Letter from Home appears weekly in Flagstaff Live! each Thursday, and is written by a rotating cast of Flagstaff-based writers, including Tony Norris, Shonto Begay, Jean Rukkila, Peter Friederici, Darcy Falk, Laura Kelly, Kate Watters, Margaret Erhart, Allison Gruber, Stacy Murison, and an occasional guest writer. Click the Read More button below any of these posts to read the full version and view any images that the authors have shared.
Talk Me Through It; Remembering Phil Donahue
Phil Donahue, whose 29-year, groundbreaking talk show spanned from the late 60s to the late 90s, died a few weeks ago at the age of 88. Headlines called him a talk show icon, a free speech champion, a pioneer. His New York Timesobituary dubbed him the king of daytime television. When Donahue began his show in Ohio in 1967, Lyndon Johnson was president, the Vietnam War was in its twelfth year, the first Super Bowl was played, Aretha Franklin released “Respect,” the Big Mac was created, and Elvis and Priscilla Presley married. My mother was 32;...
read moreEarly
In August, the ticking of the world’s clocks grows ever louder. In part that’s due to the looming closeness of the school year, a tangled cliff that’s always been present at the edge of summer’s smooth plateau (and that through my lifetime has come to begin ever earlier). This is my fault: I have clearly exacerbated my sense of summer’s mortality by choosing a career at a university, where I get to experience over and over again the mingled stress and excitement, the do-I-really-want-to-be-here-again doubt, that comes of the ever-renewed and...
read moreCreeping toward Coexistence
The flying ants showed up in mid-July, as usual. Each summer they whir into my life, unbidden and unwelcome, like the airborne monkeys in The Wizard of Oz–creepy and scary, highly motivated, seemingly guided by a dark force. These are red ants, good-sized, as ants go. Though not exactly warlike–I have never been bitten–they are, nonetheless, aggressive and disagreeable beasts with an impressive talent for creating misery. On hot summer nights they sneak around the window screens and into my off-grid shack near the South Rim,...
read moreBreakfast with the Captain
When I was a chubby five-year-old in puffed sleeves and shiny red shoes, and people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I had one answer: I want to be famous. I had learned not to say I wanted to be a fireman. Everyone laughed at that. But I couldn’t say what people expected, a teacher or a nurse. I didn’t want to be a teacher or a nurse. My first grade teacher scolded me for coloring outside the lines, and coloring a cow red, so being an artist was out. Sea captain brought the same reaction as fireman, and really after that, what...
read moreStories of my father
The last time my parents were in Flagstaff it just so happened to be the time my Letter From Home was in the paper edition of Flag Live. Although I’d sent hyperlinks of my essays to them, my dad held the paper and marveled that my essay was in print. “They gave you the whole page,” he remarked while folding it under his arm. I was waiting for him to say it was about time I used my journalism degree. But he didn’t—instead, he kept reminding me the rest of that day that I had a whole page for my ideas in the newspaper. He sounded proud. I...
read moreSummer/Time: To Everything There Is a Season. Again.
Last week, in the lazy thick of summer, my friend V and I woke up in her lake house, a small cottage on the edge of a town with no stoplights, no commerce, no noise. I read, she wrote, I napped, we hiked. The hours noodled on. The day was more like a cloud than a parking lot, and the unstructuredness of it all invited a burst of joy that I could only respond to by genuflecting. Gauzy, indolent summer. The season of cloud spotting, ice cream on a stick, and naps. The season when I can rewild my time. When I was a kid, I thought of time as...
read moreHard Wear
This past week, toward the tail end of a backyard shed refurbishment project that had gotten a little out of hand, I found myself urgently in need of a simple box of nails. They had to be two inches long, a size I was freshly out of because I had used the last ones in the existing box to begin the process of putting up trim around the doors and windows. Does a backyard shed need trim on the inside? Well yes, sometimes. Anyway, this need, or perhaps it was more of a thneed, as Dr. Seuss would have put it in The Lorax, entailed one of my...
read morePledge
I pledge allegiance. To the pinyon jays at the feeders and the coyotes that woke me up at dawn, yipping at the moon. To the local ravens, jackrabbits and pronghorn antelope. Even to the black Angus cattle in my neighborhood, slow and stupid though they are. I pledge allegiance to the land, all of it: forests, meadows, deserts and bogs. Especially to public land – the commons. To village parks and to Central Park; to the Appalachians and the Rockies, the Sierra Nevada and the dark side of the moon. To everywhere that people call...
read moreTree musings
The tree in front of my house is changing its leaves from green to a rich, red-brown. It is a chokecherry–at least I think it is. It doesn’t fruit. I don’t know if that’s because it’s a variety bred to be ornamental or if it’s just a Flagstaff thing. Even the trees meant to be fruit bearers tend to struggle here. This tree always darkens sooner than I imagine it should. Changing leaves are supposed to signal fall, but it’s mid-June and the tree has transformed almost completely. Only the tips of its...
read moreA Portable Notion; Meditations on home
Here, two big winter storms brought a few trees down. The grass is lush and the ferns my mother planted have grown in and spread along the new drainage ditch. The place looks cared for, as my parents used to care for it. The driveway has a fresh load of gravel and the house a new coat of paint. I got here last night and even in the dark I could sense the changes wrought by time and weather and us, my sisters and brothers and me, who have a long relationship with this particular three acres. This is our home spot on the long coast of Maine,...
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