Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children explores in the microcosm of a forty-acre high mountain meadow and its surrounding lands vast worlds of ecological and familial migrations. The announcement by her eighty-five-year-old mother that she would be moving to Colorado to live out her last years sparks Winograd into a journey into what it means to be a steward of a land and its inhabitants she knows little about and steward of a grieving mother sliding irrevocably into the blindness she fears and the dying for which she longs.
Expanded gold mines, drought-induced wildfires, sudden aspen decline, solitary hawks and summer-pastured longhorns, coyote and elusive cougar, fairy trumpets: as Winograd takes her mother on an exploration of the inhabitants of this deceptively remote and arid landscape in southwest Colorado at the "back" of Pikes Peak, she begins to discover its metaphorical connections to the emotional family landscape she now lives in.
In this collection of essays, Winograd braids together the pressing environmental issues of today with the sacred and profane intersections of the human and the natural world .