Today is frankly beautiful.
There’s no other word that fits: Here at Red Willow, we have clear blue skies; still thin, sheer snowcaps on the peaks; an earth already rich and loamy; air bright and warming fast with only the faintest of breezes.
It’s a shift in the weather, in seasons and light, and it feels possible today to identify, to experience every incremental step along the way.
It won’t last, of course; snow is already predicted for Thursday. More to the point, it is today’s weather that is the anomaly; ordinarily, we would have forty-mile-an-hour winds screeching and gibbering outside the door.
The fact that the air is nearly still is, at this moment, the greatest gift of them all.
To be clear, we won’t mind the snow at all; indeed, we welcome it. There is, thankfully, a lot of winter left here, and that itself is a gift, because it is the winter snows that provide the vast majority of our surface water in the warmer months. And after four or five years of virtually no planting, no crops and no harvest, the mere possibility of growing things (and growing things) is yet one more gift, one of hope.
And in this unsettled season in the middle of these days of pure peril, hope is more important than ever.
It’s part of the spirit that infuses today’s tow featured photographs; it and they are of a piece with yesterday’s, as well. Wings captured all three only days apart, if memory serves: all shot in the early morning hours in the space of the same week, somewhere around this very time of year some fifteen years or so ago. It’s the highest roofline, the northernmost section of North House, beneath the rays of the rising sun against the mountain’s slopes — back then, at this time of year, still mostly covered with snow. [This would most likely have been in one of the years that the annual closure did not begin until sometime in March; it varies from year to year, although the Pueblo has been closed entirely sine this time last year because of the dangers of the pandemic.] That particular bit of skyline, or perhaps more accurately, mountain-slope-line, is one of the most beautiful at that season and hour. The glow of the dawn turns the rich earthy adobe, red and gold at any hour, into something almost fragile, manifest in delicate shades of pale coral and pink.
In this instance, it created a tri-color scape: shades of rose-gold and ivory snow and evergreen, all infused with all the spirit and magic, promise and power, inherent in the dawn of a new day at that threshold between winter and spring. It’s one of those images that never fails to make me smile, just from the sheer fine and fragile beauty of it.
And it’s manifest in all the shades of today’s single featured work of wearable art. It’s a work that Wings originally created as part of a two-item collection in miniature, a necklace with coordinating earrings. The earrings sold almost immediately, but the necklace remains. It was also created in a different threshold season: fall, with colors designed to evoke the turning of the leaves and the nascent snows. But looking at the series of three images that make up yesterday’s and today’s posts, I realized that it works just as perfectly for the days that straddle the line between winter and spring — snow now fading, rich red-brown earth emergent, pale branches and rich evergreens adding color to glow in the translucent light. From its description in The Beaded Hoop Collection, found in the Necklaces Gallery here on the site:
Changing Seasons Necklace
Autumn in this place is a whirlwind of color, changing seasons linking green grass and brown earth with the red fire of turning leaves and the icy rime of early snow. Wings gathers them all in a single strand of elemental shapes and shades and spirits. The center of the necklace features graduated wood focal beads of genuine red-brown mahogany from Malawi alternating with rondels of flame-colored carnelian. On either side, the reds flow into browns, earthy orbs of marbled picture jasper alternating with smaller round bloodstone beads in rich reds and deep forest greens. Each end is anchored by a length of tiny round spheres of ocean jasper, translucent and aswirl with bands of green and rust and snowy white. All beads are strung on sterling silver bead chain with sterling silver findings. Necklace hangs 20″ long (dimensions approximate). Designed jointly by Wings and Aji. Part of The Beaded Hoop Collection. Coordinates with Turning Leaves earrings [now sold]. Long view shown below.
Sterling silver; mahogany; carnelian; picture jasper; bloodstone; ocean jasper
$375 + shipping, handling, and insurance
I love tho interplay of shape and texture and color in the strand: ivory and gold and evergreen, blood-red brick and the rich shades of the soil. It’s a combination that appears in a form at once more muted and more intense in the second of today’s two images.
You might think that this is merely a close-up of the image above, caught with a zoom lens and cropping all the snow out of the frame.
It’s not.
Look closely. The upper roofs above still show snow on them. Here? It’s all gone, and it’s not merely a matter of having been swept off; it’s melted off beneath the warming glow of the sun.
Which is how I know he took this shot on a subsequent day. [No, he doesn’t remember them now; he’s taken so many over the intervening years. He only remembered these photos when he saw me setting them up for the posts this week, and he’s always newly taken aback by the beauty of a lot of his old work.]
If you look closely, you’ll notice that he took this photo at exactly the same time of day: The arc of the light, the color of the walls, the angles of the shadows, all are identical. but it was at least a day, probably two or three days, later than the one above, enough time for all the snow to have vanished, not only from the roofs and parapets but also from the lower slopes behind the walls.
If you know the place pictured, you know that that magical glow is lost in a very short while. By midday at this time of year, the duller browns predominate; so, too, does the sight of the bare branches, no longer gilded but merely gray and skeletal.
In this hardest season of the year in a land of hard extremes at the best of times, it’s good to be reminded, even fleetingly, of such beauty. It restores hope, and reassures us of the promise of summer, while reaffirming that winter and spring bestow their own blessings, too — blessings that need to be acknowledged, honored, appreciated.
Now, some fifteen or sixteen years later, this day is one such blessing: a shift in the weather, in seasons and light, and a space that is itself a gift.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2021; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
