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

Navigation Menu

Full Circle

Full Circle

Posted by on Feb 4, 2021

Glowing from within: ponderosas in the snow. Photo by the author. To my eyes, adapted as they’ve been to the artificial light of the kitchen, the night appears complete as I step out the back door. Complete, but not dark: the waning moon is still up, its cold light reflecting brilliantly off the snowbanks, setting the surface crystals to sparkling. But the...

Read More

Punctuating the Year That Was; The sense of an ending, and a beginning

Punctuating the Year That Was; The sense of an ending, and a beginning

Posted by on Dec 24, 2020

My favorite among my parents’ extensive LP collection was a goofy Tom Lehrer record titled That Was the Year That Was. The year referred to was 1965, at which time I was barely toddling and certainly too young to appreciate satire. But the witty songs by one of America’s greatest satirists stood the test of time into the 1970s—and clear through today, for...

Read More

Inflection Points; End of a Long Drought

Inflection Points; End of a Long Drought

Posted by on Nov 12, 2020

Sometimes it seems like one sentence is enough for an essay. No, I don’t mean that one. Or this one. I mean one like this: Yesterday morning, Saturday morning, I went outside on the patio and it had sprinkled a bit in the night and the air felt so much more alive than it has in many weeks, and within the next hours the election results were announced—the...

Read More

Ghost Hikers; Fading marks on the land, and in the mind

Ghost Hikers; Fading marks on the land, and in the mind

Posted by on Oct 1, 2020

There are stories all across the land, and when we choose to tell one we set a course and decide which path to follow and which ones to walk past. We call that set of choices a narrative. Sometimes the possible paths are practically infinite, like the myriad ways to pick a route through the streets of downtown Chicago. Sometimes the land chooses the route...

Read More

Monsoon Dreams: Wake me up when it rains

Monsoon Dreams: Wake me up when it rains

Posted by on Aug 20, 2020

It’s the second year in a row the monsoon has gone largely missing, which leads me to a dire if irrational thought: maybe the wall is working. Because the purpose of the wall has always been more than the practical matter of deflecting people from crossing on foot. It’s been more about deflecting the whole idea of the South. It has been a symbol of how...

Read More