(Tom) This week on Arizona Illustrated, the story of a family who says they're facing uncertainty after Medicaid cuts.

(Brandy) It's literally saving lives to keep people in their homes with people who love them.

(Tom) Poet Claire Hong takes us on a visual journey.

(Claire) Belief is the eternal ambiguity of the sky.

(Tom) Meet a ceramic artist who is literally putting the Sonoran Desert into her work.

(Samirah) When I sit down to start sculpting it, I just get so into the details.

(Tom) And while the 2025 monsoon didn't deliver as much rain as we hoped, we look back at the floods of 1983 from our recently digitized archives.

(Reporter) So far the east side is recorded 20 inches of rainfall against the average of 12 inches.

Hello and welcome to Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

And we are joining you from the Romero House downtown, a beautiful place originally built back in the 1860s.

It became a ceramic studio in 1975 when the Tucson Museum of Art moved next door.

They're now celebrating 50 years and are the longest running educational ceramic studio in Tucson.

They house the Mud Room Gallery and they've become an integral hub for the art form in Southern Arizona.

We'll have much more about Romero House Ceramics later in this episode, but for now let's check out some stories.

Brandy Foster's daughter Alexa was diagnosed with autism at 15 years old and she began to receive care from Home and Community-Based Services.

But with recent cuts to Medicaid, the program that funds Alexa's and many other families care now faces uncertainty.

♪ SOFT INSTRUMENTAL (Brandy) We adopted Alexa when she was a baby.

We took custody when she was six weeks old.

And because of some things with her birth mother, we knew that we needed to follow her developmentally because she might have some delays.

(iPad Speaker) We did... [ KEYBOARD CLICKS ] It.

We did it.

(Brandy) She did go through her milestones more slowly than other kids.

So, her skills just didn't catch up to other kids.

One day we were sitting with her psychiatrist and she was repeating something and he says, "Oh, that's a symptom of autism.

We should do a test."

She was 15 at that age.

(Reporter) It was around that same age when Alexa Foster was diagnosed with autism that Anna came into the picture.

What are we gonna go do?

Clean.

Clean, that's right.

(Reporter) Anna is Alexa's paid caregiver.

She supports Alexa through Home and Community Based Services or HCBS, a program primarily funded through Medicaid.

But bringing a caregiver into the home wasn't an easy decision for Alexa's mom, Brandy.

Help.

(Brandy) It felt like a failure on my part.

Like I wasn't a good enough parent cause I mean, I only had one kid and she was really sweet little kid.

I should be able to do this, but I couldn't.

(Reporter) It was a deeply personal choice made even harder by Brandy's own health challenges.

I have a disability myself.

It's a form of muscular dystrophy and various symptoms of that and surgeries to deal with that have rendered it difficult for me to stand on my feet for long periods of time.

(Reporter) At times she questioned whether letting someone else step in was the right move as a mother.

That felt kind of bad, but it-it was better to have the help and to just accept that, it's not a measure of your capability.

Everyone needs help with this.

Now hit your sentence.

(iPad Speaker) Hello, (unclear word), what's up?

(Brandy) Anna just had like the perfect mix of empathy and kindness, but firmness in in having expectations of Alexa.

She didn't let her get away with stuff.

Okay, let's get our focused back on trains.

Let's put them away.

Anna never backs down.

Yeah.

[ LAUGHS ] (Brandy) It's really hard as a parent when your kid is always behind to know what they can do and what you can expect of them.

(Reporter) Through the program, Anna has helped Alexa build independence and stay connected to her community.

For the last six years, she's been a steady and empowering presence in Alexa's life.

(Anna) So Alexa receives respite and habilitation.

So habilitation is getting her to do life skills.

Simple things for us, but difficult for her.

So her chores normally are personal hygiene, cleaning her room, cleaning her stuff out of the living room.

We do the dishes, laundry, folding.

So folding's been a battle, but she can fold her-her chonies.

She can do socks.

She can hang up her shirts.

Folding pants we have yet to master.

(Reporter) Now that progress may be at risk.

This summer, Congress approved President Donald Trump's budget proposal, nicknamed the Big Beautiful Bill.

It includes cuts to Medicaid, the very program that helps fund Alexa's care.

Families like the Fosters are now worried about what those cuts could mean for them.

(Brandy) The purpose of those services is to keep people with disabilities out of institutions because people are vulnerable there.

They can't say what's happening to them and people aren't watching what's happening there very closely.

So, it's literally saving lives to keep people in their homes with the people who love them.

And if you can do that with the support of a caregiver part time, it's so much less expensive than it is to put them in a home and pay for full-time care.

(Reporter) To try to protect HCBS, Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs included full funding for the Department of Developmental Disabilities in this year's state budget.

That department, which supports more than 60,000 Arizonans with autism, cerebral palsy, epilepsy, and intellectual disabilities, oversees the paid caregiver program.

But those protections aren't guaranteed year to year.

If she loses that program, then that means I don't have a job.

So that means I have to go find something else to do.

So that means I won't be working with her.

I won't get to see her anymore.

Hi.

Hi, Missy.

Hi, Missy.

Hi!

(Anna) We are all made different.

Hi, Bo.

What's up, Bo?

High five.

Right on.

Some people just can't vocalize it.

So that's the importance, I think, of this thing and the program staying where it's at because they need somebody.

We all need somebody.

(Anna) Do you like emptying the dishwasher?

Yes.

[ LAUGHS ] (Anna) Are you being honest?

Yes.

(Anna) You like emptying the dishwasher?

(Brandy) Having someone who's like, "She can do this."

You know, it makes me expect more and hope for more.

And-and it's brought her a long ways a lot faster than she would have ever gone before that.

(Anna) That's, you know, the point of community.

We're all here to work together and it does take a village.

It's not just one person raising someone.

It's all of us working together, coming together.

Is that your bear crawl?

- Yeah.

- Okay.

(Unintelligible) (Anna) I have no kids myself.

I've always wanted them but never had them.

So Alexa's like the closest thing I have to having a child.

(Anna) Do you love Anna?

Yeah.

(iPad Speaker) I love [ KEYBOARD CLICKS ] (Keyboard Speaker) Anna.

I love Anna.

(Anna) I love you too.

I can't-I can't quite picture how life would be without Anna.

And I don't really want to.

♪ GENTLE AMBIENT (gentle music) For more on this story, go to azpm.org/news Now, in our ongoing collaboration with the Poetry Center, Claire Hong takes us on a visual journey through family, color, and the natural and cosmic world that bridges past, present, and future.

[ WIND BLOWING ] "Landlines."

A blue star balloon glides across the horizon.

The shape obscures and glints beyond the power lines.

Language drags, and I only connect the balloon to the namesake of the dead star after the fact.

Through a telescope, the star's remains are a bright scatter, its end in sight.

I mention Supernova 1054 by name on a garden tour, almost as a plea.

A Hopi archaeologist tells me about the prophecy of the Blue Star, what it will mean when it appears again.

I say I'm a writer and he says, "Do with this what you will."

My mother would end our calls crying the words "broken family."

The human eye struggles to detect the line between violet and blue.

Newton added indigo between them in the rainbow because he felt the number seven was godly.

Cosmic.

Something religious or chemical happens when I eat a fried tilapia head my aunt made.

Trading chopsticks for my thumb and pointer, my pupils dilate, and a shimmer forms in my skull.

This was years ago.

If the present is all we have, it is ever shifting, something one must craft.

A February heat wave makes the daikon flower early before the roots form.

Violet petals whiten and wilt back to earth.

It all gets undone and redone.

I never worked at the farm on top of the paved over paint factory.

I never culled the sick hens, one by one, who could see ultraviolet.

My ancestors clock out.

Fingers return to grandmother's hands.

She unsees what the soldiers did to the babies and they descend back to the arms of their mothers.

The pattern unrepeats.

I am believed.

Violet gets unnamed.

No more quinacridone, dioxazine, pyrlene.

Unsay the idiom black and blue.

Belief is the eternal ambiguity of the sky.

I sense the wide spectrum of possibility, past bridging future, the star appearing in blue day, the scent of snow at night in the dry valley.

♪ AMBIENT MUSIC To see an alternate version of Claire on camera reading the poem during Blue Hour, find Arizona Illustrated on Facebook or Instagram, or follow Arizona Public Media on YouTube.

Well, truth be known, I've been in Tucson almost 30 years and I've never been to Romero House Ceramics and this is a cool place and joining me is a cool person behind it, David Campbell, otherwise known to his friends, acquaintances and TV host as DC.

DC, thank you.

Hey, thanks for having us.

Good to meet you.

Thanks for being here.

Thank you for being here.

It's a special place.

You're packed with history, you're packed with clay and ovens and just a great vibe down here.

Right here in the Tucson Museum of Art Historic Block.

Yeah.

And we've been here 50 years this year.

Man.

Started outside of the Tucson Museum of Art School.

2012, we became a non-profit and we've been going strong ever since.

DC, this special place you have is part history, part therapy, I'm sure, part art and a magnet for this community.

Absolutely.

It is.

You know, people come for the work for playing with clay but they stay for the community.

You know, they really find a heart here.

Again, right in the heart of downtown Tucson and like you said, a real magnet for people.

You know, as the world gets edgier and more intense, this is a release.

We take pride in maintaining a studio and a community where people are...we leave the cares of the world behind.

When you come in here and you create, when we work with clay, you can do pottery on the wheel, you can do hand built, free form works.

But again, for a lot of us, it's just coming here, being a part of a community and doing something other.

It's a well kept secret.

It is a very well kept secret.

Like I said, we've been around 50 years.

We want to keep this going for another 50.

So we're actually going to be starting a year of celebration.

Starting November 1st, we're going to have our first art auction here in the Mudroom Gallery and ramping our way up to in about a year from now, a larger block party where we really celebrate.

So what if you're not an artist?

What if you can't even draw a stick figure and I won't mention any names?

All of our classes are geared towards beginners.

But we then will work with you and build with you.

Our classes don't have a general curriculum like most classes do.

We follow what the artist or what the student wants.

We mentor as instructors.

But it's all about creating that space where people can let that inner creativity out.

This is extra special because you're part art, you're part of the Presidio, you're on the campus of the Tucson Museum of Art.

What a great spot.

We love it here.

You want to be around another 50 years?

It sounds like you'll be around another 50 years.

Oh, I certainly will be.

Thank you.

Thank you.

This is great.

It's been eye-opening.

Love it.

Thanks for being here.

Well, while we're here at Romero Ceramic Studios, we've had the pleasure to meet Janet Burner.

You've been here since the beginning 50 years now.

In fact, you helped to build this kiln.

What's special about this place for you?

It's my life.

You know, I've been here, I grew up here.

I started when I was 23.

I was hired when the museum moved from the Tucson Art Center.

Whether it's a veteran like you or someone making clay for the first time, what is it about this process?

What does it feel like?

It's magical.

It really is.

I made up my mind to be a potter the day I went to a professional studio in Cape Cod and went up his driveway and there was music playing in the woods and all these great pieces around and he invited me in.

And I made up my mind that day not to be a microbiologist, but be a potter.

Magical.

And it was magical.

Well, congratulations on all you've accomplished here.

Oh, thank you.

We love it.

Please come to the Romero House.

Right.

We're open for business.

Now you'll meet a special friend of the Romero House, Samirah Steinmeyer, whose ceramics capture the texture and the essence of the Sonoran Desert.

She's incorporated local rocks and minerals, including our infamous caliche, into her experimental glazes and the ceramics themselves.

♪ SOFT MUSIC (Samirah) I love geological formations that look like they could just fall apart at any moment.

I remember as a little kid seeing some of those hoodoos, it looked like a giant had come and just like stacked rocks on top of one another.

Some of my favorite spots are rock climbing spots because they have these sheer rock faces and they tower over you and make you feel small and kind of frame views and within those, you know, these sheer walls you see little plants that are just kind of popping out of there and you're like, "Where is the soil?

Like, what do you, how did you do this?"

My early work was very simple because I was trying to figure out how to make plates and mugs and bowls but once I started decorating them, I wanted to put animals and different themes that were interesting to my kids.

I decided to try selling on Etsy, and people were buying these really early pieces.

I had to figure out how to make a design that I could make relatively quick, you know along the lines of trying to make it mass-produced.

I wanted to create a business where I included the ability to continue to learn new techniques while I made work and make it so that my customers kind of expected things to evolve over time.

So that gave me space to not have to create the same thing over and over again.

The work that I'm doing now kind of shifted in style a little bit more dramatically after 2020, because that was just a chaotic year for most people due to the pandemic.

But in addition to that, I was in a bicycle accident and I had a brain injury, subdural hematoma.

After I came back from the hospital, I had to sleep a lot.

When I started to kind of come out of that phase, I found myself drawn to being outside.

And I think my brain just wanted less stimulus.

Coming back into the studio and trying to create a lot of the same work that I was working on, it just didn't align.

I was actually burnt out, just trying to keep up with a pace of demand.

When I sat down to try to create some of the designs, my sense of time had changed.

I couldn't make it quickly anymore, and I started to make things much more intricate.

It was something that initially I kind of tried to fight against, but then I surrendered to the fact that, "You know, these are still beautiful and it's a different style."

And I just kind of went with it.

Once I was able to start driving again, I started coming up to Mount Lemmon.

And I started to just observe the geology around me.

In particular, I was drawn to the rocks that looked precarious.

The ones that had fractures, the ones that were solid, but just looked really fragile at the same time.

So all of that kind of resonated with where I was at that particular moment.

Having taken some glaze chemistry classes, I knew that basically our ceramic materials are made of rocks.

And so I was like, "Ooh, I wonder how many of these rocks could actually be used for my pottery."

Muscovite, feldspar, and caliche are kind of my three favorites right now.

The ones that I have played with the most.

Caliche, I have been sourcing from my backyard because it's all over the place.

The feldspar and the quartz, I have been able to find up in the Catalina Mountains.

For instance, the feldspar, my eye is just drawn to it because it has this shine that is unmistakable.

I don't plan ahead.

I just let it be spontaneous.

I'll look at it and see what kind of a formation it's becoming.

I leave it kind of chunky so that it looks like boulders are kind of sticking out a little bit more here and there.

When I sit down to start sculpting it, I just get so into the details.

Like I would if I'm out in nature and I see something beautiful, I just go in and just start to notice all the little particularities of it.

The caliche, I've been using pulverized and using it as an ingredient in an aventurine glaze that I developed several years ago.

And so aventurine glaze is a glaze that has crystals that are made of iron oxide.

And they only appear when you have the perfect proportion of calcium carbonate and iron oxide.

So these crystals wouldn't happen without caliche.

That line of inquiry that I'm on right now is trying to figure out how to ground my work in this landscape and actually take pieces of the landscape and incorporate them into my work to make it more regional, more from this actual landscape.

I'm fortunate to have this kind of slow pace that kind of works best for me and have the opportunity to explore these questions that are fundamental to where I want to take my work.

I think I was making decent work before and I slowed down, but I think that it just has kind of unlocked a different level of creativity in terms of how things look.

I really wanted to take more time with each piece.

I wanted the whole process to be more intentional.

I only have maybe two or three shop updates per year because I want each piece to reflect that.

It's almost like me trying to create a souvenir of an experience of awe in nature.

I want to capture that moment and that scene and everything about how I'm feeling and bring it home with me.

And of course I can't.

So then when I'm back in the studio, it's like that whole feeling just kind of comes out and I'm just recreating it in this little tangible form and then I feel like I brought it home with me.

♪ SOFT MUSIC Most people, especially when we were children, we connected with the landscape.

I have two kids and so I remember just kind of becoming a kid with them again as they were marveling at things that I used to just hike right by.

It's not about going from point A to point B. It's like checking out this marvelous little insect or like this rock outcropping or... So I think maybe trying to help people reconnect with that connection with nature and that awe and being in the present moment with these beautiful natural surroundings that we have.

And yeah, at the very least, you know a good mug to have coffee from.

♪ SOFT MUSIC Well, seeing those beautiful ceramic works, what's the appetite to try something?

And we found a patient skilled instructor, Jesse Hinson, is going to take me through the paces.

What do we do first?

So we are going to make a slab cup.

So I went ahead and wrote out our slab.

I got all our tools here.

So the first thing that we're going to do is we have our forms.

So we're just going to kind of determine the height of what we want to what we want our cup to be.

(Jesse) Cut that out.

Roll it up.

I'm going to take our scoring tool, slip and score here, which is just rehydrated clay that's a little wet.

(Tom) That's your glue.

(Jesse) That's my glue.

(Tom) Two pieces of paper.

OK.

(jesse) After that, we can just take our sponge and start to smooth some of that out.

I can flip this over right onto my clay.

(Tom) Let me guess, that'll be the bottom of your.

(Jesse) Exactly.

(Tom) OK.

(Jesse) All right.

So we're going to do the same thing we did before with just slipping and scoring.

Do you want to give this a go?

(Tom) Sure (Jesse) Try attaching it.

That's good.

(Tom) Is that too much or no?

(Jesse) Oh, no, that's perfect.

(Tom) Here we go.

(Jesse) Here we go.

Yeah.

One shot at this.

Oh, it'll move around a little bit.

You got some flexibility.

You got plenty of time.

(Jesse) All right.

So we've got that sort of lined up on the edges there.

So now I'm going to put my hand on the inside to just apply some pressure outwards.

I'm going to use my finger on the bottom and smooth this out.

The other thing that we can do is got some stamps here we can stamp in some textures here.

I'll grab this one and I'll just.

So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to brace it on the bottom.

On the outside with my hand.

OK.

I'm just going to press it lightly all the way across.

OK.

All the way around.

Yeah.

That makes sense.

Yeah.

Give it a little bit of character.

Yeah.

Nice.

Great.

Yeah.

All right.

So what happens now?

So what happens now is this is still really wet.

So we're going to let it set out to dry and then it's going to go in the bisque.

So our bisque is just our in between firing.

But it'll be ready for us to glaze.

After that it's going to go in the high fire cone with a glaze on it.

It'll come out all shiny and ready for you.

So it's a day or two process.

Yeah.

Usually takes probably the fastest you would get something out is about two weeks.

It is definitely a labor of love.

It's a labor of love and you have a beautiful piece you spent some time on.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Nice.

So this is my piece.

All the panels are individually painted sections and underglaze as underglaze underglaze transfers on porcelain.

How long did this piece take you to make.

So this piece took me about 20 hours.

Beautiful.

Thank you.

Jesse thank you for putting us through the paces enjoyed it.

Absolutely.

It's been such a pleasure to be here.

Likewise.

Thanks.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Monsoon 2025 officially ended on September 30th and it left a lot of people disappointed in the rainfall totals.

The National Weather Service said we received only about 2.8 inches of rain.

But in our recently digitized archives we came across a tape of a very different monsoon.

You're looking at footage from 1983 where between six and seven inches of rainfall in a five day period in the Tucson basin and this flood overwhelmed then current drainage systems and stranded residents.

Ordinarily the Rillito Wash cuts through town never threatening its border area residents.

But now this complex has been condemned.

Residents have been evacuated.

This impromptu shore resembles land after an earthquake.

It's broken shattered and dangerous to walk on.

The Rillito River was flowing at 20,000 cubic feet per second.

Many residents and officials say it was the worst flooding they'd ever seen on the Rillito River.

About 80 people were evacuated from this apartment complex over the weekend.

Some lost everything as their homes crumbled into the river.

Others were more fortunate.

Originally the fire department had come out earlier and they didn't think we were going to have to evacuate at that time.

Then they came back a couple hours and said everybody had to go and just leave right then because we didn't have time to take.

Residents of the area agreed that the flooding had brought them all closer together.

One burly man said he had hog furniture for the women next door.

Neighbors helped each other.

The community responded by opening disaster shelters.

Individuals offered what they could.

For those who lost their homes there was despair.

For others there was a feeling of relief.

Thank you for joining us from here at Romero House Ceramics downtown.

I'm Tom McNamara.

We'll see you again next week.