Teaser Tuesday Two-fer: To the Woods and Thunder Tree

Two teasers this week from what I lovingly refer to as "random memoirs" -- interesting books about real people living unusual lives. Both are published by OSU Press.

My father squats across the fire from me, stripping willow switches for weenie sticks with his fishing knife.  His closed lips are drawn bowlike into a broad smile; he hasn't shaved.

-- The Thunder Tree: Lessons From an Urban Wildland by Robert Michael Pyle. This is a collection of essays about growing up in Colorado, along the unfinished High Line Canal.  It is described as "an environmental coming-of-age story."

I remember a year freezing rain followed a heavy snow, encasing yellow, red, brown, and green stems in ice.  Shrubs were weighted down and bent over, like old women with crumbling bones, their long hair trapped under a layer of snow.

-- To the Woods: Sinking Roots, Living Lightly, and Finding True Home by Evelyn Searle Hess. This is the story of Hess and her husband, who moved to twenty acres of wild land in the foothills of Oregon’s coast range mountains when they were in the mid-fifties.


Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by Should Be Reading, where you can find the official rules for this weekly event.