It rained last night — soft, steady, intermittent, exactly the sort of precipitation that is ideal for an earth squarely in the throes of spring rebirth.
We awakened this morning to a world covered with white.
There is still snow on the ground, heavy, wet, and melting fast now. But at dawn, and for several hours thereafter, the air was still cold enough to assure its steady fall, enough to bring us an inch and a half to two inches of the white stuff.
It’s incongruous, this picture outside the window: a threadbare white blanket with stands of tall dark green grass rising stubbornly through it. It’s also exactly normal for this time of year in this place; winter does not surrender her hold on us readily, and even after her official departure, she returns repeatedly — whether out of nostalgia or spite, who can tell? perhaps a little of both — and has been known to visit as late as the middle of June.
There is a difference this year, though. The earth’s steady warming is now perceptible, even by such dense and willfully blind creatures as humans, and this place is certainly no exception. This storm (or perhaps more accurately, a series of small storms, line after line moving through sometimes minutes, sometimes hours apart) has far less to do with winter than with summer. Our summer monsoon pattern has already begun, a month early, and after a year’s essential absence, it has returned to us altered in fundamental ways.
It used to be that monsoon season followed an eminently predictable pattern here: a clear dawn, fluffy white clouds beginning to build by mid-morning in a still-sunny sky and coalescing into black-bottomed thunderheads in the early afternoon; wild rain arriving in short, harsh bursts by early to mid-afternoon, lines of small but powerful storms that move through quickly and leave a brilliant sunset in their wake. This year, the clouds begin shifting early, sometimes covering the whole of the sky throughout most of the day; the storms are more likely to appear early or late, with night rains such as we used to get only in the rarest of circumstances, often years apart.
To be brutally frank, the new patterns are wonderful for the plants, for the prospering of the green parts of our world here. But this is not our natural climate, not how our ecosystem functions. Even as we enjoy the incidental gifts we have been granted, we recognize that this is not, even for our bit of earth that suddenly seems to be thriving again, a good thing.
Still, even incidental gifts are gifts nonetheless, and in our way, we give thanks for all the good that the spirits grant us. It is up to us to make the best of them, to find a way to turn them to the best use not merely for ourselves, but for our own small part of our world.
And so, on this day, as the skies turn white again and the snows resume, we are grateful for that which is visible outside the window, green by the water.
I use that phrase, green by the water, as both noun and verb, as state of being and as process: Look out the window to the west, and we see the jade leaves of the weeping willows and tall blades of emerald grass beside a pond filling now with wet snow; look at the earth, everywhere, and see grass and leaves and wildflower stems green by virtue of the visitation of the snow (and rain) itself. And in both respects, it reminds me of today’s featured throwback work, a commission by a dear friend from a little over a year ago. It was one in a series of hair cuffs that she had Wings create for her — five in total, if memory serves, each with a different stone and different symbolic imagery.
But in this case, the work began, very literally, with the stone.
Wings had acquired the stone from a friend some short time prior: a tiny oval of deep green Damele turquoise, its color bisected on a diagonal, half the color of jade and half the dark shade of a raw emerald. The entire stone was tightly webbed with a dark green matrix, and though it was very small, it was a very powerful, very valuable specimen of its kind. The fried who commissioned this piece had asked me to keep an eye open for something in a rich green, and when I told her that Wings had just acquired this one, she was interested. I sent her photos of it, placed against a ruler so she could see its actual small size; taken with the colors and patterning of the cabochon, she asked me to set it aside for her so that Wings could use it in a hair cuff, which she promptly commissioned.
At the time, she actually commissioned two such pieces, this one and one with a hawk’s eye cabochon that would complement a bracelet made by Wings that she already owned. He was undecided about the path the Damele one should take (she had left design elements to him), and so began with the latter first, letting the former percolate in his subconscious as he worked. And when it came time to turn his attention to that one, he found that the decision had made itself.
One essential element of the stampwork style of silversmithing is knowing when to stop. Wings has created powerful pieces filled with stampwork, hundreds of strikes in multiple motifs, and they come together perfectly. But he has also designed pieces entirely bereft, or nearly so, of any stampwork at all. When stones come into the mix, finding the balance is trickier, and even more essential . . . and when the “canvas,” so to speak, is a piece that is very small in physical size, it’s even more crucial to design it in a way that is harmonious for stampwork and stone(s) alike.
Such was the case with this piece: a small piece of silver on which to work, one to be set with a very, very small gemstone of extraordinary aesthetic power and value (and no small amount of spiritual power, either). He already intended to set the stone in the very center of the hair cuff’s top side, on the vertical. But what to do with the rest of the hair cuff, in a way that would neither overwhelm the stone’s presence nor detract from it as a focal point?
He settled on water.
Oh, not water in a literal sense, of course. But rather than fill the blank silver space with the business of ordinary stampwork, he chose instead to hammer it by hand, scores — perhaps hundreds — of individual strikes of a jeweler’s hammer, wielded lightly and delicately against a plain, solid-end stamp. It produced an aged look, eminently traditional. It also produced the appearance of water, a lake surface shimmering silver in the light.
Wings had begun, of course, by cutting the hair cuff from sheet silver, freehand. It was not especially large; a rectangle, just slightly off square, perhaps two and a half inches high by a couple of inches wide, if memory serves. Once the hammered stampwork was complete, He placed it against a small mandrel and gently hammered it into a half-round arc. He soldered a tiny oval saw-toothed bezel atop the cuff in the very center, then turned it over and repeated the soldering process with a length of thin but solid sterling silver half-round wire, hammered flat at the very top, then arcing upward at a ninety-degree angle and extending outward. This length of wire serves as the “pick,” which holds the hair in place in front of the lock or braid by way of holding the rubber band or tie around its end.
Once the solder work was complete, Wings oxidized the entire piece. He paid special attention, of course, the joins between the cuff and the bezel and pick, but with hammered silver, the way to make the appearance “pop” when polished it to coat it with a smooth layer of oxidation, then buff it thoroughly; the faintest of traces will remain on the raised edges of each hammer mark, giving it substance and depth and allowing the concave areas, by contrast, to catch the light. He chose to keep the inner part of the cuff a soft Florentine finish, but buffed the outer surface to a medium-high polish. In the photo, it looks like a mirror finish because of the refractive qualities of the hammerwork, but in reality, it was a little less shiny. Too high a polish would wear off all traces of the oxidation, and create a flattening glare where there should be texture and depth.
Buffing complete, Wings then set the stone . . . and it became clear immediately that his design choices were the right ones. It looked like a small green oasis arising out of a shimmering silver lake: in miniature, a very real rendering of green by the water.
In other words, at the end of a long winter when our friend was no doubt looking forward to the new green of warmer winds, a perfect piece for spring.
~ Aji
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