Summer and fall are at war with each other here, each jockeying for primacy of place. The calendar insists that summer still reigns, and so do the daytime highs, but the nighttime lows and turning leaves say otherwise.
And through it all, the monsoonal storms ramped up now at season’s end, battering the earth with a quick and fleeting ferocity.
Yesterday was no exception: A storm moved in from the northeast, the direction least likely to produce a weather system here, an unleashed a tempest of hailstones and driving rain. As the front moved overhead, the hail eventually subsided, leaving a rime of ice upon the land, but the rain continued to fall in a rare and perfect vertical, so hard and fast that rivers of mud carved new channels through the soil.
We were fortunate enough to be indoors through most of it although not all; I managed to get soaked to the skin and battered by hailstones before escaping into the dry warmth of the house). But it reminded me that, not so very many years ago, we old not have had such an option here — how tenuous, at this season, are such basic blessings as shelter and light.
I’m not referring here to our own living arrangements, although that would have applied, too, and as recently as last year. But I mean something more basic yet, and something entirely within Wings’s own youthful experience on this very land. You see, this land has ben in his family forever, but until just shy of two decades ago, no actually lived here, not in any permanent sense. As teenagers, though, he and his brother did live here temporarily during the summer months, working the fields and sleeping under the stars. Because this bit of land was worked: for corn, for hay, for other crops. And during the monsoon season, the only shelter available was the arbor built for shade from the summer heat, for some small protection for the elements, for illumination via the spaces between the poles that adjoined roughly to create the structure itself.
Arbors are traditional in many indigenous cultures, and are still used as a matter of daily life. We have one, and are planning on building a second next year. Arbors here are very much a part of land and place, made from latillas, long slender poles made from the trunks of native trees, cut and dried and lashed together to form a roof overhead and sometimes walls of a sort. They are used, of course, to provide shade in summer, and to keep the worst of the precipitation from drowning those who sit beneath it, but they are also used as drying racks for hides and meat. And at this time of year, they would shelter the women and children as they sorted and shucked corn to be hauled back to their village home.
Our arbor has stood through all sots of weather, from highs at the century mark to forty below in the winter, from hail and snow to spring’s gale force winds and the occasional small twister, including one that ripped the ladder off it and hung over a post, yet left the arbor wholly intact. It is, in its way, a landmark of sorts here, a center so solid and sacred that it is where we said our vows to each other.
Looking out at it yesterday as the storm battered it relentlessly, I was reminded of today’s featured work. It’s not a good photo, true, but it’s the only one we have; at the time Wings took it, bedeviled by the problems of natural light in our old gallery, it never occurred to him that he might need the image for more than a casual personal record of the piece. But it’s an unusual work, and one spectacularly well-suited to the week’s themes, so, focus issues notwithstanding, I’m including it here and the design come through perfectly clearly, after all).
Called The Arbor, it was a necklace whose pendant evoked a slightly Asian sensibility, a little like a Japanese pagoda. It’s wholly indigenous, though, a weaving of strands and spirit as solid as its real-life counterpart outside our door.
In this instance, I suspect that the design began with the stone, although it could have been a later choice. The stone itself was not particularly spectacular in its manifestation: square, high-domed, beveled at the corners, a classic robin’s-egg blue with only a scattering of dots of matrix in a bright emerald green that spoke of either the Royston or Fox mines as the source of the stone.
Before the stone could be utilized, however, the pendant itself needed to be created. It was simple in the extreme, really, formed entirely from four slender, flowing strands of silver, wending like small rivers. Two were curved gently in opposing directions, ends straight with corners rounded off ever so slightly; these would form the upright poles of the arbor. The other two strands were more ribbon-like: ends clipped, like the fletching of an arrow, one fashioned in a slight arc, not precisely even, the other with a bit of a zigzag, one end higher than the other. The arcing strand formed a lower cross-beam; the zigzag, an upper latilla, which might be seen either as a supporting beam or as the roof. We’ll get to the why in a moment.
Wings arrayed the two upright “poles” flat on his workbench across from each other, each curving outward at the center, then back inward near the base. He brought the two close together at the top, yet still separate; he kept them further apart at the base. Then, he carefully overlaid the other two strands of silver atop the uprights: the arcing one perhaps a half-inch from their bottoms, the zigzagging ribbon just over a quarter-inch from the top. He soldered both carefully into place, forming a grid of sorts — the basic woven-pole structure of an arbor.
Next, he cut a small rectangular length of sheet silver, a few degrees off a perfect square, and carefully bent it into a loop. This would serve as the bail to hold the chain. Once the rectangle’s top edge was brought forward to meet the bottom edge, he smoothed it out, ensuring that its edges were evenly rounded, then placed it at the very upper ends of the two upright “poles” of the pendant, and soldered all three pieces together — the two edges of the bail together, and the bottom of the bail to each of the two ends of the uprights.
Finally, he created a small, square, low-profile bezel, which he overlaid across the juncture where the horizontal “poles” crossed the verticals, and soldered it securely into place at the edges. I should note here that the bezel’s backing (i.e., the setting) showed through to the reverse; indeed, it was where Wings placed his hallmark. He left the center of the “arbor” open in the middle, as would be the case with a real one. Once the bezel and backing were in place, he soldered a delicate strand of twisted silver around it on all sides, the better to set off the beauty of the stone. He then oxidized the entire piece at all the places where the silverwork was joined, and buffed it to a medium-high polish.
And now the stone could be set. As I noted above, it was a relatively ordinary cabochon, although as small square cabs go, also relatively substantial — highly domed and beveled at the corners, set high enough in the bezel to show the lapidary work. But what made it so well-suited to this particular piece was its color: the exact shade that Crayola labels “sky blue,” the same shade as the desert skies overhead on a late summer afternoon. This cab was also marked by relatively little matrix, just a few small connected dots in a brilliant emerald green, like a scattering of aspen leaves visible against its vaulted expanse. Once the stone was set, all that remained was to cut the snake chain, attach the findings, and string the pendant on it.
The identity of the person who ultimately purchased this piece is lost to the mists of memory and time. If memory serves, Wings crested the piece sometime in the latter half of 2008, and it sold some two or three years later. Whomever wears it, though, wears a talismanic emblem of tradition, a small potent symbol of shelter and light.
~ Aji
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