we absorb what we see. This is nine-year-old Mahmoud Ajjour. The photographer, Samar Abu Elouf, took the picture in Doha, where the boy had been airlifted after losing his arms in March 2024 in an Israeli missile strike on Gaza City. This...
read moreThirty 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...
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