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.
Starting again
On the first day this year that truly felt like spring, I spent hours outside. I watered the plants and sowed new seeds while enjoying the beautiful temperate weather. It was even a little overcast, so I didn’t have to hide from the harsh sun. I didn’t realize until that moment how much I had missed putting my hands in soil. Most of what I’ve been working to build over the last few years is in some state of shambles. Dry, dead weeds (relentless even when I’m actively working to manage them) are tangled up in all the fences...
read moreA Wild Affection; In praise of the pickups
If you’ve never listened to the Hot Country Knights singing “Pick Her Up,” you may not be interested in reading any further because this Letter From Home is basically a paean to pickup trucks, including the lyrics they inspire. An example of this brilliance is: “If you wanna do right on a Saturday night/This is all you’ve gotta do/…Pick her up in a pickup truck.” And: “Yeah, buddy, she ain’t got no use for a BMW/Or wine from a hundred dollar bottle/She’d rather bounce around in the outskirts of town/Shotgunnin’ in a muddy Silverado.” To watch...
read moreCocoon
My husband and I have been traveling more in the southwest than we have previously. After realizing that we’ve lived in Flagstaff for sixteen years and have seen very little of the area, we decided to create a list of places to visit. Even so, we are still looking to visit places in Utah and New Mexico but haven’t made it to Walnut Canyon yet. A few weeks ago, we decided to get out of the snow and spend some time near Phoenix visiting anywhere we thought we might find birds and greenery. But it was butterflies that captured my attention. We...
read moreCut, Paste, Repeat
In mid-January, a post from something called Februllage appeared in my Instagram stream. The post was dominated by a calendar of February with a word for each day. Beside the calendar, a small B&W collage of a schoolgirl wearing a hand-drawn crown and hoisting a pair of scissors significantly larger than her head. I clicked onto the post and read further. A clumsy mashup of the words February and collage, Februllage began five years ago when the Edinburgh Collage Collective and the Scandinavian Collage Museum created an open-submission,...
read moreSeasonal Dysphoria
I know I am not alone in feeling that the past winter was a tough one in northern Arizona. Though it didn’t feature the epic snowpack amounts of 2023, it amounted to a good snow year—over 100 inches total in Flagstaff—and simply to a long haul of cold days, so that it wasn’t until well into April that we crested over 60 degrees. In March and into early April storms rolled in with the regularity of weekend tourist crowds, with varied combinations of rain and snow and sleet and graupel. For anyone confined to Flagstaff, it was simply a long...
read moreWaiting for Spring
I thought the last snowstorm we got might be the last. Actually, I felt like the last storm might be the last, but how I feel and what the weather does are two different things entirely. Maybe it is more accurate to say that I hoped the last storm would be the last, that we were on the road to spring, that I could finally get on with moving forward and starting to build again. I’m tired of storms—the literal ones and the metaphorical ones, and I guess a big part of me is waiting for things in the world to change so that I can stop fighting so...
read moreAdrift in the Floating City; A traveler considers home
Ever since reading Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City, I’ve approached the art of the passeggiata with a new sense of awe. Far from being a simple feat of forward movement, a stroll is an act of discovery, a gourmet meal of the senses. We prowl and sniff and stop and listen and sniff again, just like the four-footers we know. Sometimes we’re purposeful, ticking off the miles from one place to another. Sometimes we’re dreamy, stopping at the pasticceria for a sfogliatella, or pausing under an open window on a narrow street to eavesdrop on the...
read moreI Can See Clearly Now
Although Buffalo Park was a slip and slide mud festival after last week’s snowfall, I walked a mid-day lap on Sunday. People who had driven up the hill to see the snow clustered around the entry to the park, squealing as they made snowballs and snapped photos. I sloshed alone through the melting snow patches on the Nate Avery trail. About a half hour in, I heard the steady cadence of a runner behind me. He trotted by, buffed and sturdy and splattered with mud. He looked like the human equivalent of a rugged offroad sports utility vehicle in a...
read moreLife of Piles
Every morning when I get dressed, I walk to my dresser, take two steps to the left, and dig through baskets, bins, and piles of laundry to find the clothes I will wear for the day. Some of it is clean, gathered into a basket to be banished to the corner of the bedroom for a few cycles of laundry until I finally get a wild spurt of motivation and put stuff away. Some of it is mostly clean, worn but not dirtied enough to justify devoting resources to its laundering. Some of it is not clean. Sometimes the piles mix together and everything gets...
read moreDead Things
My husband, Marc, and I made it out to Lake Mary this weekend. First, a disclaimer: I grew up in upstate New York, about two miles from Lake Ontario. So, I am a “lake snob” for sure. But since visiting the upper falls of Lake Mary last spring during the snow melt, I’ve come to appreciate the charms of a small-ish lake surrounded by forest, hills and quaint picnic areas. This day brought us out to the Osprey Lookout where a recent eagle watch was canceled due to our recent snowstorms. We couldn’t help but think we might see eagles and osprey...
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