You could say I settled into Flagstaff for good a decade and a half ago, when we bought our house. It was a beat-up old place. “Lots of potential here,” the sellers told us. They were right. Some was readily apparent—scuffed wood floors, southern light, a sizable yard with an outdoor fireplace. Some of it we wouldn’t see for a long time—yes, you actually...
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It’s always the edges that are most interesting, the half-shadowed interface that’s not quite field and not quite forest, the crust where the dough crisps and takes on its own new texture, the border area where people mix two otherwise separate languages and cultures and foods. Just as sunrise and sunset are the most beautiful times of day, I like to think...
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An egg is perfect: The flawless curve of its nacreous horizon, the shimmering gloss, so like the Earth’s atmosphere seen in photos from space, of a rounded surface that never ends but is always beginning. An egg holds all the makings for life without any of the messiness to come: The blood, the hunger, the scraggly and wet down feathers of the newborn...
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Almost as regularly as cold fronts the driftwood used to come in to the beach. It was a wild mix of shapes and sizes, from sticks to logs and everything in between. Much of it was waterlogged, so heavy that as it bobbed in the frigid lake water you could scarcely spot it. But if it washed ashore on a day of waves, and if it didn’t get buried too firmly in...
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During the year in which I turned 21 I lived in Germany, in Munich. Ostensibly I was taking classes at the university but in reality this was a pretty light load and so I spent as much time as I could walking the streets, marveling at how different it all was than the Suburbia Americana I knew from home. Here was the filigreed city hall, with a...
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