Beautiful land on...

My bags have been unpacked for five days now and it seems more like five minutes. Everything is happening quickly and slowly at the same time. I am sitting looking out the window at the blackness that surrounds the farm with a hot cup of tea, after a bath, and  thinking of the many times over the last year that I dreamed of hot summer evenings with the dogs around. The TV is non existent and music set perfectly for the hard of hearing. It is playing " New Orleans suite", a Duke Ellington masterpiece I first heard at the Jazz Fest 2 years ago. Wynton Marsallis played it in the blues tent with full orchestra, and it stuck with me.

There is so much romance in the air here. Perhaps its the overwhelmingly pungent smell of black krim, brandy wine, green zebras, mortgage lifters, prudens purple, sungold, and striped German tomatoes fighting it out in the bowl over who gets to mount the burrata first. Such is young love, and the beginning of the harvest season. I admit to a slightly early season stop at Wallse in the Village that turned out very well indeed. I am so happy to be in Stanfordville after a wonderful trip. Time and space are the greatest luxuries, and at the moment I have both under a thin veneer of dog hair.

One of the things that gets impressed on me often by clients is their need to be able to wear jewelry in more everyday situations. The huge diamond must be in place, but the important pieces of jewelry are the ones people live in. What I mean is that there are pieces of jewelry that are entirely our own, ones that speak softly in a voice only the wearer can hear. Those pieces make no promises of never ending love, or misguided consequence, or the riches of halcyon days. They are the pieces we wear for the comfortable feeling on the tips of our fingers that make us feel good when we are alone. These pieces don't have to be precious in a tangible sense, they just happen to be better if they are, to me at least. I have a pair of cuff links that are made of wood, gold and pink tourmaline that are shaped like a chestnut. I found the chestnut in the tuilleries in my late twenties, and the cufflinks are the progeny of that genetic promise stranded on those little pebbles, so perfect for a casual match of petanque. The cuff links are right on every level. The designers that can harness these kind of pieces will be the ones people talk about in the future. I do believe diamonds are exceptional, but it takes courage to design jewelry in simple materials or restricted to just gold perhaps. The designer uses none of the material tricks that seem to please everyone. On some level I think that gold earclips are the hardest piece to design as one is forced to bring cold metal to life without the help of facets and refracted light. I plan to focus on these kind of pieces in a more serious way during the coming months, but for the moment I plan on feeding all five of the mouths around me some milk bones.