Fall is here.
It’s been here for a good while now, sharing space with the downward slope of summer, but on this first day of September, first day of meteorological fall? There’s no question that autumn is settling in for the long haul.
The skies are blue, adrift with puffy white clouds; the earth is mostly green still. But the breeze is more than brisk and carries that sharp autumnal edge. Across the highway, yellow is spreading rapidly through the trees, and we already have the golden petals of the chamisa and the purple ones of the asters flowering everywhere. Their presence may not be an anodyne, but they are at least a bit of a seasonal antidote to the golden ragwort blossoms that have spread everywhere. The ragwort is not invasive in the sense that it’s native to most of this land mass, but in the sense that it seems to have overtaken and supplanted everything else, it most certainly.
Because of course, one of the land’s greatest native allergens is also one of the only things that would manage to survive this twelve-hundred-year drought.
Fall’s arrival is a relief in other ways, too, now. This has been a spectacularly difficult year in virtually every way, and this summer was perhaps hardest of all. It was also one of the hottest summers we’ve had, overall, and the effects of such warming have been too great for even the modest rainy season we were granted to ameliorate. That rainy season is now, I suspect, entirely done, too — and that means that we have autumn’s extreme aridity to look forward to, punctuated, most likely, by more than one period of Indian summer yet to come.
I know that the younger generation hates that expression, and I understand why; its origins, like all else that is part of genocidal colonialism, are rooted in ugly stereotypes about our peoples. But we are of a generation that grew up knowing nothing of that, and to us, it was one of those rarest of things: something that not only acknowledged our existence, it was named explicitly for us — more, it referred to those few golden days when we had unusual warmth that allowed us to play outside longer after school, and so it was associated in our childhood minds with joy and wonder. And so as children, we took the phrase and made it our own, and even now, we use it as one reclaimed, refusing to let the poison of colonial white supremacy pollute its meaning, or our memories.
Because in times such as these, when the days are hard and the seasons harder, when the climate is collapsing around us and the news is always unrelievedly dark in its outlook, our memories become medicine. I don’t mean that merely in a metaphorical sense, either; they are concrete, tangible medicine, because they remind us vividly of what was, and so inform what could be again by inspiring us to keep at the work conditions require of us now.
And while there are those for whom spring and summer serve that purpose, for us, it’s always been fall and winter that call to mind the best of what our world bestows upon us. And fall reminds us, too, that these threshold periods between extremes of weather and climate are what make the latter’s navigation possible, transitional spaces that smooth the way before us. And as of today, that has become the path of an autumnal medicine hoop, one that eases us from the high heat of summer to the snows of winter yet to come.
Today’s featured work, all new and completed only this afternoon, embodies this path and its transitions, as well as the gifts that bless it, and us, along the way. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Medicine Hoop Wristband
Earth and sky embrace us in a medicine hoop, breath and life nurtured by the rain and the light. With this wristband, Wings summons the gifts of the thunderhead sky to frame lush green and blue expanse in air and light. The wristband itself is made of stiff brown-black leather, cut and beveled by hand, end tapered and held by a ridged and radiant buckle, tab, and keeper. It’s threaded through a line of five separate conchas, each a throwback to Wings’s singular rectangular style that evokes the Art Deco geometry of a century past. Each is saw-cut freehand, rounded on the corners and filed smooth, and stamped at either end with old-style thunderhead motifs paired at their narrow ends. The stampwork frames a single square stone set into a plain, low-profile bezel: three brilliant sky-blue turquoise cabochons alternating with two of vertically banded malachite in soft, lush greens. The stones have been in Wings’s inventory for what is likely decades, uncalibrated, cut and filed with coarse vintage-style edges so that all match. The entire wristband is 13-1/4″ long from tip to tip; the band is roughly 3/8″ wide; the conchas are each 1-3/8″ long by 1/2″ wide; and the cabochons are just over 3/8″ square [all dimensions approximate]. Other views shown below.
Sterling silver; old turquoise; malachite
$1,075 + shipping, handling, and insurance
I love the stones in this one, and the simplicity of the vintage-style stampwork pattern. The malachite here is a soft and gentle green, but no less rich for that, placed with the banding on the vertical instead of the more customary horizontal. The placement here calls to mind trees, forests, the richness of alpine waterfalls deep in the mountains.
The turquoise is another matter entirely. Its provenance is unknown; these, like the malachite, had been sitting in one of Wings’s cases for decades, if memory serves. They’re a deep, rich blue with an underlying hint of green, a mix of teal and sky with tiny traces of inky matrix scattered here and there. They were not calibrated, meaning they were not cut to commercial mass shape and sizing; they were always slightly smaller or larger than calibrated cabochons, and different in color, too. Wings filed all five stones to even sizes, leaving the edges textured in appropriately vintage style.
And alternating as they are here, as though sky dances with green earth? They are incredibly rich in color, and in animating spirit.
The brightness of the cabochons is also a perfect contrast to the wristband itself: hardened brown-black leather, not particularly thick but very solid and sturdy all the same. Strung as it is here with the brilliant polish of the rectangular conchas, each saw-cut, filed, stamped, and lightly domed freehand, the whole hoop seems at once earthy and bright.
The loops are all hand-made, too, the leather strung through them and the centers compressed to hold the band securely. The ranger set that comprises buckle, tab, and keeper are nickel silver, sturdier for their purpose than sterling would be, adorned with radiant motifs that suit the paired thunderheads around the stones beautifully.
It’s a perfect work for summer . . . and for those early bright days of fall, when the air still warm, the sky still bright, the grass still more green than not. And it reminds us to be grateful for this transitional period that makes the path before us easier: an autumnal medicine hoop, with a little extra healing for us before the winter snow flies.
~. Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2024; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
