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.
Plunge
The night the police helicopter dropped from the west Flagstaff sky I was lying in bed, trying to get my mind off the disturbing flow of local news updates by immersing myself in a long magazine article. The piece was about Greenland. But it wasn’t one of those articles about Greenland, the ubiquitous kind exploring the politics or the psychology of a rapacious toddler-king seeking to blow up NATO in pursuit of real-estate glory and a compelling plotline in the long-running reality show we’ve all become a part of. No, this story was...
read moreThis Train
When the 2008 financial crisis hit, I didn’t lose a thing. There was nothing to lose. No house, no 401K, no stocks or bonds. My minimum-wage job at the bakery still paid minimum. My battered old truck had quit on me, but my bicycle tires still held air. I was doing OK Nonetheless the Great Recession was a wakeup call. For decades I had been enjoying life, not planning for a future. So at 53–lacking health insurance and dragging around a decades-old student loan–I went looking for a grown-up job. The unemployment rate stood...
read moreMephitis Mephitis and the Lessons of Liberation
The guy on the TV screen tells me two things I didn’t know. One, I almost certainly have a skunk under my house because in winter that’s where skunks go, under houses. And two, if I don’t already own a Skunkinator, I need to run out and get one right now. Salesman he is, but the way he phrases it is more like two of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism: We suffer; there is an end to suffering. We have a skunk; there is a way to get rid of the skunk. This appeals to me, a kind of esoteric sales pitch designed for those who would like a smattering...
read moreShowing up
It was fairly clear on Sunday night when I rolled the recycling bin to the curb. It had been another unseasonably warm day, which seems to be the description of every day in Flagstaff since December. Looking up, I could see the Orion constellation tilting toward our house and I stood, bin tipped, to admire the formation and the bright star, Betelgeuse. The street was quiet except for the bin’s wheels grinding on cinders as I edged it closer to the curb. As I walked up the driveway and back to the house, I kept my eye on Orion until the...
read moreA Call to Kindness
The writing assignment for my second-year university students was an opinion piece. I instructed them to select an issue they genuinely care about so their passion for the subject would animate their work and fuel them through the research and writing. When I read their submissions, I sifted through the usual topics reflecting Gen Z university student concerns: the call for increased LGBTQ+ rights, the burnout of hustle culture, the unfairness of unpaid internships, and the lousy food in the cafeteria. But Ivan’s piece stood out from the...
read moreISO Season, Cold but Beautiful
As someone who lives by choice at high elevation, I know the happy truth that those of us who are lucky enough to live up here are simply closer to the sky than most other people. Which according to my dermatologist and eye doctor alike is not always a good thing. But I will take the trade, paid off in fresh air, mountain vistas, nighttime dark skies. And in the sense that when you live at over a mile high winter is always nearby. Even on a hot summer day it’s up there not that far above us, in some unseen atmospheric layer cold enough to...
read moreBoth Sides Now
My thoughts kept returning to the letters I’d mailed…to say that my mom was hurt would be an understatement; in fact, she was heartbroken. Crisp autumn sunshine flooded the streets of upper Manhattan that afternoon. City buses and yellow cabs lurched from light to light, horns honked, pedestrians milled along the sidewalks. I stood in front of a big blue U.S. Mail drop-box on the corner of 63rd and Broadway clutching two envelopes, feeling mildly sick, almost dizzy. One was addressed to my father, the other to my mom. It was October of...
read moreNurse Marinate
After a year of borrowed addresses, this Christmas comes with nothing addressed to me. Not even a ghost of Christmas past asking for a wish list. Not to worry, when you are displaced and have to pack up again every few weeks, ownership becomes theoretical. I have one close family member, my son, who I suspect bought my gift at a gas station, and I love him for it. Last winter, fire took the house. It happened as I myself was learning how to leave. It was the first Christmas in years without the old accounting system in play, something like a...
read moreAll I Want
A Barbie. A bike. A Nancy Drew book. As a kid, my Christmas wish list rarely veered from the typical wants of a middle-class American grade schooler. I wanted some shiny stuff to play with, and I wanted to read about the escapades of my favorite teen detective solving yet another soft crime. I am decades away from childhood. Shiny stuff has lost its sway, and the hyper-commercialized holiday blur of the year’s end and the new year’s onset spurs me—and many of us–toward contemplation, moral inventory and an everpresent desire for peace....
read moreDear Future Self
Dear Future Self, First of all, you were supposed to write down all of the things you learned throughout the year, but journaling seemed to go by the way back in January. It would have helped to have had some notes so that I could remind you of everything you experienced. I’m trying to write to you in my post-sweat euphoria from exercise class. That’s one good thing you kept doing this year, even through your hip replacement. Sure, you had some setbacks, but you completed your 80th cycling class today and finally broke the last/last streak in...
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