California Blue

Equal expanse of sea and sky.

White musk thins the air out over that expanse, and from the hillside everything below disappears into the Pacific. Sea salt sharpens the edge of it. Seaweed sways underneath like a lullaby, and linden blossom keeps the sweetness off.

The sun lowers with commanding presence and no charisma, goes down screaming, its hair standing on end, until the expanse swallows it. Lime and fresh ginger cut cold across the last of the light, and coastal air carries them. The bathtub is clean and ready. The bucktoothed horses are happy, or at the very least contented. Cedar and vetiver come up colder as the heavenly fog arrives.

Sister is the work of Jenny Mulder and Melina Cortez, and it begins with the world of Roy Orbison. Mulder carves the bottles by hand and they are cast in pewter, fifteen of each. Cortez made the fragrances. Three of them, released at once. Italian glass figures and handmade glass lamp panels sit alongside them, each one an edition of one.

A hillside at the end of the world with the sun going down into the Pacific. A small town under a sky domed like a cathedral, radio on and windows down. A crowded room at the moment the song changes and something shifts. Mulder writes as well, and works in ceramics: Traveling Through Light is an essay about driving, and about the way light sits differently in a Tucson desert and a Tuscan afternoon.