By Martha Quillen
According to those in the know, America has lost it. But what have we lost? Donald Trump says it’s our greatness, because the way he sees it, our nation isn’t feared nor revered anymore, whereas others claim we’ve lost our mojo, which generally refers to our gumption and can-do attitude. Many agree we’ve lost our minds, and others think we’ve lost our soul. And scads of commentators believe America has lost either its moral compass, or moral standing, or morals altogether.
By Susan Tweit
“Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.” – Steve Jobs, 2005 commencement speech
I’m just beginning my contemplative season (interrupted though it will be, for reasons I won’t bore you with). In the snatches of time I’ve found to listen within, I already hear one very clear and somewhat scary message: It’s time to focus on writing the books I’ve had in my head for a couple of years.
What’s scary about that? Writing a book requires long, uninterrupted stretches of time – months, preferably – to work on a single project. (I don’t multi-task in writing; focusing on one thing at a time is the only way I can hear the voice of my creativity.) To carve out that time, I’m shifting the balance of my freelance work and letting go of some of my regular deadlines.
By Susan Tweit
One morning in August, I woke in the half-darkness at five o’clock. I lay there hoping I’d go back to sleep, and then remembered what awakened me.
“Happy Anniversary,” I said softly out loud.
I wasn’t talking to myself, though I do that often. (I’m a writer. I live alone. Both good excuses for talking to myself, it seems to me.)
By Susan Tweit
In July I spent four days on the Green River, floating the canyons of Dinosaur National Park as a “mind guide” for a trip with Colorado Art Ranch.
Let me say right off, I am not a river-girl. Whitewater does not make my heart sing; in fact, the rumble of a river grinding downhill over rapids scares me.
This particular trip came with a boat-load of grief: my writer/bookstore-owner friend Carol drowned three summers ago on the Green, in Triplet Falls, one of the rapids we would be running. Her husband Terry, an experienced boatman, was at the oars when the boat flipped; everyone made it out but Carol. Terry was joining the Art Ranch trip, determined to return to the river he loved.
By Susan Tweit
I’ve never claimed to be Tool Girl. Back in college, in fact, my housemates prohibited me from playing with their power tools when we were renovating our old house. As I recall, a small incident with a reciprocating saw and one of my fingers precipitated the ban. Both recovered, though the finger required a few stitches.
It’s not that I’m clumsy or incapable; I lost much of the feeling in my fingers and toes to Raynaud’s Syndrome, a companion to the Lupus I’ve lived with all my life. If I don’t watch where my digits are relative to implements of destruction, I can get into serious trouble before I notice what’s happening.
By Susan Tweit
I didn’t intend to renovate my life, revising not just my daily routine, but also my path forward.
After Richard died two days after Thanksgiving, I figured I’d hibernate for several months to recover from helping him live well for as long as he could with brain cancer. I wanted time to hear myself think, to figure out this new and unsought role as Woman Alone.
I thought I’d read, rest, and get started on a new book – or books. Hah.
Susan Tweit
Recently, I had a sobering realization: I’ve been half of a couple essentially all of my adult life, or almost two-thirds of my years.
There’s nothing wrong with spending your life as part of a healthy and nurturing couple, if you can find that gig. My time with my late husband, Richard Cabe, was certainly all of that and more.
By Susan Tweit
When I was a child, I knew exactly where home was: Wyoming. Although I was born and lived in Illinois, I recognized the home of my heart on a family vacation. It was June, the beginning of one our annual weeks-long camping and nature study expeditions through the West.
My father was driving, gas pedal to the floor as he urged the engine of our home-made camper-van to its top speed on brand-new Interstate 80 west of Laramie. My mother, chief navigator, sat next to him, my brother scanned the passing landscape for birds new to his life list. I sat in back with my face buried in a book.
By Susan Tweit
More than a decade ago, when Richard and I began restoring our “dream place,” the formerly blighted industrial property bounded by the thread of channelized creek where we live, we had no plan, no budget, and no real concept of how much work lay ahead. We did have a vision of healing the land and its degraded creek, reestablishing the community of the land right in town, and a comfortable sense of time in which to do the work.
By Susan Tweit
As anyone who knows me knows very well, I am NOT the Queen of Patience. So on days like today, when Richard’s brain is just not working well, I have to remind myself that his company in my life is a gift.
Which I do … As I turn out the lights behind him, and wipe up the water he spilled all over the floor as he carefully and precisely filled up his water bottle to exactly the rim – and then tipped it as he carried it across the kitchen, never noticing the water trailing behind.
By Susan Tweit
It rained the other night, wetting the Adirondack chair I had perched on the two flagstones that make up the patio Richard and I have started to lay, stone by stone, in the courtyard just off our bedroom.
Fat drops plopped on the red sandstone flags, kicking up puffs of fragrant dust until the steady patter darkened the surface of the stone, until the stone glimmered with water and the air smelled wet and alive.
It rained until the trellis around the kitchen garden was hung with diamond drops of water, until the tires of passing cars splashed in the sheet-flow on the streets, until the rush and gurgle of rain had the gutters singing again.
By Susan Tweit
A friend who survived cancer said the treatment was like “living in a black hole,” in the sense that while the world goes on around you, and people are helpful and kind, you’re really isolated by the intense and exhausting journey you’re on.
That’s how life feels right now. Even though we’re surrounded by people who love and care for us, and who help in so many ways; even though Salida in summer is a crazy busy place; even though life hurtles on at what seems like a breakneck pace; our intense focus on Richard’s health and well-being creates an oddly peaceful space around us.
By Susan Tweit
One recent morning we sat in the VA Medical Center in Denver waiting for Richard’s oncology consult, followed, if all looked well with his blood work, by his third infusion of Avastin, a chemotherapy drug that aims to slow the growth of the aggressive glioblastoma colonizing his right brain.
After his oncologist beckoned us into her examination room, she asked how he is doing, and then looked at each of us in turn, waiting for our responses.
By Susan Tweit
Summer’s almost here, and our kitchen garden is loving the heat after a truly weird winter and spring, including more wind and less precipitation between October and May than any time in the century-plus that weather records have been kept in this valley.
May brought a detour back to the weather we might have had in March and April, including some precipitation, with a wet snow on May first, an all-day rain ten days later, and then a cold period that had me leaving the row covers on some beds in the kitchen garden all day, not just at night. The warm-weather plants, including the tomatoes, basil, and Japanese eggplants sulked.
By Susan Tweit
Living in the land of brain cancer is like riding a roller-coaster. One moment you’re on top of the world, and then whoosh, the track drops and you are hurtling down, down, down …
One recent week, Richard emerged from his fourth brain surgery seeming like his old self, responsive, engaged, and ready to emerge from the shadow of cancer at last.
The next morning, we met with his oncologist to review his quarterly MRI to check for new tumors. And down went the roller-coaster.
By Susan Tweit
Richard and I are home for a while, no small feat given the way our lives have been recently. We’ve been talking about how long it’s been since we’ve been home for more than a few days, enough time to reestablish any semblance of normal routine. (Whatever normal means when you’re living with brain cancer.)
Mid-December, I decided. Richard agreed.
Before my mom broke her hip at home while in hospice care and we began going to Denver every ten days to help, and then every week, and then every few days.
By Susan Tweit
My Mom, Joan Cannon Tweit, the California girl who grew up hiking and camping with her father, who had such perfect pitch that her high school choir director used her voice instead of a tuning fork to start concerts, who met my Dad in college at Berkeley and was married to him for almost 59 years, who earned a master’s degree in library science and worked as a school librarian despite being legally blind, who fought all forms of injustice, who prized birdsong, wildflowers and mountains almost as much as chocolate, and who passed her passions to my brother and me, died at dawn on a recent Thursday.
By Susan Tweit
One morning, I was sitting with my mom in her bedroom, feeding her a cherry danish broken up in tiny pieces. Her hospital-type bed held her upright; her frail body was propped up with pillows.
After I fed her a bite, her mouth opening obediently like that of a baby bird, she said,
“How do I get out of this hospice stuff?”
I thought for a minute. “You mean why do you need it?” I asked.
“I don’t want to be here,” she said.
By Susan Tweit
Last September, my mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease. Although she was intellectually very much “still here” in her words, her short-term memory became increasingly unreliable and her body began to fail.
Mom was always a cheerful, good-natured sort, but with Alzheimer’s came agitation and apprehension. What seemed to help most was the sound of a familiar and loved voice, and the one she really craved was my voice.
By Susan Tweit
I think of this time of year as the contemplative season: the days are shorter and life slows down in preparation for winter. I haven’t had much reflective time lately, and I feel the lack of quiet, time to just be, to listen to the “small, still voice” of my spirit and to my heart’s connection to the land and to life itself.
I wonder if I’ve been avoiding the stillness. When life is overwhelming and the news is consistently not good, busyness can be a very effective way to stay numb. My intention is to be present though.
So I’ve resolved to refocus my life in a quieter, less frenzied way. As a start to that, I spent some time tidying the informal “altars” (pronounced the Spanish way, with the accent on the second syllable, as in “all-TARZ”) in my office.
By Susan Tweit
It’s fall, and as the days shorten, I miss the sunlight, but I revel in the chance to star-gaze. Long nights combine with our clear, dry high-country air to provide perfect conditions for viewing the night sky.
Just before going to bed this time of year, Richard and I slip outside and turn our heads to the sky, searching for the dazzling river of the Milky Way, picking out the planets and their progression, and identifying the dot-to-dot patterns of the constellations.
Sadly, light pollution has erased the once-ordinary view of the stars in most cities and urban areas; even in uncrowded rural landscapes, badly-placed yard or security lights can blot out neighbors’ view of the night sky.
By Susan Tweit
“You are so lucky,” wrote a reader in response to one of my recent columns. “Most people don’t live life in the full way you do.”
My initial response was cranky.
It’s hard to see the “lucky” in Richard’s brain cancer, and his second brain surgery in the past eleven months. (And in the radiation and intensive chemotherapy he weathered in between the two surgeries.) It’s very hard to see the lucky in the pathology report on the latest tumors: Grade 4, as bad as brain cancer gets, with a prognosis I have no wish to invoke.
by Susan Tweit
Last month, my husband Richard and I drove over the mountains to Denver for what we thought would be a routine brain MRI to monitor his recovery from brain cancer. Only the images showed something distinctly abnormal: several suspicious spots deep in the lower edge of his right temporal lobe.
by Susan Tweit
After a holiday weekend spent cooking for a house full of visitors from age 10 to 81, I have food on my mind, in particular, ways to lighten the carbon footprint of what we eat. According to Stephen Hopp in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, agriculture consumes about 17 percent of the United States total energy use, second only, Hopp notes, to our gas-guzzling vehicles.
Producing our food is energy-intensive for three main reasons: the distance it is transported from farm to table – an astonishing average of 1,500 miles, how much processed food we eat, and our energy-intensive farming methods, especially synthetic fertilizers.
by Susan Tweit
I’m on the living room couch, sitting sideways with my back against one arm and my feet against the other, with my laptop in my lap.
I’m at work. Really.
I didn’t used to admit to working from the couch.
by Susan Tweit
Last week, as Richard and I drove to Denver, I spotted a flock of dark birds with slender necks and skinny, red legs, probing energetically at the soil along a meandering creek.
“White-faced ibises!” I cried, pointing at the birds. Richard spotted them and grinned.
If you’ve never seen a white-faced ibis, imagine a dark, crow-sized shorebird with the iridescent sheen of a starling, standing on long legs and sporting a scimitar-like bill. Look for them in marshes, wet meadows, or flooded hayfields.
by Susan Tweit
In April, Richard and I traveled from a spring blizzard that buried our valley under almost a foot of wet snow to sun-warmed red sandstone cliffs dotted with wildflowers in far western Colorado’s remote canyon country.
In between trips, we were home for just long enough to do the laundry, re-pack the car, and water the kitchen garden. By the time we headed west on Highway 50 for distant Nucla and Naturita, I felt a bit dizzy from the abrupt change in worlds.
by Susan Tweit
Driving across the San Luis Valley recently, Richard and I spotted groups of sandhill cranes probing the stubble of harvested fields for seeds and insects. Standing four feet tall, with wide gray wings, long, skinny legs, and necks outstretched, these birds are unmistakable.
They’re also part of this improbable high-desert-and-marsh landscape. Twice a year, some 20,000 sandhill cranes, essentially the entire population that migrates along the Rocky Mountains, descend on the San Luis Valley on their thousand-or-more-mile long migration between nesting grounds as far north as Alberta and wintering habitat as far south as Mexico.
by Susan Tweit
One of the wonders of nature, as I see it, is all we don’t know about the world around us, the everyday relationships and behaviors of species large and small that fly, swim, run, crawl, slither, and root in earth and sea.
Take, for example, a recently published study that elicited this tongue-twisting headline in Science News, “Sea slug steals genes for greens.”
By Susan Tweit
A little over two weeks ago, I woke in La Paz, Baja California del Sur, Mexico, where clouds of neon-bright bougainvillea blossoms hang over courtyard walls, hooded orioles chatter at Anna’s hummingbirds, and the air smells like the aromatic desert and the salty Sea of Cortez.
It was the last morning in a trip that included a week spent teaching a creative writing workshop on Isla Espiritu Santo, “Island of the Holy Spirit,” a place I’ve longed to visit for more than three decades.
By Susan Tweit
At the Post Office recently, someone asked, “How’s your Great Dane? I haven’t seen her in a long time.”
I had to clear the lump from my throat before answering: “She died more than two years ago.”
Some dogs stick in your heart. Isis, named for the Egyptian goddess of wisdom and beauty, lives on in Richard’s and mine.
These are tough times: the economy tanked last year, the stock market took a corresponding dive, unemployment is up more than in a decade or more, and jobs are not easy to come by. All of which makes it a great time to cultivate generosity and help each other.
Remember the movie “Pay It Forward”? In the screen version of Catherine Ryan Hyde’s novel, the hero, 12-year-old, Trevor, responds to a social studies assignment to think of and implement an idea for changing the world with this suggestion:
“I do something real good for three people. And when they ask how they can pay it back, I say they have to Pay It Forward. To three more people. Each. So nine people get helped. Then those people have to do twenty-seven.”
By Susan Tweit
November 2009
It’s official: my husband, Richard, is missing a marble. Or at least a marble-sized tumor.
A week and a half ago, his neurosurgery team removed a purple tumor the size of a large marble from the right temporal lobe of his brain. They reported that they’d gotten the whole thing, it stayed intact, and that it was small and well-defined.
by Susan Tweit
If you’re looking for a simple way to teach Colorado nature literacy, search no farther than our state’s official list of symbols. It’s longer than you might expect, and affords an easy way to begin exploring Colorado’s incredible natural diversity.
How many official natural symbols – bird, tree, rock, fish, wildflower, and so on – does Colorado boast?
If you guessed an even dozen, you’re correct. Can you name them?
by Susan Bavaria
Ranging in age from 81 on down, several regional women authors have written books as varied as river stones. Tackling subjects ranging from geology to self-publishing, these six writers exemplify the moxie needed to endure the publishing process and a love for language that creates worthy content. Some have taught students. Some have experienced far-flung adventures in the quest to find a good story. Some are members of the Colorado Authors League. All share a passion for good literature and an innate curiosity about the world we share.
by Susan Tweit
The call came on one of those afternoons when life moves so quickly that even though you’re going as fast as you possibly can, you feel like the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass, as if you’re barely keeping up.
“Susan, it’s Jim,” my friend said, and then paused. “I’ve got sad news: Carol Jacobson died yesterday in a rafting accident on the Green River.”
by Susan Tweit
What if you could walk out into your yard and pick a sun-warmed tomato, dripping with juice, for lunch? What if the hardest part of deciding what to cook for dinner was choosing from the box of just-harvested produce delivered to your door?
by Susan Tweit
If you’re a wildflower lover as I am, take a trip to Colorado’s High Plains soon. This year’s unusual dose of early monsoon moisture has painted the shortgrass prairie in a vivid array of scarlet, yellow, purple, and magenta wildflowers.
Chose one of the scenic byways that traverse eastern Colorado’s seemingly endless sea of prairie and you’ll be find both glorious spring color and fascinating stories.
Head to southeastern Colorado, for instance, and follow the Santa Fe Trail, either beginning at Trinidad, or at the Kansas border east of Lamar on U.S. Highway 50.
“This byway traces one of the West’s historic commercial routes… When Mexico gained its independence from Spain in 1821, the United States gained a new trading partner. (Spain had kept its borders firmly closed to U.S. trade.)
By: Susan J. Tweit
Illustrations by: Sherrie York
University of Texas Press, March 2009
ISBN: 978-0-0292-71917-0
Reviewed by Eduardo Rey Brummel
Susan Tweit has been a fixture of Salida for over a decade. Her weekly column in Salida’s Mountain Mail, has been a fixture for nearly as long, and she’s graced the pages of Colorado Central, bunches of times. Now, after writing eleven place-based books, Tweit’s most recent book, Walking Nature Home, is her most intimate, and has the most to say about the place we call “home.”
by Susan Tweit
Anyone who has ever raised kids has had at least one moment of wondering why in the world you wanted to be a parent in the first place and whether it’s possible to survive with your sanity intact, as well as at least one moment when you realize there’s nothing more wonderful than being your kid’s parent.
Susan Tweit
One recent week, my husband, Richard, and I headed to California to celebrate “our” Molly’s 30th birthday (she’s Richard’s daughter and my step-daughter) and cheer her on as she ran her first marathon.
Article by Susan Tweit
Local Botany – April 2007 – Colorado Central Magazine
DRIVE U.S. HIGHWAY 50 west from Salida, or take U.S. 285 the length of the San Luis Valley, and you’ll traverse mile after mile of seemingly mind- numbing high-desert shrubland. Aside from the mountains, the occasional towns, ranches, and farms, and the threads of forest edging streams and rivers, the landscape is a sea of shrubs: sagebrush on deeper, fertile soils, chamisa where sand dominates, and chico and fourwing saltbush where salts whiten the surface.