PIECES OF LIGHT: A YEAR ON COLORADO'S FRONT RANGE
Best Trade Book, Rocky Mountain Book Publishers' Association

By Susan J. Tweit

Drawings by Ann W. Douden
Roberts Rinehart Publishers
clothbound
0-911797-72-6
248 pages


In few places is the presence of nature so striking, or so closely integrated with the life of the city as in Boulder, Colorado, on the Rocky Mountain front range. Using the skills acquired from her years as a plant ecologist, Tweit interprets Boulder and its environs as a naturalist. For her, Boulder is deer tracks in the snow behind a condominium building; a muskrat patrolling an irrigation ditch; and the ecology of an urban forest canopy. Far from being just a rote listing of plants and animals, however, Pieces of Light is also a "journey of the heart," where Tweit's year is spent reaffirming her bonds to a powerfully alluring landscape.

Pieces of Light is a book to be taken up on a rainy afternoon or a snowy night, a book to be immediately absorbed by, to delight in for years.
--Bloomsbury Review

A lovely piece of work whose author shows great serenity of spirit and the ability to be captivated by small things.
-- Ann Zwinger

I am sure that other readers, not only those along the Front Range, but elsewhere in the world will be astonished and intrigued as Susan calls attention to the myriads of earth's wonders that they have missed or have not appreciated.
-- J. David Love, geologist and subject of John McPhee's award-winning book, Rising from the Plains

 

From the book:

MONDAY, 7 DECEMBER:

The chinooks began blowing sometime in the night. I woke at about five o'clock, troubled by a vague uneasiness, knowing that something was different. The air felt warmer than usual, odd. I became conscious of a distant roaring, like some great wave approaching, a tsunami wall of water. In the few seconds that elapsed as it roared closer, I remembered sleepily that it couldn't be a tsunami. The only ocean to lap this shore is millions of years gone. The roar approached quickly, accompanied by increasingly loud rattling, banging, and crashing sounds as it shook or swayed or broke things in its path. In just a few seconds it rushed by, the intense noise fading. It was the wind - a wave of air, not water.

The moon shone brightly when I looked out the window. I could see the trees swaying, dancing in the swirling eddies of air from the great wave's passage.

I could already hear the next gust coming down the slope from the Front Range. I sat up and looked out the window into the pale night. The gust roared through the trees like a train, closer and closer and closer until it poured around the apartment building, tossing grit against the windows, rattling the bare fingers of the wild plum and apple tree branches that touch the back window, clanging the wind chime, whipping the dry leaves from the yard along with great clouds of urban debris - loose sheets of yellowed newspaper, plastic bags, Styrofoam cups, and even plastic plant pots. ...

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