An early-evening storm yesterday gave way to largely clear skies — until the early hours of this morning, at least. Somewhere around three o’clock, as nearly as I can tell, the rain returned, strong and steady. By dawn it had intensified into a heavy storm, with the odd roll of thunder overhead . . . and yet, the sunrise shone through with remarkable strength. From northwest to southwest, the ridgelines alternated: rising sun here, falling rain there, all of it simultaneous, and positively otherworldly in its effects of color and light. It was, in fact, a rather perfect backdrop for the solstice, which occurred before six o’clock this morning.
But as of tonight, the light’s presence will be just that little bit shorter once more.
The rain continued through the rising of the sun until it fully cleared the ridgeline, at which point the latter began to burn the clouds off rapidly. It left us with brilliant blue skies and only a few faint puffs of white, a perfect morning to mark the so-called first official day of summer. In our way, it’s more a marker of midsummer, a recognition of the tangible truths of season, climate, weather, and time that needs no colonial calendar to recount and reinterpret months and days and ways of reckoning. Perhaps that’s why the way the colonial world labels the solstices [and the equinoxes] has always seemed not merely inaccurate but rather melancholy to me: On the first day of summer, the light is already fading? The first day of summer, and our focus is drawn instead to fall?
But that is not our way, fortunately, and in this place, we know that, sun’s track notwithstanding, there is much more of the warm season left to us than outsiders understand.
As I write, I can see the summer weather patterns following their own traditional path: giant thunderheads rising from the horizon on all sides, climbing, building, gathering themselves into fantastic shapes, funnels and stacks and towers emergent from blue-black bases that hold the rain — and, indeed, rain is forecast for this afternoon. At this moment, what remains are bits and pieces of the blue summer sky, setting the stage for the storm’s newest dance.
Such conditions, as it turns out, provide a beautifully apt setting for this week’s #ThrowbackThursday featured work, a pair of earrings that date back to just over three years ago, to April of 2021. It was still early days of the pandemic, in relative terms, and those of us who are immunocompromised were coming to terms with what it would mean for us. For those with certain conditions, the risks would be far greater, and t brought many of us to early reckonings with the prospect of our own mortality. Such reckonings often involved [and still do involve] plans for a future without our own presence, and what planning we might need to do for those of our loved ones who remain.
A relative, as we define the term, was grappling with such questions at the time, and this week’s #TBT featured work was born out of that process. It was actually one of two different yet related works, both of them pairs of stud earrings. The other pair appeared in this space in an earlier #TBT post, where I explained the genesis of both:
These were born of a special commission from a relative who, owing to urgent external pressures, needed to compile a variety of traditional items in a very short period of time for her adult son’s return home. Among those items were earrings worn by men in their culture’s tradition, tiny turquoise studs and equally small studs set with Queen Conch shell, otherwise known in our communities simply as “pink shell.” She inquired about the possibility of commissioning some by Wings, and he agreed to create them, but as a gift — our contribution to the tasks involved in their tradition.
The pair linked above, made with Queen Conch shell, always made me think of tiny flowers: a soft and gentle gradient of dusky pink shades, the combination of saw-toothed bezels and fluted butterfly backs evoking the look of petals. This pair, with softy scalloped bezels, does the same when the backs are on them, as here, but these are turquoise flowers, tiny blossoms of desert sky:
This pair was oval rather than round, and the stones themselves were extraordinary. These were very old cabochons from Wings’s personal collection, a pair that were clearly matched, but not backed and just as clearly not calibrated. They were about as perfectly archetypal a turquoise blue as it’s possible to be, and we are sure that they were old Morenci turquoise, from Arizona. It’s the most classic, iconic shade of blue, the kind depicted in Indigenous jewelry of this region from a century ago and more, and these were manifest in that same electric sky blue with the faintest hints of black chert matrix floating through them.
So if they were so old, how did they hold their color? After all, I’ve noted numerous times how old natural blue turquoise, cut and cabbed before the advent of various treatment processes and technologies, turns green with age, mostly due to weathering in the air and the infusion of oils and adulterants from the touch of human skin.
The answer is that they were kept safely in a tightly-closed box, with a nearly hermetic seal. Very little air reached them, save if and when the box was opened; by the same token, they were very rarely handled, except by him and [even less often] by me — specifically, when removing them so that he could use them in this very pair of earrings.
The fact that these were clearly cut individually — to match each other, yes, but not as part of a larger commercial parcel but and cabbed to set sizes and shapes — meant that Wings had to fashion bezels specifically to them. It’s hard to do with such small cabochons when they’re cut in this way: highly domed, but sloping down to very thing edges with no backing. It means that the bezel has to rise higher and be bent inward around more of the lower part of the stone to hold them safely. And so he created tiny scalloped bezels, the arcs cut and filed to adapt them to the steep angles, and shaped them by hand to fit the stones.
It’s what produced the petal-like effect you see here.
These were meant to be simple studs, no extraneous decoration, and so he fashioned the bezel walls to a backing that did not extend beyond the walls at all. All that remained was to add the posts on the reverse, oxidize them and give them a turn through the tumbler to polish them to a warm glow, and then set the stones. They seemed like a perfect, literal manifestation of the Skystone’s story: bits and pieces of the blue summer sky, caught in silver to be worn for posterity, and for protection.
As I write now, less of those bits and pieces of blue are visible now. The forecast suggests that the rain remains about two hours off yet, but the conditions are forming for its arrival. That, too, is the summer sky in this place — the medicine of life and breath and being.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2024; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
