The One Who Held Her Hand

Imagine Monument Valley with its stunning red buttes in the candle-like flicker of the sun’s last breaths. Imagine the Grand Canyon and its captivating red-white walls teasing your eyes with seemingly infinite depths. Imagine a trip your family took to those places and the beauty that was so pervasive you felt it in your core. Now, picture a hogan, a traditional Navajo dwelling, just out of view in each of those places. It sits just beyond the mesa where the paved roads carrying tourists end. Visualize its mud-covered roof, patched each spring to fill the holes cracked and frozen during winter’s cold in an attempt to seal out summer’s coming monsoon rains. Imagine a silver sliver of smoke, whispering from the ash black smokestack carrying the scent of cedar, pine, or cottonwood chopped and stacked the previous...