In theory, we have more than an eighty-percent chance of snow later today. In practice, we will likely get no more than a dusting, if that.
Coming up on noon, and while the fog of lowering clouds enshrouds the peaks, most of the rest of the sky is brightest blue, banded only by bits of white fluff here and there. That can, of course, change rapidly, but despite last night’s bitter cold, we have already long since exceeded the predicted high for today. At the moment, it’s hardly cold enough to create any iridescence in the southwest sky, and thus we are without one of our more reliable indicators of coming change.
As this month winds down and February beckons, the fallout from winter’s general absence becomes ever more acute. Oddly, perhaps, to those unused to our ordinary patterns here, these weeks of real winter in this place are normally a vortex of opposing elemental forces — not merely of snow in abundance and a deep and bitter cold, but also of the fires of soul and sky.
With Valentine’s Day looming in the colonial world, perhaps the former fire still burns bright, in its way. But we have missed the latter’s presence here, the interplay between sun and ice in the upper atmosphere that ignites cold rainbows from the heart of the light.
This week’s featured #TBT work, however, brings us a little of these fires of the sky, along with those of soul and heart. it’s a throwback only to the middle of last December, although its genesis lay in a series of events dating back two years prior, almost to the very day. It’s a necklace that Wings created specially for one of our dearest friends, as a close-but-not-quite-identical replacement for an earlier one.
The short version of the story begins prior to Christmas of 2019, when her husband purchased this necklace, entitled From the Heart of the Light, for her as a holiday gift. It was an extraordinary work, built around a striking heart-shaped cabochon of natural Hachita turquoise in her beloved rich green shades, marbled and webbed with a golden-gray matrix. Wings had ringed the central heart with a dazzling array of sixteen separate round cabochons, the setting scalloped freehand to match their arcs: a single aquamarine at the throat; coral, carnelian, amethyst, lapis lazuli, amber, garnet, and rainbow moonstone arrayed randomly along the top and sides; and a single tiny jade cabochon, rooted like a seed, at the very tip. it hung from a strand of mixed beads of sterling silver, gray moonstone, jade, Madagascar Labradorite, lapis lazuli, garnet, and green turquoise to pick up the shades of the Hachita heart.
It was a masterwork, one that suited our friend’s tastes and spirit perfectly. And then it went missing.
She had traveled overseas for an extended period, and such circumstances too often make opportunities for theft far too easy. At any rate, it was brought to our attention last November by another friend; her husband wanted to replace it for her, as closely as possible, as a Christmas gift.
It was a good thing we had a little lead time, because the hunt for a similar cabochon fast became an all-consuming process, and one that was partly fruitless in the end.
It’s true that supply-chain deficiencies have affected most aspects of commerce since the beginning of the pandemic, now commencing its third year. But items like gemstones tend to me largely resistant to such problems, save for delays in shipping; what’s mined and sold is what’s cut and cabbed and offered for sale, and generally speaking, that provides a fairly decent cross-section of shades and styles from which to choose.
Until now.
In prior years, I had had absolutely no difficulty whatsoever finding heart-shaped cabochons in every size and in every possible shade of blue or green and every matrix pattern. This year? No one had anything even remotely like the Hachita cabochon we’d bought only two years prior. Oh, there were plenty of greens, and plenty of spiderweb matrices, but never in the same cab, and never the right shade, shape, and/or size. This one was substantially larger than the usual size sold by large commercial suppliers in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, and the boutique online sellers (including the seller of the original cab) had nothing that remotely met the criteria.
Finally, in desperation, we purchased an assortment of turquoise heart cabochons from a variety of different sources, and set about comparing them to the photos of the original piece, and gauging them for size, shape, and proportion. Several bright green ones were simply far too small; one large green one was too large, too pale, and the wrong shape besides. The blues were, of course, not right anyway. We finally narrowed it down to one possibility: the bright blue Pilot Mountain turquoise heart shown in the image at top and below, somewhat larger than the original Hachita version but perfect in shape, and with some beautiful bright-green webbing floating over the blue surface along with the bronze-toned matrix. It would create a slightly larger pendant than the previous version, but Wings would be able to keep the proportions sized properly.
One way Wings accomplished that was through spacing the sixteen surrounding cabochons slightly farther apart, He had used plain, smooth bezels in the first; here, he used saw-toothed (sometimes called “serrated”) bezels, which don’t take up more space but do refocus the eye in a way that diverts it from the space surrounding the stones. I worked to track down, among his many inventory cases of small cabochons, the same number of each type of gemstone, including the tiny “seed” cabochon of deep, dusky jade for the base of the heart. He arranged them in what was if not quite identical order, as close as humanly possible. Because this pendant was slightly larger, he gave it a slightly larger bail, as well, this one hammered entirely by hand across its heavy surface, the better to catch and refract the light of the beads and stones.
The other problem we faced involved the beads.
Finding stones are one thing; beads are another. We generally buy them from two sources, one local and one overseas. For this one, he needed the round jade beads that appeared in the older version, that brilliant green that picked up both the jade seed bead in the pendant and the bright greens of the turquoise focal cabochon.
No one had them.
I didn’t really expect to find them locally, but I tried. I also tried to buy them through the U.K. importer with whom we do business, which was where we had sourced the earlier strand, but they had none in stock in that color, only dyed versions in other shades. I looked online everywhere, to no avail.
And then, at the last possible moment, a trip to Santa Fe to the supplier there produced results. They had exactly the same beads albeit in a slightly smaller size. So I bought a couple of strands for him, and we returned home to try to bring together all the other necessary elements.
He had more of the gray moonstone, and more of the Labradorite, although both were a size larger than in the original. He had a bit of the lapis, which was all that was needed; no one had the tiny chunky garnet beads any longer, but he had puffy cherry amber, which matched for shade and was beautifully textured to the touch. He had sterling silver beads for accents.
That left the tiny round turquoise beads.
He had plenty of them . . . but not in the greener shades. It turned out to be irrelevant; placing a few of the remaining small green turquoise rounds next to the pedant, it became clear that they would clash badly. He did, however, have a full strand of the same grade and style of turquoise in more blue shades, and once strung between the larger beads and fed through the bail, it became clear that they were a perfect color match for the blues in the heart.
The entire piece was not, of course, an identical match to the missing necklace; it was never going to be, given the impossibility of finding two identical natural cabochons of any sort of turquoise. But it was its own representation of the rainbow of color that flows from the heart of the light here in midwinter. More, it was a manifestation of the fires of soul and sky now — of light, and of love.
~ Aji
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