"When I first moved to Santa Fe about 26 years ago, I cried," the author says. "I didn't know anyone. Didn't have a job. All the houses were the same color. The streets didn't make sense, often turning into one-way roads at whim. Then something happened. I began to enjoy the idea that nothing made sense. Nothing worked. Nothing was expected to work, including the telephones when it rained. But no one really cared. Life went on. When I wrote my first check for $2.56 for breakfast in a place where most people spoke Spanglish and the chile was hot enough to spring tears into my eyes, I knew I had arrived in someplace that mattered. It was a place where people wore western hats, dusty boots and blue jeans. In the true tradition of the American West, people left you alone, unless you didn't want to be alone, and then they embraced you. I discovered that I had to leave my native California to go East in order get West. I won't say that living is easy here; it's not. But it's good. The people are truly wonderful and for years, I've been able to tell their stories, sometimes helping them find their own voices, sometimes using my own. I learned a long time ago a good journalist writes the truth with love. Just as I've learned that I've never met a person who didn't have a story to tell. Here are some of those stories."DENISE KUSEL has been a journalist for so long you'd think by now she would have changed careers to something that actually makes money and earns respect. She currently is a columnist at "The Santa Fe New Mexican," where her columns "Only in Santa Fe" appear three times a week.