Yesterday was the 49th anniversary of our wedding. Gary and I were married under the pagoda tree in my parents’ backyard. We wrote our vows, a friends officiated, I made the wedding cake, a fruit cake, from a 100-year-old recipe, Joyce brought lasagna, The Chieftains sang on a record, and my dad toasted us from Shakespeare as his “warrior children”.

Our anniversary rings, more about goldsmithing, the Hood to Coast relay, and my preferred running conditions.

Gary put a nineteenth century garnet ring on my hand. I didn’t have a ring for Gary’s left hand, but he should have had sterling and gold. The rings disappeared earlier that day. I had made myself a simple band of green and yellow 14k gold and added a gold bead to the sterling ring I’d made Gary years before while I was a high school senior.

Mom flushed them.

Seriously. [To her dying day she denied this, but the rings had a red rouge high polish and were wrapped in bit of tissue. I believe Mom thought it was trash and flushed it. How did she miss the weight of metal? Good question with no answer.]

I remade two rings like the first I made for myself and we both still wear them. For the past 49 years I meant to remake that sterling ring for Gary. The other reason I was so stressed reentering the metal shop was wanting to make that ring. So that happened.

My hand at right, Gary’s at left. On Gary’s hand, the ring I made is at the top right after our wedding, then our 20th-anniversary ring from George Sawyer, then the sterling and gold ring I recreated last week with green and yellow gold scraps from our bands and one more colorful bead of leftover 22k cloisonné wire.

I wear my wedding band held in place on my little finger by a custom made carnelian ring by Janet Raskin. On my ring finger, I wear a stack of rings, one for each decade of our marriage: Barbara Heinrich’s granulation; George Sawyer’s folded gold, copper, and silver; Reinstein Ross’s hoop stock; and Polly Wales’s ring with gray and pink sapphires set in the wax, invested, and then cast in gold (the stones shift around in the process). I understand the techniques but would not attempt making any of these. I learned do a great deal in college, but granulation was still secret, folding fine metals wasn’t being done except to make swords, diamonds didn’t appeal to me in my 20s, and casting jewelry, as a jeweler-neighbor agreed, generally fells like cheating. Wales does something different.

My first lost wax casting was a life-size hawk in 8th grade. It’s sitting on the bookcase in front of me. Before I finished high school I’d also done steam casting and centrifuge. In the University of Washington forging studio my most impressive piece was a sterling vessel raised from a 7″ disk. In the other studio, I made pins and rings and pendants, sterling animal heads as the clasps of beaded bags. I launched into enamels. [My first enamels were made when I was ten years old. I can’t help wondering what my parents were thinking, but then again, I was a determined child.] In those years I learned to sweat solder, weave chain, set stones, plique au jour, repoussé, cloisonné, and champlevé. I crocheted sterling wire with beads in 1975 before anyone else seemed to have thought of it. [I had to check the spelling of several of those words and was surprised I got them right. I am a terrible speller.] I always assumed that the talk about how great it was to work with gold was all hype. Then I worked with gold. Gold is just so easy, clean, elegant, and you can work it and work it without metal fatigue. I wish I had been able to afford to work with it more than twice. But I was a cliché starving student, working my way through college. Clay had been so much cheaper! I won scholarships that helped. I worked 18-30 hours a week at the University Book Store. I participated in the University Street Fair and the Bellevue Fair.

My first large commission was in college just as I completed my second studio degree and before I changed majors again, an enamel wall piece mounted in a frame that I also milled from a raw rosewood board. I think there’s a good chance it’s still living in Idaho.

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This weekend is the 41st Hood to Coast relay, which covers nearly 200 miles from Timberline Lodge on Mt Hood winding down the mountain and west through the city of Portland and through the coast range to Seaside, Oregon. The first wave of runners were out this morning just after three. We left Portland early to avoid crossing paths. The traffic will be insane along that route, with the “largest running and walking relay in the world, with 12,600 runners in the Hood To Coast relay and 19,000 total participants.” Among the runners, six in one van, and six more in a second van, usually with a driver who does not run so runners can rest, the vans handing off to one another at five key exchanges. I ran that relay several times (maybe five times, I found my medals 1996-2000), always in position 7, first out of the second van. I ran in 96° heat and in the middle of the night over about 16 total miles in three legs. I still don’t like the heat, but running in the dark became one of my favorite things.

I’ve run in snow and sleet, gale force wind and driving rain. The worst is hail, where I draw the line. I have run logging roads, highway 101, and prefer the beach, but also city streets of Portland. I have run in many cities and many roads but never in the dark because it’s not so safe. Ashland, Oregon, for example, feels safer than anywhere in Georgia or Philadelphia, especially in the early morning. I was in New Orleans when a woman was killed while running at 8am in a city park. Locals shook their heads, “What did she expect?” I swam in New Orleans.

My ideal running conditions? I like temperatures in the 50-60s, the beach just before dawn at minus tide. NW Portland at that hour is generally good too. I once ran the highway for hills when I was training for the Hood to Coast, and despite a couple of close calls with inattentive drivers, I might still run highway hills weekly if doing so didn’t make Gary edgy. Rain is fine. Not hail. Heat is not my friend. Early morning cool, not too much wind.

Helen of Margaret and Helen is posting, and that is encouraging.