March first. the first day of meteorological spring, although in this place, it should still be the dead of winter.

The key word there is “should,” because in point of fact, it’s nothing of the sort: The mercury is at seventy-two degrees and climbing.

This is more typically May weather here, not what would attend the birth of March . . . and yet, the forecast is for drastic change overnight, bringing us as much as a week’s worth of scattered snow showers beginning tomorrow.

Spring here, even in normal climatic conditions, is the hardest season, the most unsettled and capricious. And these are very far from normal conditions now. If these lands were still in good health, March would be another full month of snow, any real possibility of a true warming trend [and with it, the arrival of the trickster winds] deferred to April. Indeed, we have had such conditions as recently as eight short years ago. Now, though, the collapse is accelerating rapidly, and spring’s ferocious trickster winds arrive weeks ago, in January.

We would, however, already be contemplating the thaw, and what this year’s runoff volume would bring. There will be none of that, either; our snowpack is currently measured in the negatives, and those reporting it mean it quite literally — one need only look at the mountains on all sides of us, bare of any white blanket, the tundra entirely exposed on the peaks, to the know the truth of that terrible development.

Many parts of this land mass call spring their rainy season, but that’s never been the case here. Spring precipitation winds up being mostly late snow, occasionally graupel or sleet; the rainy season here is [or was] reserved for the heat of summer. Still, an occasional rain in the months of first leaf and flower does occur, usually at the end of a snowfall when the air warms sufficiently to melt it in mid-air, and so it is that from last snow, first rain falls, a phenomenon giving rise to the name of today’s featured work. It’s one that was created for the unsettled threshold of the season to come, part of a trio of works in Wings’s signature series of gemstone-bead works devoted to the elemental forces of the four seasons here — in this instance, from the collection in miniature called The Spring Elementals:  Water. It was a trio that consisted of a necklace, a pair of earrings, and coil bracelet; the bracelet has long since sold, but the earrings remain available, and so does the necklace, featured here today, a perfect manifestation of te borderline blues between winter and spring in this place. From its description in The Beaded Hoop Collection in the Necklaces Gallery here on the site:

From Last Snow,  First Rain Necklace

Spring is the season of the thaw: From last snow, first rain falls. With this necklace, Wings calls the water into a great descending hoop that transmutes the one into the other. The strand. is anchored by tiny sterling silver doughnut rondels alternating with paired icy selenite rounds. The beads flow downward in a gradiant of snowy color and newly-exposed earth via segments of cloud and Picasso jaspers set off by thick rondels of ultra-high-grade aquamarine, like the last of the frozen lake ice. Giant orbs of snowy white coral, richly textured, paired with solitary doughnut rondels of snowflake obsidian, diminish to single spheres alternating with the rich raincloud blue of Dumortierite. At the center, three giant freeform barrels of fabulously webbed iolite, as deep a blue as any storm, are held in the embrace of more icy aquamarine, a reminder that the early rain is still a cold one. Necklace hangs 23″ long, excluding findings (dimensions approximate). Designed jointly by Wings and Aji. Another view shown below and at the link. Necklace coordinates with The Dewdrop Returns to the Dawn earrings and The Thaw Becomes the River [sold] coil bracelet. From the Water series in Wings’s new collection, The Spring Elementals (all pieces shown at the link).

Strand:  Tri-ply foxtail plated with silver; sterling silver findings;
Beads: Iolite; ultra-high-grade aquamarine; white coral; Dumortierite; snowflake obsidian;
Picasso jasper; cloud jasper; selenite; sterling silver
$400 + shipping, handling, and insurance

I love this one, and frankly, I thought it would be one of the first of that larger group to sell. The photos do not begin to do it justice.

For one thing, it’s virtually impossible to capture the mystery and depth of those iolite barrels through the camera’s lens. Here, they look a little gray, a little brownish, and it’s true that they do have patches of bronze-hued matrix. But they’re anything but gray. these are giant freeform barrels of deep violet blue iolite, translucent overall, but with plenty of inclusions, both veining and patchy elements, that add ab icy opacity. In truth, they remind me a bit of giant ripe blueberries dusted with new frost, what happens when the mercury in the pre-dawn hours plunges just low enough to crystallize the dew. These beads are haunting, mysterious, positively stormy, and ethereally beautiful.

The aquamarine rondels are full of shimmer that doesn’t render well here, too — tiny inclusions that make them look like raindrops mixed with snow. The white coral is richly textured, each tiny space a tactile delight, and the selenite anchors are like orbs of pure ice illuminated by the morning light. The darker beads that make up either side, from snowflake obsidian to charcoal-hued Picasso jasper to the earthy shades of the cloud jasper all evoke the appearance of the earth as winter snows slowly cede space to the waters of spring [and the mud, rich but deep and ready at any and every moment to pull your boots down into those depths].

All in all, it’s a perfect encapsulation of that very blurred line that constitutes the threshold between the first two seasons of the calendar year here: the borderline blues between winter and spring. And despite the nearly flawlessly clear skies today and a temperature forty or fifty degrees too warm, it appears that there is a real chance of a little — just a little — of such seasonal weather to come.

We can hope, and pray . . . and tarp the wood and the hay and the equipment.

Just in case.

~ Aji

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