Wre it not for the new green everywhere, one would never believe it’s spring.
The winds are bitter and brutal, the cold cutting all the way to the bone; the clouds have turned the sky to lead, and although we have had only a scant few raindrops here thus far, it’s possible to see the snow falling over the peaks at this moment.
Here, May is supposed to be the month that banishes winter at long last, leading us gently toward the heat — and the rains — of summer. I suspect that we shall feel the heat before much longer, but even if the next tweo week’s worth of forecast precipitation actually materializes, I expect the rains to be short-lived.
This is our new pattern here, could we actually be said to have one anymore: extended trickster winds, and extended cold with them, followed by a faint and early monsoonal period that has spent itself utterly before June is out, abandoning the land to drought once more.
Such possibilities make this nascent green all the more important now, and our fast-telescoping timetable compels us to the work of summer before winter has even truly departed.
If that forecast should hold, it would mean that we would be granted some two weeks’ worth, at least, of monsoonal storms here. Even those patterns are altered now, though, and so what we might receive — if anything at all — may still bear no real resemblance to what our warm season should look and feel like here. For now, we have a world in early leaf, a new moon to light the grassy earth throughout the shorter hours of dark, and from the trees still struggling to breathe, what flowers from day into night.
This week’s #ThrowbackThursday featured work seems to embody the last of these: of trees laboring to leaf, extending their branches toward the light — a process of respiration for the earth as a whole, work from which they are granted rest and respite only in the dark hours of the night. It’s a pair of earrings wrought in an old traditional stye, one of two very similar yet distinctive pairs that Wings created around the winter holidays of 2010, if memory serves.
And the focal stones are of a similarly distinctive material, one not much found in this region: gaspeite.
I’ve written here about gaspeite before. It’s a calcite mineral, so named [despite plenty of misinformation out there among dealers about its origins] because one of its major deposits is found in the Gaspé Peninsula of the lands now known to most of the world as “Quebec.” It’s generally manifests in greens that range from lime to pear to seafoam, usually with significant matrix. That matrix can be patchy, webbed, or both, and ranges in color from golden brown to sepia to charcoal gray to jet. The matched specimens in this pair of earrings are unusually large, perfect in stone color, and finely veined and webbed with both browns and gray-black.
These were one of two matched pairs in the same large size [somewhere between 1.5 and 1.75″ long, I believe] and perfect teardrop shape that Wings acquired well over a decade ago: in 2010, if memory serves. He used them both in earrings late that year, around the winter holidays, in pairs that were very similar to each other, and yet also unique. Both pairs featured low-profile bezels to hold the gaspeite cabochons. so spare that one barely notices them at all.
The difference was in the type of bezel and in the accent work.
The other pair was set into a saw-toothed bezel, finely serrated and just as low-profile as these smooth bezels. That pair also featured a row of accents around the lower arc of the bezel, too, but instead of three stones, it consisted of four smaller round ingot blossoms: each melted, poured, molded, and cooled by hand into tiny ball beads, then stamped on the upper surface in a simple blossom motif, and lastly, overlaid beneath the bezels of the focal stones, as though each green teardrop was flowering into something wholly new. I featured them in a previous post in this space some years ago, and you can see them here.
That pair was purchases by a dear friend who wore them at her wedding, but if memory serves, she also own this pair, too: nearly identical stones, with perhaps more visible green and a little less matrix webbing; a spare, perfectly smooth bezel around each teardrop; and below, three round glossy onyx cabochons of mysterious depth, each set into its own small scalloped bezel overlaid beneath the gaspeite.
These onyx cabochons were a bit larger than the ingot ball beads, and so, to preserve the proper proportions, Wings chose to use only three beneath each focal stone instead of four. In both cases, the proportions are exactly right, neither too large or too small, not too busy and not too sparse.
Once all of the bezels were soldered together, he added a tiny sterling silver jump ring on the reverse at the top of each teardrop, then threaded a sterling silver coil-and-ball-bead French wire through it. The result was the glowing gentle green of a early summer’s day above the glossy black of night. And if you look back at the middle of the three photos in Tuesday’s post, you’ll see exactly why the webbing in these particular stones makes me think of trees in the late spring winds.
I have written here, and recently, too, about the role of trees in the world’s respiration, that post centered specifically around the same willows that appear in Tuesday’s post linked immediately above. We are taught, in school, that it is called photosynthesis, but in truth, it’s nothing less than our ability to breathe, to live.
But science now knows that even trees need respite, that they relax and sigh and rest in something approximating sleep. We all need rest, never more so than at times such as these. It’s what allows them, and us, to thrive, and what flowers from day into night and back again.
~ 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.
