There is snow on all sides of us, but none here.
Yet.
It’s so close we can practically taste it on the air, veiling peaks and horizon lines alike, spreading wide and thin and then concentrating itself in heavy white falls here and there. It’s beautiful to see, but it would more beautiful still if it would bring its medicine to this place.
The wild birds seem enthralled by the prospect; they are everywhere today. Ravens, crows, magpies, blackbirds, every junco and sparrow and finch (and of course the invasive pigeons, too) all seem to be enjoying the colder air, the heavy clouds, the feel of new moisture on the wind. From the window, I can watch the snowclouds swirl and dance; they have descended over the stands of evergreens at the lowest level of the slopes, creating a haunting fog-like, and yet one that seems to spangle their blue-green boughs, as well.
It’s a little atmospheric magic for the first real snow of the season.
Now if only it would drift down to our own conifers, our aspens and willows, too.
Still, if there’s a tree that serves as an archetype for this point in the season, it must be found among the evergreens. We are a week and a half past Hallowe’en, and while here, that doesn’t mean all bare branches, the pop-culture zeitgeist associates such skeletal beings with that night. In our good years, full winter would have seen the juniper and pine, spruce and fir robed entirely in white. But now, this season that I was taught to call the Little Winter, the Small Snow, is the one in which the evergreen boughs still show through, rich with moist needles and plenty of sap, their color almost as blue as green beneath the garland-like dusting of white.
In other words, it’s the perfect season-within-a-season for this week’s #ThrowbackThursday featured work, one in one of Wings’s longest-running signature series, a whimsical collection of winter trees (occasionally joined by equally whimsical red-nosed reindeer), pins all. He’s been creating these works for probably well over thirty years now, perhaps forty, and they were once an annual event of sorts. Now, his workload is such that there have been years when he doesn’t have a chance to create any at all . . . but of course, they can always be commissioned. As a child of the early TV generation (we only had black and white, even when color became common), they have always reminded me of the animated trees of Christmastown in the Rankin-Bass version of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: animated by their own spirits, filled with joy and light, upturned boughs dancing in the winter winds. Each is unique, with its own saw-cut shape, its own stampwork garlands and stars, its own jeweled ornaments.
This one dates back to the winter holiday season of 2006, seventeen years ago. It was one of a pair he created simultaneously, this one featuring three Sleeping Beauty turquoise cabochons, the other with two of the same turquoise and one garnet. On this day, one of all silver and blues seems to fit best the current feel of air and weather and sky.
Over the years, Wings has sketched out numerous templates, all roughly between just under two and a little shy of three inches in height. Each is different: some, like the one here, have slightly upturned boughs; a few have boughs that drape downward beneath the weight of symbolic snow; even fewer have branches that extend mostly outward on the horizontal, sharp as the needles on their real-life counterparts; and a couple have had libs they turn upward so sharply that each tree appears to be dancing, and smiling as well. This one fell into the first category, bright and animated by a slight but steady sense of motion, and decorated in the colors of the cold winter sky.
I noted that Wings created templates for these, but they’re used as something rather less than that: a few quick strokes with a pen around the boldest lines onto the silver, and he fills in the rest with the saw-work, all of which is done freehand, then filed smooth. The stampwork, too, is freehand, and it varies substantially from one pin to the next, although some motifs put in regular appearances. Such was the case here, with a plain five-pointed stars, a five-pointed star embedded in a radiant circle, an eight-pointed star, a couple of eight-petaled blossoms, and a second blossom style formed of seven linked hoops. All evoke the spangled imagery of snowflakes (and classic holiday decorations) sufficiently, and he scatters them seemingly randomly across the surface. This particular one also features a couple of simple arcs, used to evoke garlands, and two or three plain hoops, like the old ball-shaped ornaments that were commonplace when we were children.
Virtually every tree also gets a “star” atop it, too. In this instance, it’s less about a holiday star, perhaps, than about the real-life star closest to our planet: a sun symbol, a tribute to the Four Sacred Directions, an evocation of the life cycle, all in a stylized form of that image so recognizeable to the world now as a Zia symbol. [It’s also the symbol on the flag of this “state” now known as “New Mexico,” so there’s an additional link.]
Finally, he adds one last form of “ornament” to each tree, a collection of tiny round gemstone cabochons. Usually, he selects a variety of materials and colors for each tree; less commonly, he’ll go with a color theme, such as opal and lapis combined, or shades of green in malachite and jade. In this instance, though, he chose to go with the classic Skystone, as though the tree borrowed fragments of the alpine desert’s winter sky with which to adorn itself: single domed cabochons of Sleeping Beauty turquoise from Arizona, bright and blue and perfectly clear, entirely free of matrix, each set into a plain round bezel and scattered across the surface of the pin.
Sometimes, Wings chooses to add some shape to the trunk, or some texture; in this instance, he kept it simple and spare. The only other work is that on the reverse, his hallmark and the pin assembly, and a little oxidation on the stampwork so that buffing the piece allowed it to pop. Then he set the stones, blessed it traditionally, and offered it in inventory.
I no longer recall whether this particular tree was one of the ones that sold in 2006, or one of the group that lasted until 2007. He created them in both years, and there was overlap between them, as has sometimes been the case in the years since. The last one he created was purchased at this season last year, the final of four from a year or so before. To date, he has not had a chance to create more for this winter’s holidays . . . but I would not be surprised to learn that they were coming.
Speaking of coming (and going), as I write, the snow has begun here . . . and it has ended, too. It was little more than graupel, falling straight downward on a perfect vertical, but it was snow all the same. Not enough, of course, to do anything for the land, and already the sun is chasing the clouds eastward past the peaks. But perhaps the air and sky will develop a taste for it, for this weather of the Little Winter that we all need so badly now.
It is, after all, the season for a little atmospheric magic. And hope is a stubborn thing.
~ Aji
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