Dawn this day was more October than August, a few shirred clouds breaking apart behind the peaks in shades of amber and peach and coral and copper. Our best sunrises come in the autumn months, but October is when they are most glorious, and it would seem that the skies, along wiht the sharpened air and turning leaves, have already welcomed such displays two months early,
Of cousre, the clouds moved in soon enough, thin but low and gray. Overhead, blue skies have managed to break through, but on all sides, the thunderheads have already built themselves into high heavy walls, and the tops of the eastern peaks are already enshawled in white.
We were granted a little rain yesterday, albeit only a smattering of it. Just west of us, though, the deluge descended: reportedly nearly four inches in the space of an hour, and as of yesterday evening, washed out roads with flooding to a depth of four feet.
We have indeed been fortunate here.
The worst effects here have been mostly inconveniences, and those mostly modern ones: power outages, mostly. The rains, even the heaviest ones, have still managed to find a place in the thirsty earth, and while the pond remains empty, none of the water has been lost to runoff, nor even to evaporation. These are new patterns for us, these nighttime storms, but they are perhaps the best medicine the land could have now. Heading into an autumn that seems determined to dance with summer, we are now reaping the benefits of the late-season rains in the form of a radiant floral medicine, daisies and asters and a few wild sunflowers, wild thistle and chamisa and late Indian paintbrush, even a few stray late alpine dandelions to follow the sun.
The other part of an early fall is the sneezing.
It happens every year: cowpen daisies and chamisa in full riotous flower, and a constant sniffle-sneeze-cough combination that won’t go away. Now, though, such circumstances ignite suspicion; after all, when no one in the colonial world can be bothered to mitigate the effects of a deadly pandemic in even the smallest of ways, its population naturally assumes that the rest of us are behaving likewise.
Nothing could be further from the truth. I will never be free of my allergies (nor of my complex of autoimmune diseases), but I have not had so much as a cold in two and a half years now, never mind any variant of the coronavirus. Such are the benefits of constant public masking and distancing, and of being out in that public as rarely as humanly possible. It’s also a gift to be able, still, to smell the summery mix of ozone and wet desert sage, to catch the scent of gentler blossoms on the breeze.
We have not had many of those blossoms this year; the worst of the drought persisted too late into the season for that. [And no one should make the mistake of thinking that the recent rains mean this twelve-hundred-year drought is done, or even ameliorated, really; it will take much more than a couple of months of short but regular storms even to put a dent in the damage.] The aformentioned dandelions, a few columbine, some catmint and blue flax, two or three shades of Mexican hat (otherwise known as tall prairie coneflowers), a couple of pink cosmos to supplement the pinks and purples of the thistle and clover, plus the invasive chickory and teazel — that is this year’s sum total of first-half-of-summer blooms.
One of the early blossoms that I have missed this year is the Rudbeckia, like those shown in the image above. It’s a shot Wings captured probably six or seven years ago, when we could still beguile ourselves into believing that our weather patterns remained ordinary, and when summer wildflowers were early and abundant. Those bloomed annually in a patch long devoted to flowers and shrubs, one now on the northwest side of the house. Back then, the lavender was lush and brilliantly purple, and the yellow coneflowers that emerged in the spaces between held centers that were less brown than a shimmering shade of mulberry, part red, part purple, all glowing and radiant.
We have not had a single one of their blossoms this year.
They are far from the only local flora missing, of course. Our fields were so stripped bare, the soil so burned by hat an drought, that I could not find a single cactus blossom, either. There were plenty of old prickly-pear spikes in evidence, but no brilliantly-colored petals rising from between the pads. There was no Idian paintbrush here, either, although I have no doubt that there was, and remains, plenty of it in the backcountry away from highway exposure. In years past, we used to be able to find a few stands growing alongside the road outside our fence, but those are long gone now, a casualty of increased traffic and the toxins it brings to the land at least as much as of the drought.
Still, it’s one of my favorite summer medicines — and it is medicine, no question. My own people have a culturally significant name for it that need not be repeated here, but it’s a plant that is indigenous to near the whole of the continent, and it’s been used as adornment, as pigment and paint, as a tool, and as medicine by Indigenous peoples all across this land. Here, the most common colors are the corals and reds, but it comes in shades of pink, yellow, white, even purple, too, depending on region.
These precious red petals of the local version share a spirit in common with both of today’s featured works of wearable art and with the image that links the two, below. We begin with the first of the silverwork pieces, an old-style cuff that is slender and simple but powerful, too. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Indian Paintbrush Cuff Bracelet
The first soft weeks of summer are when the red medicine flowers: Indian paintbrush, the crimson petals of desert and prairie. In a week when they are in full flower, Wings honors their color and medicine, the water and light that calls them from the earth, with this heavy silver cuff set with fiery coral. The band is nine-gauge sterling silver, slender yet solid and substantial, its entire surface chased with deep, heavy, graceful freehand stampwork. Down the center, two rows of curving lines arc in and out like the path of the Great River, the silver between as clear and luminous as the Río’s surface. From either edge up to each flowing line, the band is texturized with deep single stamps, scores of strikes of the jeweler’s hammer rippling its surface. Between each break in the water’s path, paired flowers rise from either edge, stems curving and petals dancing in the light. Across the top three round, highly-domed, bezel-set, richly textured cabochons of natural sponge coral evoke all the shades of the flowers that serve as one of our most ancient Indigenous medicines. At either end of the band, paired wildflowers dance in the embrace of deeply textured earth. The band is 6″ long by 3/8″ across; the coral cabochons are each 1/4″ across (dimensions approximate). Other views shown below.
Sterling silver; sponge coral
$1,500 + shipping, handing, and insurance
Click on the gallery-entry link above, and scroll through the images of the cuff from other angles. Then take a look at the image immediatey below, here:
This is an image Wings captured as part of a small series of shots, taken digitally probably thirteen, fourteen years ago. It’s of the fields at the base of the mountains on the main road into the village, which in summer are usually alive with both wildflowers and horses grazing beneath a stormy afternoon sky. This day was no exception; the late-summer clouds had already rolled in, one or more small storms already having passed through with more on the way, and the other shots show a brown Appaloosa and the other members of its herd making their way through the tall, abundants stands of Indian paintbrush.
Typically, these bright coral-colored petals first open on rising stalks in the middle of June, then continue to grow. These are not, of course, typical times in any shape or fashion, but I suspect that were we to drive past these fields now, there would be at least some of these fiery blooms in evidence.
At least a few horses, too, no doubt.
But this has always been one of my favorite images: medicine growing wild and abundant among the lush greens of summer sage. It’s one of the great blessings of this place known as Red Willow, the growth of such natural gifts in such extreme conditions, testament to the hardiness of the which Spirit chooses to place here.
It’s a spirit, small-s, found in the second of today’s featured works of wearable art. It’s a pair of earrings, one of Wings’s more recent works, milled and cut freehand and set with more of that beautifully textured sponge coral in the exact shade of the Indian paintbrush petals. From their description in the Earrings Gallery:
The First Wild Petals Earrings
In a volcanic land of lakes and rivers carved through mountains emerged from timeless seas, of formations built atop ancient shell mounds, the alpine prairie flowers bloom with the first wild petals of summer. With these earrings, Wings summons spirits older than time to dance with newborn blossoms in the fiery shades of genuine sponge coral and the silver of the light. Each geometric sterling silver drop is hand-rolled in a brash, looping floral pattern, equal parts Art Deco and Flower Power and all summer medicine, then saw-cut freehand into a spoked pattern that honors the four winds and the sacred directions. At the center of each, bezel-set and edged with twisted silver, sits a bold round cabochon of sponge coral in soft rich shades of flame-red stippled with hi ts of orange and bronze and plenty of natural texture across the surface. Sterling silver jump rings link them to sterling silver earring wires. Earrings hang 2-3/8″ long, excluding wires, by 1-3/4″ across at the widest point; cabochons are 9/16″ across (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; sponge coral
$625 + shipping, handling, and insurance
The color of the cabochons in this pair of course evokes the local paintbrush petals, but the shape of the milled flowers behind them seem all part of the clan the colonial world knows as Asteracae: daisies and asters, sunflowers and firewheels.
Like these, once so ubiquitous a part of our summers, now absent entirely:
These are Indian blanketflowers, also known simply as blanketflowers, or as firewheels, or by any of a number of other names. They are very obviously siblings to the Rudbeckia, above: the cone centers and petal shape are testament to that. But these are manifest in shades of yellow and gold, orange and red, with brilliantly painted patches and stripes on each petal that collective form the “wheels” of the third name.
These, too, have the rounded cones for centers, mostly brown but also shimmery, and in certain lights seeming to pick up their wine-colored hues of their relative above. These cones, though, are often edged in brilliant yellow pollen, making their centers just a little more radiant than their brown-eyed Susan and sunflower relations. They add a beautiful bit of fire to the gardens and wild stands of summer flowers here.
But perhaps our small world has seen enough of fire this year.
We have an overabundance of the yellow daisies (called “cowpen”mostly for their smell), perhaps a little compensation for the lack of wild sunflowers and others this season. The chamisa, too, is already blooming — early, and allergenically, too. But their blossoming means that the hummingbird moths cannot be far behind, and they are always a joy to watch. The purple asters, too, attract the late-season indigenous bees, and we need to encourage their presence as much as possible.
Outside, the skies are mostly gray, the land beneath mostly green. And despite the limitations imposed by drought, a radiant floral medicine still ripples and dances across the fields now.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2022; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
