The full color movie ad in the New York Times makes me do it. I pull the Kodak slide projector from the back of the closet and aim it at the white refrigerator and click through slides from 1967 until I find me on my first backpacking trip, which was through Aravaipa Canyon. The projector hums; I look at a 10-inch version of me in an orange T-shirt with an...
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Our father kept a wooden ladder permanently leaning against the eaves of the cinderblock duplex he built to house his family. It was not a ladder like you’d imagine poking out of the dark well of a kiva. Instead of hand-shaved poles, it was nailed together from wood leftover from various projects, and it was heavy, so maybe that was why it was always...
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Earlier this month “Star Date” on KNAU caught me at a stoplight, so it sunk in through my idling split attention that pieces of meteors might delight one’s eyeballs in the wee hours of a Sunday or Monday morning. I even looked for more details at the Sky and Telescope magazine website. There it said the radiants of the Orionids would be near the raised arm...
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On a Sunday morning at the cabin where I winter, a delicate clunking of deer hoof against rock stirs me out of easy dreaming. When I go from window to window looking outside for spindly legs, I blink the night out of my eyes and see nothing but light caught in bird wings. Below the front porch new marks in the dirt look as delicate as elf footprints. A...
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These sunflower days are smearing the hillsides with a daily wash of yellow and I want the color to paint truth for me, help me tuck the summer into memory. My fire season flew by with almost no fires. My side of the mountain slept through the summer it seems. Now I watch 25 violet-green swallows make passes by the windows of the lookout as if they are...
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