We have soft gray cloud cover again today. It’s not comprehensive; there are patches of blue showing through clearly here and there. But it’s a much softer sky than spring usually delivers here.

For much of this land mass, this probably seems unremarkable; certainly, in my own homelands, soft dove gray skies backlit by a wan and pale sun are the norm at this season, or at least they used to be. I have not been back in decades, but news reports of the effects of climate collapse have called even that regions customary patterns thoroughly into question now.

Here at Red Willow, April traditionally is nearly as much remnant winter as it is newborn spring. None of that holds any longer, of course — a twelve-hundred-year drought amid real-time climate collapse has seen to that — but less than a decade ago, snow would have been as likely today as sun, and we would have at least one more good blizzard, albeit so short-lived as to be gone in hours, in the days ahead of us.

In this place, snow is not at all inconsistent with spring.

Of course, it means that our migratory residents may sometimes find themselves discomfited by conditions, especially in the season’s early weeks. Of course, spring has been in residence most of this calendar year, arriving initially in January and with only a few temporary periods of cold and snow to interrupt its progress toward summer. The past two weeks saw highs thirty to forty degrees to warm for this time of year here, and the chance that these soft gray clouds hold any form of precipitation for us, frozen or otherwise, is slim to none.

Even as I write, those same clouds are beginning to break apart, scattering around the horizon in fragmented form, while the blue behind them shows itself ascendant. The forecast is for high winds beginning tomorrow and accelerating on Thursday. But there is, at the moment, a decent of chance of not only rain but snow showers for Saturday, and for the moment, we hang on hopes on that.

As I said yesterday, hope is a stubborn thing.

I was speaking then of the annual return of the meadowlarks, a phenomenon not seen here for three years. I noted that locally, it’s not really spring until the first meadowlark sings, and their apparently complete absence in 2023 and 2024 means, in a way, that we have not had real spring since 2022.

It’s a sobering thought.

And so when planning this week’s posts and themes, these brilliantly gilded indigenous birds seemed a perfect illustration of this threshold period  when winter and spring begin the process of disentangling themselves, one moving on and the other moving in, readying our small world here for summer. Yesterday’s post featured that year’s pair in residence, presumably surprised a bit by the late snow, but not remotely defeated by it. This week’s edition of Red Willow Spirit features three separate images of this beautiful local spirit: perhaps all the same bird, perhaps not, the photos all shot by Wings in digital format over what was likely a period of five years or so.

The one above is the earliest, and in truth, I believe it predates yesterday’s by a few years. As a digital shot, it necessarily occurred after the latter part of the summer of 2006, when Wings acquired his first digital camera. The bird’s small stature and the presence of the snow together tell me this was shot in spring, likely April, which means that it could have been no sooner than 2007; if memory serves, I believe it might have been 2008, actually, or possibly 2009.

What I do know is that it was shot prior to 2011, when we no longer had our old manufactured home, because he shot this on the feeder that stood outside the kitchen window. It may not be compositionally perfect, but it captures the snowfall with decent precision. It also captures the little bird’s expression beautifully, seeming at once nonplussed and also slightly annoyed, as though wondering why he should have to navigate snow just to obtain a little sustenance.

His image is linked to the next by one of today’s two featured works of wearable art. Both are pairs of earrings from Wings’s signature series. Both are found in The Standing Stones Collection in the Earrings Gallery here on the site. We begin with the pair that best suits the image above, the one that still channels winter’s conditions, a cold crackling light reflected off the surface of whatever snow and ice remain. From its description:

A Cold Crackling Light Earrings

In the depths of winter, the flames of morning sun and the hard-frozen ice together create a cold crackling light. With these earrings, Wings calls the golden glow of the sun down to dance with the cold fire of the snow. At the top, deep golden orbs of faceted citrine embrace tiny diamond-cut sterling silver miniatures before flowing into focal segments formed of single giant yellow quartz barrels flanked by faceted rondels of rainbow moonstone. Beneath the focal segment, more faceted citrine alternates with single spheres of chatoyant gray moonstone and ethereally translucent selenite. Beads are strung on sterling silver round wire. Earrings hang 2-1/2″ long, excluding wires (dimensions approximate). Designed jointly by Wings and Aji. Earrings coordinate with Snowfire necklace [sold] and Sun Dog Sky coil bracelet [sold]. From the Fire series in Wings’s new collection, The Winter Elementals (all pieces shown below).

Sterling silver; faceted citrine; diamond-cut sterling silver; rainbow moonstone;
yellow quartz; gray moonstone; selenite
$175 + shipping, handling, and insurance

As the description notes, this pair was part of a collection within the larger collection, this particular signature series called The Winter Elementals. He created one for each season, and within each season, one for each of the four primary elements, earth, air, fire, and water; each grouping consisted of its own coordinating trio of necklace, pair of earrings, and coil bracelet, all clearly designed to go together, but each work equally capable of standing entirely on its own. This pair was part of The Winter Elementals:  Fire, and the other two works in the trio have sold, but the earring pair remains. I admit to being surprised by that; I had expected the luminous mix of shades of sunlight and snow to be snapped up immediately, irrespective of the other pieces.

Instead, the opposite proved true. But part of me suspects that it’s because I haven’t given this pair the attention it deserved. It also strikes me that its colors and materials suit this unsettled threshold period at least as much as they do full winter. After all, spring is marked by the return of the light, and these certainly catch and refract it in beautiful form.

Speaking of the light, the second of today’s photos is one that Wings shot on a spring morning, if memory serves. And, if I recall correctly, he shot this one a few years after the first, somewhere between 2009 and 2013; at a push, my best guess is perhaps 2012.

I believe Wings captured this one atop the aspens closest to the arbor, perhaps near the very beginning of April, back when our trees’ normal budding cycles still held. These days, we often have buds emerging as early as December, sometimes even November, but when our more usual patterns remained firmly in place, it was not uncommon to see the first small buds only appear in mid-April, no leaves in evidence before month’s end, or even May.

But what I love about this one is the subtle detail the lens captures where the meadowlark itself is concerned: the rich marbling of wing and back feathers, the brilliant white band around the eyes, the dagger-like beak and clenched talons . . . and, of course, that extraordinary golden bib the makes it seem as though they have been chosen to wear the sun itself.

This was, in truth, a rare shot; the meadowlarks generally prefer more distance between themselves and us. They love the fenceposts on our east and west boundaries; before the winds uprooted it a couple of years ago, they spent a great deal of time singing from a perch in the gnarled old cedar at our south boundary. In the evenings, particularly, we might find that one of the pair had moved to the tops of the weeping willows to the north or the west, or, more rarely and usually momentarily, the tops of the aspens on the north side of the house.

Coming this close was unusual, and therefore a gift.

Compositionally, of course, it’s more than just the meadowlark. There’s a distinct feel of early spring about it: sky blue with a hint of gray, common just after dawn; the earthy branches tipped with new buds still closed, dagger-like, and yet the hint of green even in the limbs is unmistakable. It’s a reminder that, while winter may not yet be fully departed, summer is not that far off now.

The second of today’s featured works captures this faint greening of neutral tones in a warming world, its materials manifest in the coral and moss of the old shell mounds beneath the surface here and the soft green newly emerging at the base of the trees in our alpine forests now. From its description:

Coral and Moss Earrings

This is an ancient land spangled with coral and moss, built upon rivers and reefs and alive with green even in the face of the deadliest droughts. With these earrings, Wings honors the ancient foundations upon which this land mass formed, and the beauty and medicine it offers us now. Each strand of hand-selected beads is strung on filament-thin sterling silver wire: The center focals are formed of faceted cubes of smoky brown Java glass, a form of recycled glass designed to mimic beach glass, but with a less polished surface texture. Above sit giant orbs of perfect white fossilized coral; below, very slightly smaller spheres of beautifully brown-webbed howlite. The bottom anchors are small rounds of Chinese writing stone, golden brown with rich sepia matrix; at top, olive green South Sea shell pearls, human created from the shells of oysters, add shimmer and depth of color. Between each such pairing of beads sit accent rondels of Petoskey stone, the famous fossilized brown coral found in and around Michigan’s Great Lakes. Earrings hang roughly 3″ long, excluding wires (dimensions approximate); sterling silver coil-and-ball-bead French wires hold them securely. Designed jointly by Wings and Aji.

Sterling silver; South Sea shell olive pearls; Petoskey stone; fossilized coral; Java glass; howlite; Chinese writing stone
$175 + shipping, handling, and insurance

This is the newer of the two pairs shown here today — not part of a series within a series, but a standalone pair in a mix of shades and textures that seem to suit this spring threshold season perfectly. Most people don’t realize that coral was not merely acquired through trade here. Indeed, these lands, emergent eons ago from receding oceans whose waters carved these great mountains and canyons that we so take for granted as a part of this place, it atop ancient river rock and shell mounds, the latter once thriving beneath those prehistoric seas, now fossilized and forming part of the very earth beneath our feet. Coral is among them; there are ancient reefs buried deep within the ground, not by any human hand but by the drastic changes inscribed upon this earth by time and tide and change on an epochal scale.

As for moss, it’s another one of those features of this place that makes it so very different from what most people envision when they think of the word “desert.” Alpine deserts are a very different thing, this one at once arid and lush, too, with four discrete seasons and plenty of green. That green includes moss, which materializes occasionally here at lower elevations, and on the lower trunks and at the bases of the trees in the mountain forests.

Or so it used to be.

Then again, the meadowlark’s song used to be our guarantor of spring’s arrival.

Which brings us to the third of today’s featured images, one that Wings captured, if I am not very much mistaken, during the same spring as the second, which would be around 2011 or 2012, in all likelihood..

This, too, was unusual, in that the meadowlarks rarely come close enough to sit atop either giant blue spruce. One of those two great warriors did not survive these recent years of record drought, although it still sustains life for birds and insects alike. This is the surviving spruce, one on the northwest side of the house at a small remove, next to some fencing panels and above the wild raspberry patch.

At the time that Wings captured this photo, it had one section of trunk emergent at the top — slightly bent, but still seemingly perfect for a star at Christmas. it’s never had such a think on, but it does have strands of green and white lights still wrapped around its body, something Wings did ten or eleven years ago to create a little winter holiday spirit. Now, there are a couple of additional branches rising straight up alongside the original, a little odd-looking by comparison, perhaps, but now able to support several birds at once.

At the time this meadowlark alighted on it, of course, there was no such idea of lights, and it was entirely the wrong season, anyway. We did, however, have caroling of a sort on that day: You can see that Wings captured this image just at the moment when the bird’s voice was mid-song, its melodic, rippling notes the defining aspect of spring here.

Or so, as I have found myself saying so many times in this space, it used to be.

I’ll repeat my own earlier repetition: Hope is a stubborn thing. And sometimes, it’s rewarded unexpectedly.

Last night at seven-thirty, I went out onto the upstairs deck one last time. I wanted to watch the light, to see the interplay of the sunset with the clouds then drifting apart, to spend a few moments at day’s end wrapped in the softness of twilight. I walked toward the east and stood for a few moments, then turned to head westward . . . .

. . . and I heard a sound. Not just any sound; a very distinctive one. A song.

From my left, in the distance, came the meadowlark’s song, those fluttering, cascading notes that invite a response to their call. And sure enough, a moment later, another one answered from the distance to my right.

Our pair [a pair, and since they are here, we claim them as relatives] have returned form a three-year absence.

I looked everywhere, in all of the likely spots; I grabbed my camera and used the zoom lens to try to find them. It was all to no avail, and I imagined them laughing gently as they continued to call to each other while I searched in vain or a sighting of either one. The shadows were already to long, the light too weakened, dusk too ready to turn into night.

But they are are here, our meadowlark pair, and so after three long springless years, yesterday became the season’s first official day. Their song carries us over the threshold from winter, notes that call the warmth and light back home again.

And yes, I’ll be back outside this evening, hoping to catch a glimpse of our relatives, returned to us with the medicine of their song.

~ Aji

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2025; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.