Bright silver sun, a few wispy clouds slowly amassing into something more substantial, an earth now more golden-bronze than green: As October wends its way faster now toward November, the seasonal changes are accelerating too.
Today’s forecast, like tomorrow’s, calls for clear skies and warm winds. If the projections are accurate, that all changes on Tuesday.
Tuesday, the experts say, will be rain and snow and increasing cold.
We will welcome it, if it comes. Our world here needs the moisture too badly to reject it, in whatever form it chooses to appear. But more than that, this is properly the season of early snow, heading into the weeks that my own people call the “Little Winter,” the softer snowfalls that help to ready the land for the larger storms and deeper cold of the full season.
Here, of course, rain or snow, the weather won’t last; that is the nature of this place. But this weekend, coupled with tomorrow, will likely prove to be the last visitation of Indian summer, yesterday’s high having neared seventy. After the rain on Tuesday and Wednesday, temperatures are expected to plunge by a good twenty degrees.
If we are lucky, that is. We need the cold, and the accompanying snows, if the land is to come through the winter intact. Here, and especially now, rain and snow are medicine for the earth.
This week, then, is a fitting time for today’s featured work, one that Wings created in a season of extreme weather of a different sort: the summer monsoons that showed themselves so rarely this year. From its description in the Earrings Gallery here on the site:
After the Rain Earrings
The high desert’s monsoon season is one of starkly beautiful landscapes, and after the rain, the sunset sets the sky aflame against a still-gray earth. Wings summons the spirits of storm and sunset simultaneously in these dangling drop earrings, each a long, elegant cascade of landscape jasper set into bezels backed with a feathery pattern as ethereal as the post-storm light. The cabochons are a matched pair, domed at the top and beveled at the corners, warm earthy bands of sand and burgundy and ivory at the top above a land still gray with storm and wind below. Each is set into a hand-filed, low-profile bezel trimmed with twisted silver and hung from sterling silver wires via hand-made jump rings; the back of each setting is hand-milled in a graceful feathered pattern, raised in a silky textured relief. Earrings hang 2.25″ in total length (excluding wires) by 5/8″ across; cabochons are 2″ long by .5″ across (dimensions approximate). [Note: These are large stones, requiring a significant amount of silver; the earrings are substantial, and should be worn by someone accustomed to wearing earrings with a bit of weight.] Reverse shown at the link.
Sterling silver; landscape jasper
$725 + shipping, handling, and insurance
For the moment, we will enjoy this perhaps-last glorious weekend, one of sunny skies and warm winds, of an earth as gold as the light. But the storm is coming, and this is a good thing.
After the rain, a healing earth can make ready for winter.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2018; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
