The Other Duff

[Duff Necklace :: sterling silver, copper, enamel, chrysoprase, carnelian, and Oregon beach stone]

A beautiful, curious piece featuring a large, fabricated, pod shaped form that acts as a cage for an exquisite Oregon beach stone in shades of periwinkled grey. Also note the lone flittering enameled leaf that shivers with autumn frost — worn, tattered and white.

Duff Necklace

[Duff Necklace :: sterling silver, copper, brass, enamel, citrine, carnelian and silk]

There’s a great fondness in my heart for this little necklace.  My favorite elements are the enameled leaves which practically shiver with heavy frost, the caged citrine nugget (like a pod full of promise) and that little solid sterling cast bone — cast by me — I found the bone on a sand dune on the Green River of Utah.  Just a wonderful little collection of natural bits and bobs.  Merry for the wearing.

[a dozen dark photos from the past week — thank goodness the clouds finally moved on]

It was terribly dark and stormy for a few days.  I love weather, but too many dark days in a row and it begins to feel like someone has reached out and pulled black curtains over the windows of my heart.  This morning, Idaho is bright and cold, twinkling and wild, rising up in humps of stone — the mountains are elk molars!  Precious, wild, earthen ivories.  It is, indeed, a very good day to be Idahoan.

We are hosting a stragglers American Thanksgiving feast later this week — which is just a silly way to inform you that we are hosting Thanksgiving for all our friends.  I refer to anyone who doesn’t travel for the holiday a straggler.

Get along little dogies!

We also have family coming to town for Thanksgiving which is a big deal for us.  Any time any of our family members take the time and energy to visit us here in Idaho it means the world to us.  I’ve been readying the spare room for them, and by spare room I mean the Airstream.  I hope they bring their warmest pajamas!

Last year, we cooked a huge elk roast for the table, with all the Thanksgiving trimmings.  This year, we are dreaming of and working on gathering enough game to roast one dozen wild shot pheasant for dinner.  We have even been experimenting with a few recipes.  Boy howdy.  Have you ever eaten a whole roasted wild pheasant?  Two nights ago we smothered a whole pheasant with honey and herbs, dutifully basted it to smithereens while roasting it and the meat was beautiful, golden brown on the outside, and tender and moist on the inside.  It was amazing.  It was delicious.  I’ll let you know how our feasting plans proceed.  Hopefully I’ll have an incredible photograph of a dozen roasted pheasants with their darling little drumsticks raised in wild defiance by the time Thanksgiving arrives!  I bought a gorgeous turkey, just in case Rob and I can’t harvest enough pheasant for the table by Wednesday…I suppose that makes me faithless…or perhaps wise beyond my years!  But oh, I love and believe in a wild harvested Thanksgiving!

—————————————–

Besides being wonderfully run off my feet with too many irons in the fire, these past two weeks, I have been suffering this feeling of being splayed out on a large map of the world, reaching and straining to touch all the places my most loved ones live, and failing to physically touch any of them at all.  Everyone and everything seems so far away at times.  Robert and I have always lived where we want to live and we have always felt free to chase our dreams, no matter where they might take us.  But the flip side of all that freedom is the fact that we miss our far away people, our various tribes, our families — we miss them all, all the time.  I tend to get especially lonesome and melancholy for my people this time of year, but I also realize how thankful I am for the incredible batch of friends we have here in town — friends who are like family to us.  That’s the truth of the matter.

How about you?  Are you where your people are?  Are you also splayed out on a map, trying to reach out and connect with all the ones who are far away and loved?

————————————

Boy howdy.  Didn’t November fly?  The months have wings.  If time flies, I’m a small rider on the back of a bird; it carries me forward and I hold on with fists full of feathers, my eyes are teary with wind, the seconds are measured in wing beats.

https://www.thenoisyplume.com/blog/2013/11/23/7182/

A Sunday Spent

This isn’t where I meant to be today.  I meant to be on the mountain in the background of this photograph, Scout Mountain, but the lower snow gates on the forest service roads were already shut and I remember that I felt annoyed by that.  I turned the truck around, muttered something impatient to Tater Tot who was leaning his head over the back seat and yipping excitedly in my ear.  I drove up a different road, parked at a snow gate, leapt from the truck while swinging my backpack on, released my wolves and set out walking.  I naturally shortened my stride, just slightly, to make up for the work of walking in snow.  My legs turned hot as I made my way upward, unused to the resistance of white.  I was all alone.  For a while, I followed what looked like a lady wearing size nine Sorel boots.  I veered off that trail when I opted to follow a set of deer prints instead.  Later I left the deer prints for rabbit tracks.  Later still, I strode out into unblemished snow, heavy with the warmth of the day, clumping and clinging to the tops of my boots and jean cuffs.  Above me a raven was swirling, singing out a throaty song, leading me on deeper into dreams and beyond.

The sky was heavy, the high places open and ripped by a sharp wind, there were coves of untouched douglas fir, still dressed in delicate blankets of snow.  The lichens on exposed rock blazed orange, crimson, chartreuse and mint.  I saw mule deer sailing through sagebrush like kites.  I crossed a spring, two, four, eight springs — feeling my heart lighten with the easy sound of mountain water flowing towards an important destiny.  I talked to myself.  I talked to the dogs.  I talked to the wind.  I fell into silence and simply walked and looked and breathed.  When I reached the highest place on my jaunt, I stood and looked out, turned myself in a tight circle and absorbed the full, panoramic scope of Idaho laid out beneath my feet, a wild blanket for walking on, a map of natural history, a skin scoured by sun and storm.  My Idaho.  The wind beat itself against the smallness of my body.  My hair flew out behind me like a yellow cape.  I thought I would be lifted up and carried off on the strength of the gusts.  I felt my feet turning cold, my hands numbing, my face stained pink in the royal shout of breezy decree.  Once I could stand it no longer, I left the peak, settled just below it, with my back to an ancient and twisted juniper, poured a little cup of peppermint tea and warmed myself.  The dogs ran loops through the timber, checking in with me, from time to time.  Tater barked at blue grouse, high and safe in the fir trees.  I sat deeper on my perch and savored the warm herbs of my tea.  I noticed the sky sailing past, littered with merry postage stamp patches of blue.  I noticed the distance growing between mountain tops and sky roots.  I wondered if I’d receive a sunset while walking back to the truck.

I began to make my way down, step by step, slipping and tripping on hidden stones and brush.  I walked side slope until I thought my ankles might break.  Tater busted a covey of partridge and chased them as they flew, like he had a heart full of Christmas.  Suddenly, the sky broke and the land was lit with glorious light and warmth.  Around me, the sage was glowing, the aspen like a thousand shy, slim brides.  It was heaven.  The light was heaven.  I made my way slowly through the glory of it all, reveling in the sudden warmth of unobstructed light and the details of the world around me.

I crossed a creek.  Then one more.  I pretended to be water and felt myself adore the glorious, magical pull of gravity.  I met a road, snowy and tracked with skis.  I rambled down it until I reached “nest alley”, a place I visit often, where every step along the creek reveals a new bird nest to be reveled in.  I found one I liked, pushed past thorny brambles, suffered a scratch on my cheek, and collected it for myself — delicate and neat.  I walked on, and on.  I passed two small butterflies cruising low in the cold of a steeply walled canyon.  I thought to myself, “I’m a different person now then when I first arrived here.  Something in me, something that anchored itself meanly in the corner of my heart, has been released.  The chains have been dissolved into mist with every step I’ve taken.  I can’t remember who I was a few hours ago.  I only know who I am now, now that I’ve been in the high places, smoothed by wind, purified by snow and cloud drift, cradled by the hand of God.

On days like this, the entire world seems underwing.  I suppose it is.  As if I needed to be blessed again by creation, by the healing of it and the beauty of it, already brimming, as I was, with joy and peace and fullness of spirit, the sunset and alpenglow on the drive home was wonderful and rosy and lovely as ever and as pretty as anywhere.

Smatterings

Yesterday I told him, “Feels like snow.”  Which I have always believed to be a Canadian phrase, specifically a Saskatchewanian phrase.  Is it?  Do you say it too?  Robert also uses this phrase and I cannot tell if he has always said it or if it’s one of those cross over phrases we use between the two of us and we simply cannot recall the origin of it or who actually said it first and brainwashed the other into repeating it.  We brainwash each other all the time.  I guess it’s true that when you love someone long enough you begin to become them.  Anyway, I told him, “Feels like snow.”  And he said it back at me and I felt the temperatures dropping and the wind growing mean and I had to let our big diesel truck warm up longer than I usually let it warm up because it felt a little creaky and stiff and it’s very good for diesel engines to have luxurious wake-ups.  Big trucks are quite like me in that regard.

This morning, I woke up rather early, looked out the windows and sure enough, there was snow!  I rose, penned a couple of letters to far away friends in the blue light of dawn, delighted in the whistle of the kettle on the stove top, watched the snow fall on my cow skull collection outside the big kitchen window, ate a little breakfast and then went out to ramble in it all — to tumble around in the weather like a big, round, lonesome weed.  It was beautiful, stark, stormy and it felt awfully fresh to have my feathers backcombed by the wind.  Wintertime is my happy place.

Items of note:

I watched the 2011 version of Great Expectations this week.  Lord have mercy.  It is beautiful.  Gillian Anderson is perfectly disturbing as Miss Havisham.  I couldn’t tear my eyes away.

On the bedstand:  Seven Gothic Tales, Gift From The Sea, Wildwood, The Language of Flowers, All-American Poem, and I found a clearance copy of Lebovitz’s Pilgrimage while in the city this week!  It’s gorgeous!

Playing in the studio:  Mack & Ryan (naturally), Brooke Waggoner, The Goldberg Variations and The White Buffalo.

Now I must skedaddle.  I’m halfway through an enormous enameling project I hope to finish up next week.  Hope you are all well and cozy on this fine weekend!