Canvas for this piece was folded into the origami crane model for shibori dyeing process with turquoise and mixed turquoise/magenta Procion dyes. The resulting "underpainting" became the compositional structure for a painting of my backyard landscape in Southwest Virginia, a hillside that rises at too steep a grade to leave sky visible, but beautifully covered in tulip trees/yellow poplar, oak and maple and a vigorous understory including dogwood, spicebush, hawthorne, black cherry, ironwood and more. Composed during the winter, this piece represents the cyclical nature of seasons so pronounced in the southern Appalachians. Every fall I expected and got a visit from huge migrating flocks of blackbirds that would pit-stop in my yard to munch on dogwood fruits. Winter was wearing on me that year, so I folded another "paper crane" out of the canvas to remind me of the legend of folding 1000 paper cranes to get a wish. All I wished for at that time was a hasty return of spring, which of course would lead to fall and another visit from the blackbirds before winter began again, so I added silhouette blackbirds to my landscape and imagined ten times 1000 of them stopping in on their journey.