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.
Streetlight
The Bisbee Music Festival—Sidepony’s 11th year—felt like an underground party where Arizona’s hidden music scene collided with sounds from Seattle, New Mexico and beyond. Every venue felt like walking into the cool scene, bouncing from a dusty guitar riff to a one-man accordion show to a trampoline bassline. After I get back, my son asked to listen to “We Built This City.” He wanted Starship and Journey, a welcome reprieve from the usual EDM which doesn’t grace my ears so much as interrupt my nervous system like an overzealous...
read moreMy Imperfect America; Of losers, winners, and washing machines
If the ‘50s was not a shining moment in human history, the decade at least landed us with an abundance of game shows. Truth or Consequences, The Price Is Right, Queen for a Day, and a few years later, Let’s Make a Deal. These were the four that played at our house, and I considered it daytime TV at its finest. How I became a game show aficionado puzzled me for years. Why wasn’t I in school or playing with my friends? These shows aired in the morning or early afternoon yet somehow I can picture myself, a little kid lounging on a rug the color...
read moreA different kind of strength
Getting older is not for the weak. This has become my mantra the past year as I’ve struggled physically with ongoing back and hip issues. How it started: I sneezed while getting up from my recliner. While this sounds like the beginning of a joke, it isn’t, although I have tried to laugh with every doctor, coach, and physical therapist that I’ve worked with this past year. All of us go through varying degrees of injuries and I didn’t think anything was amiss. I figured I’d be fine in two weeks. As time passed, my ability to function normally...
read moreThe Startle of a Stranger
During Covid, one of things I missed most was fleeting encounters with strangers. The cashier at the grocery store, the seatmate on a plane, the person behind me in a slow-moving line. More often than not, I am a person who talks with strangers. Often I prefer them to talking with people I know. With strangers, I can gauge and widen my understanding of how people operate, what they look like, how they smell, what their eyes hold. I like strangers for the possibility of unexpected delight. During the Pod Times of Covid, I had friends I could...
read moreDammed
There wasn’t a good place to be in the days after the election. For someone who believes that the candidate we’ve just elected disqualified himself years ago when he forsook his oath to defend the Constitution by choosing to watch TV while his supporters ransacked the Capitol, there was no escaping a sickening feeling of doom, or a feeling of uncanniness that tens of millions of fellow citizens somehow felt OK enough about that option to fill in that particular bubble on their ballot. And even some people I know who did so admitted to dismay...
read moreThe Pine Tree Out Back
The dead pinyon pine behind my shack still looks sturdy. For now, at least. Short and stout in the way of its kind, the tree is more than a foot in diameter, but just 25 feet tall. When I bought this place ten years ago it was almost dead, battered by the one-two punch of drought and beetles. It finally gave up the ghost during an especially dry summer a few years ago. I had planned to cut up the tree for firewood–pinyons make dense and fragrant fuel–but changed my mind. Why? Because I could only burn the thing once. After it had...
read moreAll Mirrors
At the hot, laid-back music festival in Arcosanti last month, I was struck by Angel Olsen’s haunting lyric: “All we’ve done here is blind one another,” from her song, Lark, on the 2019 album All Mirrors. Words have always resonated deeply with me, often overshadowing everything else in a piece of music. Olsen’s ethereal, brass tacks voice—both frank and dreamy—floats me right into the heart of my indie music sweet-spot. Her words echo a duality I can’t help but contemplate. Blinding someone can be a protective act, shielding them from...
read moreMess
The story goes that when my father’s parents divorced when he was eight, the reason given was not infidelity, moral lassitude, or drunkenness, but messiness. Theirs was an example of the inability of two people to share a life when one was messy and one was neat. There are many apocryphal stories in my family and this may be one of them, but I suspect there’s truth at its core. I remember my grandfather as a buttoned-up man whose passion was fishing. He tied his own flies—an incredibly exacting art—and was a beautiful skier. If you could meet...
read moreA book, a garden, a life
I had the privilege of introducing a friend at her book launch celebration in Flagstaff a few weeks ago. I admire her writing, and her. The essay she read that night is one that I teach in my class. Seeing the essay as part of a whole collection—a book that I could hold in my hands—delighted me. Many will now get to read her beautiful words and ideas. A friend sidled up to me after the reading and asked, “when is your book coming out?” I never know how to answer this question. The lack of a published book by me is not for lack of trying. I...
read moreWild Horses
On a July day before my fifth grade school year began, Mom and Dad circled my three brothers, my sister and me. They told us we were moving to Indiantown, a one-stoplight village in rural South Florida. We’d be moving in a week to my grandfather’s cattle ranch, which was acres of palmetto scrub. We’d live in a doublewide trailer encircled by some scraggly pine trees in the agricultural flatlands that are the interior of southern Florida. Indiantown is a former Seminole Indian trading post, a midway point between the Atlantic Ocean and Lake...
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