the blue muse

A perfectly perfect peony bud, it makes me think of possibility, things to come, the potential for beauty, and … summer.

Sometimes I feel like this should be a gardening blog because I am always taking photos of my flowers, but there they are and they look so lovely and well, it is hard to resist. My peonies opened just yesterday, which is quite early, but it has been so warm here that flowers are popping out everywhere, and for me, peonies mark the beginning of summer. They just do. And I know they won’t last because it is just too hot, so I went out and cut bunches and bunches and now they are all over my house. They smell wonderful.

And then I have, in front of me, this plate full of possibility, new jewelry pieces fresh out of the kiln… this is how they look after I mold and press and collage and shape and sand and fire them, but before I tumble and oxidize and sand them again and tumble them some more…

Underneath that white coating is .999 pure silver. By the end of this week, they will be ready to make into jewelry and that is good because our first show of the year is rapidly approaching… June 5th will be here before I know it!

I love the first days of summer, the possibility, the promise, the anticipation, it must stem from those days as a child when school was just about to get out and I knew that soon I would be barefoot and carefree and riding bikes and going to the beach and reading lots and lots of books in a hammock beneath a tree in the backyard. All that free, unstructured time stretching before me…

Each year, I try to recapture just a little bit of that feeling. I can’t take the whole summer off, (I wish!) but I try to fit in a few of the things that make summer seem magical, Sunday afternoons reading in my garden, evenings outside in front of the fire pit, watching fireflies and listening to crickets, a long lazy day at the lake with a picnic basket full of fruit and cheese and lemonade, a stack of magazines and the sound of children splashing in the background… there is just something about summer that makes time go slower, nights last longer, books more memorable, music sound better.

Don’t you agree?