Fragments of a Summer Afternoon:

Summer has arrived at The Gables!  I love the in between months, spring and fall.  Their titles are apt and in those seasons when the world is rolling into the living and the dead I feel so energized by the changing everything.  This said, one of the loveliest things about spring is the way it feels like we’re all waiting for summer.  Gauging the advance of hot weather by the height of the tulips and the greenness of the growth that surrounds us.  There is the slow watch of unfolding spring bulbs into tulip, crocus, hyacinth, amaryllis and then eventually poppy, iris and allium.  
The slow pace of spring is gradually and fiercely gorgeous .

Then one morning we wake up and those spring beauties have faded away like macarons in a French patisserie window and the curtains of our worlds pull back to reveal summer standing in full glory with hair to her waist and sandals on her feet.  She is hot, bare armed and about to toss lightning bolts and singing rains from her fingertips.  
How sudden.
How sharp.
How simple. 
She hit the switch and the world is made of 
the fragrance of clematis, the taste of popsicles and the swing of croquet mallets.  
God bless that summertime.
She always arrives just in the nick of time.
This afternoon I have spread a blanket out on the lawn, beneath the plum trees, in the cool of dappled shade.  It’s windy.  I’m listening to the voice of air as it speaks through the trees.  Air is nothing without a vessel with which to make itself known.  I know it is because I hear it combing through the stature of the blue spruce, elm, catalpa and plum trees.  I know it is because I hear it moving bird song with it’s muscle.  I know it is because I can watch it push at the world around me, symphonic, as though it has the hands of a conductor and the music is for the making.  I know it is because I feel it passing over my skin and smoothing running fingers through my hair.  

I cannot taste it unless it carries dust into my open mouth 
nor can I smell it until pushes the scent of lilacs up against my ol factory senses.  
I cannot see it unless it’s controlling the world 
around me (for all things must bend to the wishes of the wind).  
I cannot understand it unless I watch it manipulate my environment.

This is what I’m busy with today.
I’m understanding the wind.
A beautiful Sabbath to you all.
I hope you found rest for your souls.

xx
The Plume

PS  I know there have been plenty of creature photos lately so if you loathe creatures, my apologies, certainly!  I’ve been photographing the beasts a plenty for RW namely.  He reads this blog by phone in his smokejumper bunk house.  I know he misses our beasties and am trying to help take the edge off with the odd handful of images of our fur and feather babies as often as possible.  If you’re fit to be tied by all the fur and feathers just do slow blinks while you’re scrolling through my blog and I promise you’ll nearly miss it all!

PSS  

The new neighbor is moving in.  I was taking out the compost while he was unloading his truck.  I’d have stopped to say hello but he had a phone growing out of his head.  On the seat of his truck was a taxidermied duck in a glass box.  Now read my tea leaves please — what on earth could it mean?!!
There is a time
every day
when the world seems to spin gold.
Each breath we take is currency
each glimpse into the 
face of sunset
costs.

I travel home
and weave the gold of my hair
into small squares
that hold that sun spun time.
Still and warm.
Captive and wild.

In my hand rests a 
measurement
of daylight past
slow tender slants
falling East
and we murmur 
down below
about the long shadows cast
about the rising chill.
We wrap our arms about ourselves
and fade into night.

https://www.thenoisyplume.com/blog/2010/06/18/707/

Let’s go walking:

It’s so good to be home again!
I missed the hills.  
I know!
I’m ridiculous.
I was only in Salt Lake City for a day.  Actually, I was there from 4PM Saturday afternoon until 2AM Sunday morning. Which reminds me, something needs to be addressed:

She sang to me.  I was there in a crowd of people.  No one knew me except for her.  When she sang there’s beauty in the breakdown I knew just what she meant and I couldn’t help but cry a little bit and I didn’t find her weird at all.  In point of fact, it was refreshing to see someone behaving normally.  I had my camera with me and every now and again, when the large tree on stage was lit neon violet and her glass baby grand was booming with sound and the bass was thumping me in the chest, I thought to myself:
Self, you should take a photo of that. 
It’s amazing.

But then I realized I didn’t want to share the experience.  I wanted to bottle up ever moment of it JUST for me.  I’m sorry I’m such a hog!  No I’m not.  Ok.  I’m sorry just a smidge.
One thing I like best about Imogen, I think….is that she constructs songs….the way I construct jewelry.  We have our dissimilarities, she and I, of course, but there’s something about the way random things weave in and out of her music that reminds me of some of the things I have built.  I’m not saying this because I feel a need to be connected with her.  I’m not obsessed.  I just understand some of the structure of her songs in a solid way that could easily be translated for me — into jewelry or small sculpture.  I’m not even sure what I mean by this except while she was playing her music, I felt something stir and then there was an easy understanding that fell down to me.
Which is why it’s only fair that someday I WILL share something I have made with her the way she has shared what she makes with me.

If she comes to your town, you need to go.
You really do.

And a short but important list of thanks:

Thank you RWK for loving me.  I miss you dreadfully.  Sometimes I dream of getting tangled up in a parachute with you and I wake up with a dog in my arms.  It’s ok, but I’m not so keen on all the kibble breath and snoring.  You are the delight of my heart.  I always believe in you.
Thank you KJK for encouraging me and for praying those bright lights into existence on the corners of everything I touch, and here, steady on my fingertips.
Thank you HMO for being eversteady.
Thank you luminous old big world for being so full and so real.
Thank you Muse for picking me back up!  I know there are a lot of us to juggle in your dexterous fingertips, I know, so thanks for noticing that I’ve hit the ground and for swooping down and lifting me up and into rotation again.
To everyone who has taken the time to write to me, email me, or send me something in the post these past couple of weeks — you make emailing and checking my snailmailbox a complete joy.
And thanks YOU.
You mean the stars to me.

xx
PLUME

Confessions of Typewriter Tuesday





















Sometimes it’s fun to set out and see where the road leads.
xx

The Littlest Birds Sing The Prettiest Songs

Sunday was a day of discovery at The Gables.
I found myself working for hours and hours in my studio, completing old ideas, satin finishing projects I dug up from the depths of my workbench and when my work was finally through I tied shoes on my feet and flew up to the hills.
A steady stride carried me up through the sage, past hillsides of hip-tall Midas grasses, past the Russian olive grove, through the cool damp of the maples and the white limbs of the aspen, over one spring creek and then the next and then high enough that it was only the junipers and I aloft on down valley drafts and the heady scent of scaled leaves in the spring sunlight amidst stubborn patches of snow. I tried to watch the ground as I ran but my eyes were drawn up, time and time again, to the tree tips laced with Idaho blue, which is exactly where I was looking when I found this.

It took an easy climb and the quick snap of a branch to retrieve it. It fit in my palm so well, it was as though it was slip cast from my hand. Inside, the detritus of last year. Small, disintegrating grey turds and a pair of matched leaves; weathered and crisp. It was otherwise empty. A small grey abandoned house, slightly aslant in the wind, timbers hanging on by mere threads. (And in the corner of the bedroom a sun bleached nightgown fluttering on a hook.)
Who, in this world, takes the time to build a home of sticks, grasses and spit anymore, but for the birds? They keep our hope buoyant on their matchstick legs. Bright eyed. Beak clacking. Wings folded in prayer. Complex songs and offerings on their tongues, weaving melodies and warbles like women at looms. Balancing the world on their flight feathers, diving in the breeze and stalling in the gales. And at night, heads under wings and a soft coo to anyone who will hear.

And then in the garden, nestled between two tulips, memento mori, free of the stench of death, cobwebbed and crusted with dirt. The smallest skull with a perfect beak but a throat song long evaporated into the living landscapes of Idaho.

Translucent in the sun.
Creatively designed.
Placed there by the tides of time and the provident hands of God for me to discover and thoughtfully turn over and over again in my fingertips.

Birds of the past,
I wonder what wings my way in the future.