Some days simply do not permit me to do my work in a timely fashion.

This was one. It wasn’t the weather, or anything attending it; indeed, all we’ve had a re few intermittent sprinkles here and there across the afternoon and evening hours. No, this was simply the time involved in some obligatory tasks, continued deflections onto less-obligatory ones by forces beyond my control, and all of complicated by one of my worst days in terms of autoimmune pain in memory.

Now, as night encroaches, I have no choice but to devote the next several hours to tasks I had intended to have done by early afternoon at the latest. As I write, the sky is beginning to dim, the clouds pale peach to the east and north, a melding of coral and rose to west and south, but nothing like the post-storm sunsets of only a few years ago.

Back then, these would have been moment of skies aflame, a herald of sorts to the garnet moon, still nearly full tonight, that we might have seen gain the southeast ridgeline an hour and a half or so from now.

But there will be no blood moon tonight. If we are lucky, perhaps it might be tinted with a warm rose-gold hue, a shade of petal pink that suits its name.

We are blessed here to be able to watch the moon rise more nights than not. In our location, we do not see it ascend over the parapets, either of our home or of the old village. We do, however, get to watch it emerge from behind the ridge, the slope, the peak, depending on season and time, and it’s one of the great gifts of the dark hours in this place, the moon’s glowing ascent of the night.

If we happen to be awake in the early hours of the morning, before the night has receded, we are privileged to watch it descend, as well. At times such as this, it often seems lower, closer, bigger, brighter than at its rising, and it feels like benediction and invocation simultaneously, a blessing for the night just ending and for the new day about to begin.

This week’s #ThrowbackThursday feature embodies this gift in either form, depending on one’s vantage point. It’s a #TBT work that dates back to 2011, if memory serves, and an entry in one of Wings’s longest-running signature series, the Pueblo pin. It’s a series that he’s been creating for some three or four decades now, scores of individual pins [plus the occasional barrette, and in one memorable instance, a cuff] all wrought in the same general style, but every one of them unique, each one of a kind.

Up until the last three or four years, the silverwork for each pin consisted of a mix of freehand saw-work and stampwork, each pin set with its own gemstone accent. In recent years, he’s taken to creating a single traditional ladder separately, forming the posts and rungs of slender legnths of steling silver wire, then overlaying the whole against the front of the pin. It adds dimension and depth, plus a little rich texture to each pin.

Back in 2011, though, he created each in his original design, which is what you see here.

The design is one that he patterned on North House, into which he was born. He sketched his original template of a few quick, straight strokes of the pen, capturing its multistory character, the stairstepped effect of the rooflines, and the outer walls all at sharp angles to each other. From there, he adjusted the staggering of the stories as he felt moved to do so; some bear outlines identical to this one, with the stampwork and stone details varying; others have the individual stories placed differently. He sketches quick outlines onto the silver to delineate its edges, then adds the stampwork before cutting it free of the surrounding silver.

That stampwork typically consists of the textured lines you see here that make the edges, both walls and rooflines, clear; he uses the same stamp to create the dimensional look of the lower walls on the bottom story, where some of the old homes extend beyond the others. The windows are proportional to the original old, high, narrow windows of the oldest homes in the structure, now more than a thousand years old and continuously inhabited that entire time. To evoke, them, he uses a stamp that consists of a single short horizontal line, with a little width and depth to it — a bit like an em dash in punctuation, and perhaps sharing a bit of its animating spirit, too. The windows, of course, were a later addition, as were the doors; access and egress were originally both through a roof opening, for purposes of security. The first windows to be added were the high, narrow ones like these here; in the last century-lower widnows of more ordinary sizes and shapes have been installed lower on some of the walls, along with doors at ground level.

But that is the version of the village that people recognize today, and so it’s the one that he creates, at least with regard to the doors. Those he delineates with three quick strokes apiece while he performs the stampwork, because they will be part of the saw-cutting process. Beyond the windows, he stamps the vigas [those are the giant log roof beams that extend through the outer walls on traditional adobe homes; our own home has them, as well], using a tiny divot-end stamp, repeating them in horizontal lines just below each roofline. In these older pins, the only stampwork that remained to be done [save his hallmark on the reverse] was the ladders, old traditional ladders made of wooden posts and rungs that are lashed together [although these days, you might also find nails hammered strategically, too].

If you look at a photo of the Pueblo — virtually any photo that shows more than a single home as part of either North House or South House — you’ll see these old ladders propped against the walls, both at ground level and on the upper stories. They’re still in regular use. And Wings has always added at least one, usually two, and occasionally, if memory serves, even three of them to his Pueblo pins. This one has the standard two, which tends to be perfectly proportional to the pin’s size. He uses a plain chisel-end stamp, chasing two vertical lines of differing lengths to form the posts [because if you look at the actual ladders used, one post is shorter at the top than the other, to permit ease of stepping on and off it], then connecting them with, typically, four quick horizontal lines. Those horizontal lines extend beyond the “posts,” and that, too, is realistic; the original ladders, as I noted above, lashed the rungs to the posts with heavy sinew, and the ends needed to be longer than the width of the posts to do so safely. As you’ll note here, one is propped evenly, the other at an angle, and that, too, is taken from real life.

Once the stampwork was complete, his next step would have been to excise it from the surrounding silver. It’s done using a jeweler’s saw, with a filament-thin blade, and he picks a starting point and moves consistently forward, never back, working his way around the parapets at the top and, at the bottom performing two operations together: Instead of a straight line at the bottom, he cuts it in a gentle upward arc, which both adds dimension and depth and allows the pin to lie properly when worn; and at the roper intervals, he works the blade in and out of it to create the small open doorways [here, there are five, which requires a lot of meticulous attention to the saw-work].

Once the cutwork is complete, he files the edges smooth, then turns it over and domes the whole ever so slightly. it’s a very gentle curvature, but it allows the pin to lie against the fabric of the wearer’s clothing without pulling downward — and, again, it adds a sense of depth to the pin. Once the proper arc was achieved, he would have soldered the pin assembly securely into place, then turned it right side up again and fashioned a tiny round saw-toothed bezel to hold the stone. Just as the stampwork varies, and the choice of the stone itself, so, too, does the stone’s placement on the front of the pin. Some are nearer the top, others right in the vertical center; some are placed toward one side or the other, and some, like this one, are placed very nearly at the horizontal center.

The name of this one was Garnet Moon, for what are likely obvious reasons, since he chose a five-millimeter garnet cabochon, round and highly domed, as the accent stone for this one. But I like to think of it as a representation of the spectacular full moons we are granted in this place: rare blood moons; summer’s blooming and berry moons; autumn hunter’s and harvest moons; and occasionally, the scarlet moons that arise in darkened skies still filled with a pall of dust or smoke.

For much of the year, our moons tend toward gold and white — amber and pearl, always luminous, always breathtaking. Whether pearl or amber or garnet like this, the moon’s glowing ascent of the night is part of the medicine the dark hours grant us. Tonight’s sunset skies were coral and rose, less dark and less bright; moonrise tonight will likely have only a hint of pink. But it will be a gift all the same, and we are grateful for it.

~ Aji

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