The onion is in place at the corner of Main St. and Colville St. in downtown Walla Walla, but I need to catch you up on how we ended this saga---sorta!

I left you in the last posting with the soldering taking place. The top and the base. The top is copper with an antiquing technique perfected by Ron. It blends beautifully with the copper colored glass and appears as a seamless whole. The base is black with strands of "roots" peeking out from under the onion. There is also a name plate and information on Gilded Glass and the artists who created the onion. There was much lifting and holding and it took two days. Ron and Floyd working non-stop. I fed them frequently! Worried aloud that they were about to drop the onion on the floor and tried to cheer lead, when I wasn't terrified of a last minute catastrophe.

Floyd did some mop up on the top with grout and some missing tiles. Then the two guys painted the bottom black--after soldering and attached the name plate. This was finished on Thursday night very late. [Keep in mind the WW Sweet Onion Festival starts Friday night.] The three worker bees sat in a quiet and very messy studio and stared at this enormous vegetable of glass and sighed and allowed as how we would miss her. Letting go was going to be hard, even though none of us wanted to say it aloud. Ron headed for home and three days off. . .he told Floyd he didn't want to watch the move.

Moving day was aided by a wonderful fellow from Tumac Machinery (local John Deere dealer). He told our friend Judy Stein that he has spent years helping Walla Walla "get art" and it pleased him no end. Apparently he has assisted with the installation of other pieces of art work. He arrived with a "shower cap" for the onion and carefully loaded into a truck.

A woman who worked for Nancy and Floyd years ago, Sara Strickland, has returned to Walla Walla and is a quite accomplished photographer. On Wednesday she did some new photos for us that showed us in our current thinner persona. We invited her to take pictures of the onion if she wanted and she jumped at the chance. She doesn't work on Friday, so we hung out down town waiting for the truck with the onion and talked and talked. It is so good to have her back in our lives. I included one of our favorite pictures from the collection she took. It is terrific. Anyway, she gets the credit for many of today's picture postings.

The next stop for the onion and Floyd was Tumac Machinery, where "Sweet Reflections" got her base. 300 lbs. of concrete. To keep it from blowing away or walking away in the back of some teenagers truck. We now know that she weighs about 103 lbs, without her base.

Then the onion moved downtown in the truck. The forklift from our local newspaper, the Walla Walla Union Bulletin arrived and the onion was moved from the back of the truck to the ground, where the pallet was removed in a wobbly and scary manner to grace the corner. A reassuring factor is that the onion is positioned to provide a perfect view to police security cameras. The onion is likely to stay downtown for several weeks, maybe the summer and then move to the airport. . .at least that is the current plan.

Floyd did one last cleaning job and "Sweet Reflections" became public art. Floyd, Sara, and I sat in the car and watched people come racing down the sidewalk and break stride to slow up and walk over and touch the glass. . .not good for a glass piece sitting in 85 degree sunshine. Hands off quickly. There were teenagers, old ladies, and small children checking it out. It truly is amazing how much art can contribute to a person's everyday life when it is easily available.

We are still at the office trying to reclaim our regular lives [as if anything in our lives could ever be characterized as "regular"] and preparing for weekend festival activities. Floyd will be selling glass at Farmer's Market and sharing a notebook titled "The Story of Sweet Reflections." This story comes to an end, but not really, the onion will be here for a long time.