Ten years ago I wrote this column for Flagstaff Live!. It was my coming out story. Prepublication, I was terrified of telling the story of how I came to decide to have an abortion. Afterwards, I felt committed, brave, vindicated. People told me their stories, and I made the Kevlar Kimono that I reference at the end of the essay below. It became a public...
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Flagstaff Letter from Home recently posted its 500th column on the website FlagstaffLetterfromHome.com, where each column has been archived since late 2009. Ten Flagstaff writers, usually five at a time, have been rotating on a weekly basis since the column first appeared in May 2008. This week, two of the original writers – “homer”s – reflect on that...
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A little more than 10 years ago, Michael Wolcott was writing a weekly column for Flagstaff Live!, but he needed a break and floated an idea to Tony Norris: “I…would like to generate a column that uses each of our voices….Our voices are representative, I think, of a certain cast of characters who’ve chosen to live on this great ocean of...
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I’m on the Metro in Washington, D.C., in a crush of pink-hatted (mostly) women, many carrying protest signs. We are really doing this. We are feeling our power, many of us for the first time. It is an extraordinary thing to witness and be part of. Successive subway platforms are jammed with more people in pink hats. There seems to be enough space on our...
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Here’s almost everything I know about trains. Trains are great generators of white noise. This is good if white noise helps you sleep. Trains and the people inside them also generate plenty of the other kind of noise. Is black noise the opposite of white noise? You’re never quite still riding a train. That makes it nearly impossible to write legibly on the...
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Sometimes the best we can do is quote the smart, funny, insightful people we know. In the early 1980s, when Mike was in grad school working as a teaching assistant his roommate, Harry, who worked as a bartender at the Pinckney Street Hideaway in Madison, brought home jokes for Mike to tell his class. I wonder, when was the last time I had a truly...
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This week’s Letter from Home is brought to you by the color yellow: egg yolks from free-range chickens, aspen leaves in the fall, and sunflowers that bloom along roadsides in August in northern Arizona, in fields and yards all over town, playing against the clear blue sky and swaying when the wind comes up. And tiny goldfinches and pine siskins perching on...
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Eight weeks ago, I began what should have been a three-day project to empty my studio, clean and vacuum, spray for spiders (I know, but the studio’s been infested with black widow spiders, and I have a zero-tolerance policy on that score), then sort and replace the contents. I worked for the three days, and then realized it was a bigger project than I’d...
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Enclosed you will find your copy of the 1959 Britannica BOOK OF THE YEAR … This handsome book provides you with unbiased, accurate information on every important phase of world affairs. It enables you to discuss current events and world developments with authority … At my mother’s urging, my parents stretched their meager budget to buy a set of...
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My first grade teacher was scary. That’s what I remember, anyway. Mrs. Appel was old, for one thing. (Probably about my current age.) I remember her as intimidating, and not gentle or particularly kind. She was doing the best she could (aren’t we all), but she was harsh. Shouldn’t a first-grade teacher be sweet and young? Or at least sweet and middle-aged?...
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Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been thinking about snow, and about the color white, which led me to think about Agnes Martin and her serenely abstract (and mostly neutral) paintings. The simplicity of them caused some to discount her work, but in the end, she was awarded a National Medal of Art in 2004 for her contributions as an abstract...
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This past weekend I participated in a panel discussion: “Life as a Successful Artist.” When I was first asked to do this a few weeks ago, I balked. I thought about what it means to be a successful artist. And whether (or not) I feel like one. Sadly, the success label can kill the creative impulse for some of us. I have to be very careful to apply the label...
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Now that I’m finished procrastinating – the dishes are washed, the laundry is done, and my desk is cleaned off – I can sit down to write with a clearer head. Today is a day for being inside. After a temperate fall, snow has at last coated the bare aspens: white on white. Late in the afternoon the sky cleared enough for a peek of blue. In the northwest,...
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My friend, René, is on her way to Oregon, where her husband has a new job. I met René years ago in a workshop. She handed me her card: “René Westbrook: Gluing Things to Stuff Since 1989.” I laughed, and knew immediately that I wanted to be her friend. After living at the South Rim of Grand Canyon for 11 years, she moved to Flagstaff so her daughter could...
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My mother taught me to use her putty-colored electric Singer sewing machine when I was 4. The toy sewing machine she bought me didn’t work right, and being practical, she figured she might as well teach me to use her machine. In the years after, I learned well how to follow a pattern to construct a garment from yardage. When I was in college, I would...
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My mother has always been deeply interested in houses: their layouts and locations, and most importantly, how they function. She would have been a really good architect, I expect. Instead of studying architecture, though, she married my father and spent many years moving around the world. They bought, remodeled and sold several houses in the 17 years I...
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Three deer grazed in the forest behind my house, skittish but hungry. One headed for the penstemon flowers growing in our yard, but seeing Mike and me, and Kelly the (unthreatening) Labrador, opted out. A yellow swallowtail butterfly was briefly trapped under the shade shelter on the patio, fighting the winds that signal yet another red flag warning....
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Vacation planning always feels like such a hopeful thing to do. We’ve been working all week to prepare to leave. Mike’s built a fabulous platform/storage box for our new-to-us vehicle. I’ve been working at my desk so I can leave with a clear conscience. At last, we’re nearly there. I’m in that halcyonic state of having only a few last minute things to do,...
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A home movie of my sister Dana, taken sometime around 1967, shows her enthusiastically hunting Easter eggs in our backyard in Springfield, Va. Her 6-year-old self is wearing her pink Easter dress, pink Mary Janes and a navy blue straw hat. Captured by my dad on film with his Brownie Fun Saver movie camera, she was so full of joy, and watching her leap like...
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When my husband Mike and I moved to Flagstaff in 1986, the town was sweet, but somewhat shabby. It was most certainly not the happening place it is these days. We temporarily rented a house out by the old fire station just west of Cosnino Road, then bought a house near the intersection of Fourth Street and Lockett Avenue. Our local grocery was the Bayless...
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What is this book? What is anything? Who am I? Who are you? Stop it. Forget it. This quote on the front of my current journal is a direct lift from the inside flap of Maira Kalman’s book, The Principles of Uncertainty, in which Kalman gives equal treatment to trash cans and flower arrangements, bedrooms and bathrooms, and the hats, coats and shoes of...
Read MoreThe four of us stood on the porch admiring the last glimmers of light on thunderheads over the Echo Cliffs. A few moments later, the moon rose from behind those same clouds taking our collective breath away. This is a fact: at Kane Ranch the contrasts often leave me breathless, sighing over light and dark, or gasping aloud at something I never even...
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It’s morning. Dense fog rises off the river in the valley below, though the sky is clear. Drops of moisture diffuse the sunlight; the traffic sounds are muffled. The daylight burns off the fog, but sometimes not until noon. Everything seems to take longer, moving through the dampness. The trees are ghostly and unfamiliar. The wall heater kicks on just...
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What if bridges – your only connection with the outside world – washed away in a torrential rainstorm and the ensuing floodwaters? What if the Colorado River ran muddy as the Mississippi from the Glen Canyon Dam down to the Little Colorado River? How resilient could you be? The river did just that this past week, as the sands picked up by Wahweap Creek...
Read MoreThe road construction crews at Lee’s Ferry have signs posted along the road indicating where it’s safe for them to pull out with their heavy construction equipment: TURN AROUND. Lacking the hyphen to make it a noun, I read it as an imperative: GET OUT WHILE YOU STILL CAN. The message was clearly meant for me that particular day.
Read MoreI packed for Ireland with my mind on my last two trips: I could never quite get warm here. This time, even though it was July, I brought a warm jacket and clothes I could layer, plus a brand-new, purchased-just-for-this-trip rain jacket. Boy, was I surprised. Since I arrived it hasn’t rained a single drop. More remarkably, for over a week a heat wave has...
Read MoreAt the conference I attended last week, one of the presenters recommended editing as a technique for achieving focus in one’s artwork. While I know the value of reviewing and culling my activities, I often forget that doing too much – and the requisite switches in attention – takes enormous amounts of brainpower. Even a tiny task, like making a phone call,...
Read MoreEight miles. That’s how far I walked along the south rim of Grand Canyon today. My hands are puffed up like little Vienna sausages, and my feet felt for a while like they would burst out of my shoes, but for the moment I’m sitting on the porch at El Tovar with my shoes unlaced, drinking a tumbler of club soda and a glass of Irony, a lovely Cabernet...
Read MoreListen to the author read this essay. Thanks to John Grahame and Radio Sunnyside for this recording. It began like this: our family made an epic journey through the colonias of northern Mexico, past irrigated fields and wood-and-metal shacks, surrounded by burros and horses, goats and chickens. These homesteads were nestled against earthen berms,...
Read MoreA few weeks ago, I started doing something I thought I’d left behind many years ago: I took up smoking again. (Before you jump to conclusions, let me say I’ve quit already.) Since I quit all those years ago, I’ve smoked about one cigarette a year. But the brain is a funny thing: for years after, I had dreams that included finding cigarettes in my purse,...
Read MoreComing home from the Calexico concert the other night, the moon was a grinning Cheshire cat, mocking me with his over-large smile from a perch in the sky-soup of stars and darkness. That blackness resonates with me, especially on these short winter days, but music soothes my dark inner beast. A few days later, I headed south for a warm respite in Blythe,...
Read MoreI’m trying to learn to be better at making mistakes, and more willing to fail. On the face of it, that seems like a bad idea. But I’ve been reading about how failure can ultimately lead to success. I’m not convinced that’s the only requirement; success probably grows out of a combination of persistence, opportunity and a whole host of other qualities and...
Read MoreLast week, I stopped by Starrlight Books in downtown Flagstaff to visit with the owner, Evan Midling. I’ve been curious to know how he learned the book business and came to own the place. I wondered how he manages to stay afloat in these seemingly tough times for independent booksellers. Between bookshelves, kachinas and framed art decorate the walls. Evan...
Read MoreA few weeks ago, I dreamed of flying, not in an airplane, but mysteriously under my own steam. In my dream, I pedaled a winged contraption quickly enough to get and stay aloft as I soared over Wheeler Park and the roof of Federated Church. I used to have flying dreams when I was young, as late as my high school years. They were rare enough that I looked...
Read MoreI have two sisters. Between the three of us, we’ve had a range of reproductive experiences: miscarriages, near-misses with miscarriages, false positives, and the birth of live healthy babies. During her second pregnancy, one sister was told that her child would likely be born with Down Syndrome. In spite of that possibility, there was never any question...
Read MoreIn an effort to entice myself back into the studio, I’ve been preparing scraps of fabric for collage, willing myself to do anything, as long as I’m in the studio. And it works: even these mundane tasks awaken a new appreciation for the fabrics, and remind me why this medium has always felt like home. These days I’m especially drawn to the fabrics with some...
Read MoreAfter Maurice Sendak died last month, I was reminiscing about his books, and then about all the children’s books that made an impression on our family. Found in the stacks at Bookman’s, Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen, so quirky and fantastic, was one of our favorites: “Milk in the batter! Milk in the batter! We bake cake! And nothing’s the matter!” Our...
Read MoreA couple of weekends ago, I drove south to meet my youngest sister, Kristin, at the Phoenix airport. We’d hatched a plan a few weeks prior for her to fly from St. Louis to surprise Dana, our middle sister on her 50th birthday and our mom for Mother’s Day. We haven’t all been together for Mother’s Day since I left home in 1976. It felt momentous. We had to...
Read MoreUnlike most American teens, I didn’t learn to drive when I was 16. We lived in Belgium where the legal driving age was 18, so when I returned to the states I was uninitiated to certain Midwestern rituals. My first summer back, in central Indiana, I had one date with a guy who drove a Ford pickup with a bench seat. He thought it was weird that I didn’t sit...
Read More“It’s easy to focus on the sky on days when you are flying through the air from your home to a distant place.” That’s how I started my journal the day I left for Ireland a few weeks ago. I left Flagstaff on a Saturday, flying through clear blue skies, the airplane wing angled in contrast against a line of haze at the horizon. I bought a brand new Moleskine...
Read MoreThe other day I spent a couple of hours with Jean Rukkila, who is one of my personal superheroes. We sit at the bar at the Monte Vista, looking across Aspen Street to West of the Moon. She confesses, “I used to fantasize having my little press in one window and massage table in the other window and a little sign, like those private eyes have, written on...
Read MoreDavid lives in west Oakland, Calif., just across from the BART station. On the night of Nov. 2, he was one of 92 people arrested in protests in downtown Oakland. When he called the next night, he said, “Mom, I just wanted to let you know I’m OK.” Clueless, I wondered aloud, “Why wouldn’t you be alright?” I was kind of glad not to have known that he’d spent...
Read MoreA dream: I’m in the middle of an open field. In the distance is a swarm of bees, flying 30 feet off the ground, a humming, pulsing river of insects. In the middle of the field is an old swing set. I’m hanging off it, like I did when I was 10 years old, upside down with my knees locked over the bar. A few bees land on me, but don’t sting me. I drop to the...
Read MoreWhat do you see when you turn out the light? When I was younger, I thought this was a nonsense line, but as an adult I suddenly realized that John and Paul used this line as shorthand to ask all the questions about what delights and motivates us, what fills us up, what empty places and sorrows there are in our lives. It’s key to self-knowledge, this...
Read MoreIn the beginning, in 1998, we held Flagstaff Open Studios to make art more accessible to the general public and the art-making process less mysterious. People came to our studios, and we did it again the next year. Fourteen years later, we’re still making our art and telling our stories. I’ve missed a couple of years, once because I had a brutal bronchial...
Read MoreWhen the days turn steamy, there’s nothing better for sleep than the cool night air humming over you. Before the rains started, my parents visited to escape the Tucson heat. We gave them our bedroom and slept outside on cots and sleeping pads. The night air was cool, almost cold, and I slept with my down bag zipped up and relished the chilled air that...
Read MoreFar from the fires around Flagstaff, we’ve been in chilly Ogden, Utah, this past weekend. It was green almost beyond belief—the only gaps in the lushness are where snow still covers the mountainsides and peaks. The reservoirs are brimming, and the rivers are running at full tilt: falling over cliffs of quartzite and granite and crashing down mountainsides....
Read MoreAt the front window, the dogs stand with their tails in the air and a ridge of hair raised along their backs. They are on alert, poised to protect us from the dangers posed by blowing bits of paper and leaves, and whatever else might happen along on this windy day. They pace the floor. They follow me around the house and never quite settle into their usual...
Read MoreAfter the Viola Awards a few weeks ago, a bunch of us traipsed over to Uptown Billiards in search of closure and whiskey. Poet and owner of Uptown, James Jay, had just won the Viola Award for Literature. Upon receiving the award he recited a beautiful poem (not even his own) that brought me to tears. Several of the acceptance speeches that night were...
Read MoreIn “Finding Flow,” Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi writes, “The quality of experience [is] a function of the relationship between challenges and skills. Optimal experience, or flow, occurs when both variables are high.” When you address big challenges with high skill levels, feats of creative genius are possible. This is true for any field. Even within the rigid...
Read MoreIt feels to me that things are falling apart, like the poem: “the centre will not hold.” We’re trapped in a socio-political centrifugal machine, where the heaviest mettle gets spun to the outer edges of society and separates into its most irrational component parts. Last Sunday I drove into spring: down I-17, first past dun-colored hills and...
Read MoreAfter my grandmother died, my mom and my Aunt Nina took up her holiday cookie-baking gauntlet. This was not an undertaking for the faint of heart. Grandmére was a prodigious baker of cookies; around the winter holidays she spent hundreds of hours filling tins with sweets to pass along to her family, friends and neighbors. I’ll go out on a limb of...
Read MoreLast weekend my 18-year-old niece, Taylor, came to visit. She’s graduating next spring and looking at colleges. Though I’ve known her all her life, I didn’t feel like I really knew her. I was afraid it would be awkward, but instead, her visit became a sweet opportunity to get to know her. Taylor is a photographer. Her high school offers photography...
Read MoreTony: I’m in the planning stages for a new CD of lullabies, those songs intended to calm the fretful child and persuade him to fall fast asleep. It seems all my younger friends have babies and toddlers. Having raised five of my own and boasting eight grandchildren, I want to record a collection of soothing tunes that might make bedtime a little easier for...
Read MoreRoberta and I motored out Highway 89 today to visit Judy, who lives with Pete on a sizable spread in the pinyon-juniper forest north of Flagstaff. We drove out to see the remnants of her garden, but Judy gave us the home tour, too. I’ve decided: the expansive greenhouse is my dream home, lack of toilet facilities notwithstanding. Near sunset, we reveled in...
Read MoreI’ve been missing the steady tone of a good novel, so when my book club decided to read Barbara Kingsolver’s newest, “The Lacuna,” I felt relieved to be given the assignment even though the book is long and time is short. Plus it gives me something to do in the middle of the night. One of the best lines I’ve read so far is this: “Mother is a museum of bad...
Read More“After four decades devoted to informing fans about the cowboy life style of Roy Rogers and his wife, Dale (Queen of the West) Evans, the family museum in Branson, Missouri, has shut its doors … Christie’s (Auction House) will be selling off most of the collection July 14-15 … (including) … Rogers’ trusty costar Trigger, in the flesh.” –The New...
Read MoreThis morning I took the dog for a walk up the urban trail. Gilia, milkvetch and dalmation toadflax were all in bloom. I pulled up a few of the invasive toadflax plants, making a tiny action toward weeding the forest. In my own wild yard, the iris blossoms are spent. Columbine, sage and lavender are flowering now, and beneath the thick mulch, the soil is...
Read MoreThrough a fortunate set of circumstances, I recently spent 10 days living at the south rim of Grand Canyon hiking, making art, writing and then, on the last two days, sitting on the jury panel for the park’s Artist in Residence program. Though I feel I barely know the canyon, I am enthralled. Also, intimidated, curious and profoundly impressed. Each...
Read More“If you do not intend to stipulate that marks of punctuation be transmitted, write your message without punctuation and read it carefully to make sure that it is not ambiguous.” –Instructions from a 1928 pamphlet intended to help people write more effective telegrams. I’ve been thinking about texting and telegrams lately, and wondering what we might learn...
Read MoreThere’s snow falling—again—but I’m starting to get my annual urge to dig in the dirt. This is a dangerous impulse in Flagstaff in early March, but considering the possibility raises some hope in me. Years ago as newlyweds, we lived for two years in an Iowa farmhouse. All things seemed fertile there, including me. That summer I was pregnant with our older...
Read MoreA few weeks ago I was in Mexico, and slept nine nights in my sleeping bag on my friends’ front porch. My sleep was not without middle-of-the-night wakings, but I easily released back into sleep after each one. The rhythm of a life lived mostly outside, and mostly without a timepiece, agrees with me. While there, and against the odds, I got some of the best...
Read MoreI’m sitting in my studio today stitching on a project that has no intent. It doesn’t need one: it’s simply beautiful. And that makes me happy. My needle moves in and out of a sandwich of rayon challis and silk chiffon, a repetitive meditation on color. There’s no other point to it, which is a nice break from my usual, content-driven artistic pursuits. The...
Read MoreFall makes me greedy. I want to capture the light and the colors and the smells for safekeeping, so I can enjoy them in the dead of winter, when the light is too low, the days are too short and the colors are not so vivid. The sun streams into my studio this fall morning, at that rare angle perfectly designed to show off the yellows and reds of the leaves...
Read MoreAudria is a massage therapist and a painter. She’s well-known for her lovely cloudscapes, having studied clouds closely and painted them for years. She’s painted clouds on the ceiling of her massage room in greys, yellows, browns and blues. It’s one of the favorite moments of my month: to be on her massage table, and roll over onto my back and study her...
Read MoreA couple of Saturdays ago, I unintentionally went contra dancing. And though I’ve been before, I never understood the appeal of it. This time, though, I really enjoyed myself. I needed to get out of my head for a while, and while I’m not sure why this time was different, it worked. At one point, the caller said something that made my ears perk up: “It’s...
Read MoreIn our family of girls in the early ‘60s, my two sisters’ and my primary jobs appeared to be staying clean and staying safe, not necessarily in that order. In my mother’s defense, these two principles – cleanliness and safety – were deeply embedded in the culture of that time. The edge of that generation of women raised to be housewives and mothers barely...
Read More“The true antidote for greed is contentment.” The Dalai Lama The yard demands my attention. A neighbor walked by as I was gardening last weekend and said, “You’re doing the meditation of one thousand dandelions.” In my case, it’s more like one hundred thousand dandelions, and soon to be more, since every one is going to seed at this exact moment. In Rush...
Read MoreA vague sadness seems to be endemic in my circle of friends these days. No one’s really talking about it, but there it is, just under the fabric of our daily lives. It’s not suffering we want to make public. At its worst, tears stream down your face, mascara runs, and your features contort, making you look like Tim Curry’s character at the end of The Rocky...
Read MoreI believe that – if we’re lucky – we’re always in the process of becoming our true selves. Sometimes it happens slowly, with baby steps, then, suddenly, by giant leaps, like some weird game of psychic “Simon Says”. This is the story of how a red leather purse could effect one tiny transformation. My friend Laura brought this incredibly beautiful,...
Read MoreIn my album of baby photos, there is a photograph of my granddaddy taken sometime in the 1950s. He’s standing inside a rustic cabin, holding up a fish that’s about two feet long, and wearing a plaid flannel shirt underneath a canvas jacket. The jacket was probably lined with more flannel. Flannel played a leading role in Granddaddy’s wardrobe. Granddaddy...
Read MoreThe noise from my roof sounds as if it’s either hailing or a herd of small rodents is running across it. Neither is true: A single yellow aspen leaf has landed on the skylight above my head, backlit by the mid-morning light. The next second, it’s gone. The wind is blowing the leaves off the aspen tree in back. These fall days feel so aimless. Lifeless...
Read MoreI am living on the edge. No, not that edge. My edge has a chain-link fence along it, so I won’t walk over the cliff in the middle of the night, I guess, and sue the State of California. We are at a state beach in southern California, living both the paradise and the nightmare that is urban camping. Our neighbor’s radio is blasting Ryan Seacrest, counting...
Read MoreA few years ago, I spent the month of March strolling around Santa Fe, camping on the beach in Baja California, then trekking through Araviapa Creek on my first-ever backpacking trip. In Mexico, I slept on the beach. The night sky was at once astonishing and consoling, and I spent hours stargazing, trying to memorize the arrangements, reconnecting with the...
Read MoreHere is what I think about while I’m working with my hands: everything. For that fact alone, I love working with my hands. While I peel carrots, drive long distances, wash dishes, I also woolgather. Those sorts of tasks make a connection to my brain that doesn’t require the involvement of my conscious self. That state — a sensation of simultaneous...
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