We awakened this morning to cloudy skies, a harbinger, perhaps, of tomorrow’s forecast weather. It didn’t take long, though, for the rising sun to send the gray fleeing eastward past the peaks, leaving a sky basking in the blue of a turquoise dawn.
The hints of a change in the weather persist: Bands of gray-white clouds linger behind the peaks, as though hoping for a change in wind direction to send them back to the valley; the same bands to south and west, their size magnified by the smoke plume of two wildfires not all the distant, are fast coalescing into small thunderheads now. And while today’s forecast stubbornly insist that the chance of rain is zero, the radar map shows storms just north of here, not very far at all.
Still, the vault overhead remains cloudless for the moment, its blues intensifying with the day. Turquoise, cornflower, indigo, all are present now, depending on where one looks in relation to the light. The sun is bright, the earth green, the wind steady . . . and the land is increasingly thirsty for rain. Perhaps we shall see these turquoise skies send their namesake jewels our way yet.
Today’s featured work, one of my personal favorites in its category, embodies the brilliant shades of this day’s birth. From its description in the Earrings Gallery here on the site:
Turquoise Dawn Earrings
One of the jewels of the desert is the turquoise dawn. Wings invokes its beauty and power with these classic earrings, wrought in traditional fashion of silver and stone. The sterling silver settings are formed of bright oval medallions, polished to a mirror sheen and edged all the way around in hand-stamped sunrise symbols to catch and refract the light. At their centers, in spare, low-profile bezels, rest a pair of stunning free-form Turquoise Mountain cabochons, brilliant sky blue and dusted with bits of earthy red-gold matrix. Each earrings hangs 1-5/8″ long by 1-3/16″ across at the widest point; each cabochon is roughly 7/8″ long by 1/4″ across at the widest point.
Sterling silver; Turquoise Mountain turquoise
$775 + shipping, handling, and insurance
These earrings are wrought in a classic traditional style, simple silver medallions set with turquoise focal cabochons. Their apparent simplicity is deceptive, however; it makes them seem relatively modest, when in fact they are big and bold. They are not at all heavy, yet they hang dancing from the ear, the spare stampwork that encircles the stones in a radiant sunrise motif catching, holding, then refracting the light brilliantly.
The cabochons, too, are brilliant, an intense and perfect sky blue that approaches indigo, left freeform with a rolling natural surface texture that brings out the beauty of the gold- and copper-colored matrices into sharp relief. Had these stones not been identified by their source when Wings acquired them, I would have assumed they were Bisbee, so deep and arresting are the shades of both stone and matrix, but in fact they come from Arizona’s Turquoise Mountain mine, perfect specimens of the stunning new material being found there in recent years.
They are also perfect earrings for this very day here. We shall have more turquoise overhead before the day is done, particularly in the west at dusk, when the gold of a sun descendant blends in a flawless gradient with the darkening blues above. Still, they are most aptly seen as the jeweled embodiment of the birth of the day.
The rain we need so badly is slated to arrive for most of the week to come and well into the next. But I suspect that on most of the days, the sunrise will more closely resemble today’s, a bright gift before the storm: a sky basking in the blue of a turquoise dawn, coppery clouds parting momentarily in a shimmer of radiant silver light.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2020; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
