He just stepped out for a pack of cigarettes… It’s been a while since I’ve heard anyone say it, even as a joke. The echo of a father who slipped out the door and never came home. The legacy of…
How to Disappear …by Tonya Audyn Morton
Tag: Sowing Clover
Life on the Prairie …by Tonya Morton
“When I was a schoolboy my map of the United States showed between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains a long and broad white blotch, upon which was printed in small capitals ‘THE GREAT AMERICAN DESERT – UNEXPLORED.’” —…
Yes, Some People are Still Smoking. Could We Just Leave Them Alone? …by Tonya Audyn Morton
The first time I picked up a cigarette, I was probably six years old. It was late morning, mid-summer, and the babysitter had let us kids out into the park next to her home while she returned inside to begin…
Safe at Home: Learning to Love Baseball …by Tonya Audyn Morton
Either you learn to love baseball as a kid or else you don’t learn to love it. Right? It’s just too big. It’s like any other behemoth cultural institution—Catholicism, for example. I can speak to this as a Catholic. That…
The Love of Maps …by Tonya Morton
The oldest surviving map of the world—the Babylonian Imago Mundi—circumscribes a landmass between the Mediterranean and Caspian Seas. The world it describes is only as long as the Euphrates River. At its center lies the city of Babylon. To the…
Sowing Clover: The Stranger …by Tonya Audyn Morton
When I lived in South Dakota, one of my favorite places was a truck stop on the western edge of Rapid City. There wasn’t anything particularly special about this truck stop—except…maybe, for the quality of the pie in its diner.…
Finding Peace at Yosemite, Part One: Ansel Adams and WWII’s Wounded Soldiers …by Tonya Morton
There’s little doubt that we live today in interesting times. In recent months, Americans have been confronted with deep, seemingly insurmountable problems. Divisions among neighbors and families. The pain of economic loss and the specter of illness and death. We’ve…
Covid 19 on the Prairie: Life in the Urban/Rural Divide …by Tonya Audyn Morton
It’s a peculiar time to live in a tiny, isolated town on the prairie. Peculiar, firstly, because the town looks largely the same, despite the international pandemic that occupies every headline and every conversation. The roads are quiet, yes. But…
UFOs, Desert Nights, and Late Night Radio …by Tonya Morton
When the swamp gas clears…and the weather balloons are safe in their weather-station beds …and all the super-secret spy planes have spun their alley-oops and jittered their non-ballistic shuffles through the clouds for the night…and you’re on some wide stretch…
CANDID CAMERA: Facial Recognition and the Last Fight for Privacy… by Tonya Morton
“It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.” – Robert Oppenheimer In any given week, any given month…