It’s cloudy today: a thin white veil over the eastern sky; darker blues to south and west. The latter are the kind of clouds that hold rain, but today’s forecast has reversed its numbers from yesterday’s predictions, from a 51% chance projected then to a scant 15% now.
Still, I wouldn’t bet against it, not entirely. What we have here at Red Willow now are a mix of our new altered patterns of high thin spring clouds that remind me of the lake-born cloud cover of my own homelands and this place’s traditional monsoonal patterns that normally don’t arrive before June. Even now, a wide, heavy mass the shade of blue slate has spread from west of the weeping willows to the southeast reaches of sky beyond the largest pear tree, lowering itself to earth and masking the distant horizon behind a haze of what looks from here like rain.
That pear tree, incidentally (or perhaps not), has budded from center to tip on every branch; it’s one of the few trees here that is seemingly unaffected by this drought’s iron death grip. While the weeping willows hang on for dear life and even the globe willow on its other side shows too many dead branches between the nascent green, while the stand of native red willows southwest of it seem no longer mostly dead but wholly so, the pear tree thrives. And the wind that has risen over the last five minutes now makes clear what the prior stillness failed to show: On this day, those buds have begun to open — no kind of full flower yet, but clearly open at their tops, the white petals just beginning to show through now.
Perhaps our small world will adhere to last year’s timetable, after all.
This week’s edition of Red Willow Spirit features two images from this time last year — the pear tree in its first day of full flower, which happened to be May third, now only one day hence. Wings shot both photos in digital format, both of them intended only as casual snaps to memorialize the occasion for us, but they are such beautiful illustrations of the best this time of year has to offer, and such perfect bookends for today’s one featured work of wearable art, that I couldn’t resist including them here today.
The image above, in close-up, shows what was a day of clear blue skies — nothing like what we have this day, but frankly a better exemplar of what May typically looks like here. Of course, that’s now, at midday; at dawn, the skies were clear, or mostly so. I awakened at six o’clock (five o’clock, of course, by ordinary time) to find the first rays of light climbing high behind the peaks, rendering the receding night shades of darkened cornflower, fading eastward into a gradient of turquoise and palest icy aquamarine. A few wisps of cloud floated gently above the eastern peaks, the ray’s of sun tinting them, just for a moment or two, with the shimmer of pink mussel shell — not coral, not peach, but decidedly pink, and glowing seemingly from within.
And it occurred to me then just how apt today’s choices for this post would turn out to be, as though the spirits of spring earth and sky themselves had guided them.
We shall see whether the pear tree flowers fully tomorrow; if we do get rain today, it will help the process along, certainly. But that one small pear tree is one of our greatest providers: a profusion of flowers in spring, rounded white petals around a center tipped in bright glowing pink; and an abundance of fruit in the fall, sometimes more than a thousand pears from that single tree . . . if we can get them before the magpies do.
And so this modest little tree has become one of our touchstones for the land’s well-being, and for our own.
These flowers find expression in today’s single featured work of wearable art, a pair of earrings wrought freehand of silver and shell. They are named for one of the wildflowers indigenous to the alpine meadows of this place, one that outsiders tend to scorn as a weed but that in fact has its own role to play in such ecosystems as this, and adds a shimmering beauty to our world. If I had thought of the pear blossoms, I might perhaps have suggested that as a name, but these were created a few weeks ago, in a still mostly wintry world where even the hardy alpine dandelions were not yet able to flower. From their description in the Earrings Gallery here on the site:
Prairie Evening Primrose Earrings
At the high elevation of these alpine lands, remarkably delicate wildflowers grow and thrive, from the fiery bands of the blanketflowers to the the pale, shimmering pink of prairie evening primrose. With these earrings, Wings summons the spirit of the latter, deceptively fragile-looking blossoms in pink and white that dot the rolling meadows of the high desert. Each drop is saw-cut freehand, the petals scalloped with a the blade of a jeweler’s saw; each petal is articulated by similar saw-work, separate from those around it, and gently veined with flowing freehand stampwork. At center, pale pink mussel shell cabochons glow in tiny round saw-toothed bezel. Tiny jump rings at top hold the sterling silver French wires in place. Earrings hang a generous 1″ long by 1-1/16″ across; cabochons are 3/16″ across (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; pink mussel shell
$425 + shipping, handling, and insurance
This was one of two pairs that Wings created at the same time: this pair set with pink mussel shell; the other, which sold almost immediately, set with iolite the color of today’s stormy sky. As I’ve said many times, I’ve never been a fan of the color pink, at least in the abstract, but I love these, both for the beautiful freehand cut-work that formed each individual petal and for the warm shimmering glow of the shell. The fact that they’re set on wires to dangle and dance only makes them more perfect, as though they are blown gently by a late-spring breeze.
As I write, the rising wind has now suddenly become the trickster’s tool: high, wild, sending still mostly-bare branches thrashing against the darkened sky. Perhaps there will be rain, after all . . . and perhaps tomorrow the pear tree will look like this:
It’s not merely the blossoms; it’s also the leaves. On these, leaf and flower are wound tightly together in the bud, the spiraled lines showing clearly as they begin to uncoil. We are at that threshold moment today — a midpoint of spring, in a manner of speaking, when half-open buds begin to flower.
But this day requires patience, a willingness to wait and see what the weather holds. A little rain will go far to coaxing the buds into flower; a drop in temperature that freezes limb and branch overnight will have the opposite effect.
We are still on the threshold, the real dividing line between winter and summer. But now, we have hope for the flowers once more.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2023; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
