They are spirits from an old song of the season, written eighty-two years ago and launched into popular music’s top ten recordings (twice) seven decades ago this very year, first by Johnny Mercer, then by the crooner who would be forever associated with it, Perry Como.
As a child, it was one of my favorite “Christmas songs,” despite the fact that it speaks only of winter, not of any particular holiday. I listened to it over and over, trying to tease out the point of the reference to “Parson Brown” (and, indeed, it was how I learned what a “parson” was). The reference to the bluebird, “gone away,” was obvious; in my own language, their name is rooted in the same word as the name of the direction the English-speaking world calls “South.” I didn’t fully grasp the import of the “new bird,” however, until well into adulthood, unaware as a child of the layers upon layers that buttress, inform, and mold any statement, cultural or otherwise.
it also wasn’t until very recently that I learned how the song came to be, and the melancholy pangs of recognition run deep. On the surface, it’s a song about two young lovers (perhaps out with friends) walking, and playing, in the snow. For a lonely child, one who lived mostly in enforced solitude, far from other children of her own age and often housebound by illness, it was an inviting idea: to have friends, much-loved peers, with whom to play, unencumbered, in the snow. As I grew older, i always assumed that it was just a silly lightweight pop standard, a throwaway song written and recorded for mostly commercial purposes in the Forties.
In reality, it was penned a dozen years prior, by a man named Richard B. Smith — a sketch of a winter’s day at Honesdale Central Park in Honesdale, Pennsylvania. Mr. Smith was then a resident in Scranton’s West Mountain Sanitarium, battling tuberculosis, and a walk in the park’s icy wonderland was possible only in memory. Knowing the backstory tinges the song with a deep sadness belied by its treacly pop tune and seeming carefree spirit.
It makes me think that the “new bird” of the song was not merely a chickadee or some other bird typically associated with the winter months of the Northeast and Upper Midwest. I now wonder whether the new bird was also a reference to something less easily defined, if no less tangible: In Mr. Smith’s case, the freedom, the sensation perhaps almost of flight, that would come with the ability to walk again, not merely down a sanitarium corridor, but outside in the cold bracing air and shimmering snow.
The child who lives on in my own memory, the one confined for weeks at a time, breathing hindered by flu and croup and strep and bronchitis and all manner of other childhood diseases for days, weeks, months seemingly without end, . . . that child understands that same yearning to walk, to fly, to be free.
Perhaps it’s one of the reasons why, as an adult, I feel such an affinity for the wingéd ones, the birds and the butterflies and the dragonflies. I know that when I first saw today’s featured work, what I saw were two pairs of wings, shining silver in the sun, dancing in the light. From their description in the Earrings Gallery:
In Flight Earrings
Bold wings of sterling silver unite in the center, then gather and stretch to their full length in flight. Each triangle, hand-cut of exceptionally fine-gauge sterling silver, is smoothly shaped to create elegant rounded edges and buffed to a mirror finish. The gentle flanges are conjoined by means of a sterling silver hinge at the center, allowing the wings to dance in unison as they dangle softly from the ear. Each simple spirit, whose shape evokes the stylized outline of a dancer in flight, is held fast to wires by means of slender silver jump rings. Each earring hangs 2.25 inches long (excluding wires) by .75 inch across at the widest point (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver
$250 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Today is the first day of the new year to dawn wholly clear, no trace of cloud to shade the sunrise. It’s not expected to last; early reports forecast a series of four small storms, to begin perhaps as early as tomorrow evening and extend throughout the week. But for this day, the sun is already washing the world with silvery light, turning the surface of the snow and the feathers of the tiny winter birds the same glimmering gold.
In this time of resolution and rebirth, it’s perhaps also time to watch for the arrival of the new birds . . . and for the opportunity to fly with them, free.
~ Aji
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