After about eighteen hours of uninterrupted snow, the accumulation stands at some twenty-three inches here (although only about six inches in town, apparently). We have drifts four feet high in places.
And now, we have a fierce southwest wind that, nascent midday sunlight notwithstanding, is turning our whole world into a deep-freeze.
Yesterday’s winds provoked snow devils across the fields; today, it’s a wall of crystalline dust sweeping along the horizontal with every gust.
This is the dust of a dangerous season, every bit as much as that of summer’s dirt and smoke.
And just like sunlight filtered through the dust of warmer winds, that which shimmers behind the current veil of ice crystals gives the world its own fiery glow. It’s a phenomenon manifest in today’s featured work, a pair of earrings radiating silver light around the molten cores of fiery bronze suns. From their description in the Earrings Gallery here on the site:
Dust Light Earrings
This is a place of extremes, of harsh weather and harder winds that create a mysterious phenomenon of dust light, our world illuminated in shades of earthy silhouette behind a veil of sand and smoke. Wings’s fourth entry in his signature series, revisited, of earrings that honor the light evokes the hazy shimmer of such magic in traditional silver form and jewels of chatoyant dark. Each drop is a perfectly circle domed from beneath, repoussé-fashion, t0 create a softly rounded concha. Across the front, an eight-pointed star extends to cardinal and ordinal points by way of hand-stamped spokes fanning outward around the center. Each spoke ends in a hoop whose task it is to link the lodge pattern, radiant with the literal and metaphorical light, that lies between each tiny circle. At the center of the starburst, in a sawtoothed bezel, sits a single round cabochon of luminous tiger’s eye, each glowing with earthy fire like sun and moon behind the desert dust. Conchas are polished to a soft Florentine finish; tiny silver jump rings attach the earrings securely to sterling silver wires. Earrings are 7/8″ across (excluding jump rings and wires); cabochons are 3/16″ across (dimensions approximate).
Sterling silver; tiger’s eye
$350 + shipping, handling, and insurance
The winds have only just driven the actual snowfall out to the peaks, where the haze is beginning to lighten but flakes still obscure the details of the slopes. Meanwhile, we are buried beneath a blanket of white, several feet deep and molded into drifts of mysterious shapes and still-greater depths. Its blankness catches the sunlight, refracting it outward in shades of silver even as individual ice crystals concentrate its color and power, bringing the air alive with shades of gold and amber, copper and bronze, the colors of a winter’s dawn and dusk given momentary life at midday.
The world is beautiful, clean and mostly still yet. That will change, and fast. this is, after all, the dangerous season: predatory wind chills sufficient to burn skin and steal breath today; a rapid warm-up beginning tomorrow that will turn this clean white cover into rivers of earthy mud.
It’s time to dig out from under it.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2019; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
