Letter from Home | A collection of essays originally written for Flagstaff Live!

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Feeling tense; Expanding beyond the present

Feeling tense; Expanding beyond the present

Posted by on Jul 3, 2019

In the hubbub over the Women’s World Cup it has been easy to overlook, in the U.S. at least, that there’s been another major soccer tournament underway. I heard about it on a plane to Paraguay.  In the only announcement that didn’t have to do with routine matters of timing, altitude or weather, the pilot reported the results of two first-round matches to...

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Pinal County blues; Many ends, and endings, on the Colorado River

Pinal County blues; Many ends, and endings, on the Colorado River

Posted by on May 30, 2019

Back in the old days, most rivers gathered water from a wide area and delivered it to one place; they were gatherers rather than distributors. That seems profoundly old-fashioned now, at least in the hydraulically engineered West. That’s what I was thinking to myself earlier this spring as I stood in a field down in Eloy, in Pinal County. The field grew...

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Still America’s best idea; Coloring in the national parks

Still America’s best idea; Coloring in the national parks

Posted by on Apr 18, 2019

My initial exposure to America’s great national parks came as a perk with my first magazine subscription. Thanks to an inspired second-grade teacher who worked to instill a love of nature in her students, I became an avid reader of Ranger Rick magazine. As a subscription bonus I received a set of national parks color-by-number drawings, to be completed not...

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Narrative arc; Lessons in writing, from the sidewalk

Narrative arc; Lessons in writing, from the sidewalk

Posted by on Feb 7, 2019

For the second time since the onset of cold weather, on the same morning walk with my son to the bus stop, a dead raven lies immobile down in the next block in the strip of gravel between the street and the sidewalk—the utilitarian zone that many people call, appropriately enough, the “death strip.” The lightest possible dusting of snow encrusts the...

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