Letter from Home appears weekly in Flagstaff Live! each Thursday, and is written by a rotating cast of Flagstaff-based writers, including Michael Wolcott, Peter Friederici, Laura Kelly, Margaret Erhart, Stacy Murison, and Katie King. This site includes archived columns from Tony Norris, Shonto Begay, Jean Rukkila, Darcy Falk, Kate Watters, Allison Gruber, and some guest writers. Click the Read More button below any of these posts to read the full version and view any images that the authors have shared.
Falling Waters
The calendar read September, but the air was muggy and still when my wife and I had the good fortune this month to visit Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece of a house that is considered by more than one expert to be one of America’s greatest contributions to world architecture. It’s in Pennsylvania—deeply rural Pennsylvania, that is, where it has for almost 90 years now jutted out over the cascading creek locals call Bear Run. I’m not sure “jutted out” is really the right wording. When you’re standing on the bridge that’s needed...
read moreA Difficult Hope
We must learn to acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery; we will never entirely understand it. We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe. — Wendell Berry While much of the planet mourned for Dolly Parton last month, another vital American voice fell silent. Though not a household name, Wendell Berry was as important to the world of letters as Dolly was to the world of music. Berry, who died two weeks ago at 92, was a farmer-poet whose elegant writing helped to inspire the sustainable-agriculture and local food movements. In a...
read moreBehind Every Smile
Our family dentist, Dr. Handelman, was a burly fellow with movie star looks and thick fingers that didn’t easily fit inside a child’s mouth. The movie star looks were possibly what had clinched my mother’s decision in choosing the man—I often wondered if she chose him from a lineup—but he caused so much pain to her children that even in the waiting room she could hear our muffled cries of distress. These were the days when teeth, children’s teeth in particular, seemed to be made of cavities. There was novocaine, of course, delivered to the...
read moreEpitaph for the Desert Cottonwoods
It must have been 1990 when I encountered the writing of Charles Bowden for the first time, not coincidentally when I first found myself traipsing around the Sonoran Desert in winter and early spring. For a young man from the suburban Midwest the scenery was a revelation: mountains stood like purple cardboard cutouts on dawn horizons, then transformed themselves into textured slopes of bright stone punctuated with saguaro exclamation points. In between creosote flats spread out so broadly that they seemed as much a mental exercise in how...
read moreThe Stuff of Life
The desperation in Manhattan was anything but quiet in 1991. After six years in the frantic, ear-grinding angst of the city, I was ready for a drastic change. While considering my next move I studied Thoreau’s Walden for guidance. “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!” old Henry advised, harrumphing about all the needless things we humans can’t seem to get along without: “Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life” he wrote, “are not only not indispensable but positive hindrances...
read moreSay Their Names; Discovering what it means to be an American
One summer, years ago, I lived in Washington D.C. while studying American Sign Language at Gallaudet University. Every Friday afternoon, after classes were over, I’d get on the bus and go down to the National Mall where I would wander among the monuments with no particular destination and little purpose except the purpose of trying to discover what it meant to me to be an American. That I might discover such an abstraction there on the National Mall seems only naïve now, but at the time it was a good and honest endeavor. The monument I...
read moreA summer of Optimism
Dear Friends, It doesn’t really matter if I’m watching soccer or not—the stories from the World Cup seem to find me anyway. I watched parts of games that were on the big television screens throughout the Dallas/Ft Worth and Nashville airports last week as I traveled to see my mother. I also watched people from all over the world stop to catch a glimpse of a game, or a score, while shuffling luggage, coffee, and cellphones. At DFW, people wearing their Mexico jerseys were sunburned and sleeping on each other’s shoulders—a rain delay had folks...
read moreLetter from Home: Zeroing Out
During the same week in June, two freakish things happened. A rare but welcome incursion of monsoon moisture entered Arizona from the south, scattering welcome showers across parched forest and grassland, but also throwing down lightning bolts that set off dozens of wildfires. Elon Musk, meanwhile, became the world’s first trillionaire, reaching an unprecedented milestone in the lengthy annals of human accumulation. You can guess which of these happenings prompted more attention from the media: it was of course Musk’s...
read moreSnaggletooth Summer
I wanted the loose days of yore, but it’s been a bit of a snaggletooth summer, imperfect and not letting loose in the ways I would like it to. My son will spend nearly a third of it away. Camp and rivers and songs and memories that don’t include me. Which is, of course, exactly what I want for him and exactly what hurts a little. I wanted summer to cut loose, where days stretch themselves out into a full yawn. I’ve had a few summers like that with my son, and I can count on one hand how many I have left. A friend came over recently and asked...
read moreThe Joy of Petrichor
In June the question hangs in the air like virga: When will it rain? June is upon us. For weeks the relentless northern Arizona sun has poured down on our beloved and beleaguered plateau, sucking moisture from its soils, baking its volcanic rocks and causing we its people to long fervently for rain. June, the month of virga–those tantalizing purple curtains of rain that sweep down from the sky but are swallowed by the thirsty air just before reaching the parched earth. June, our season of hope. Despite the inconvenient truths that stack...
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