Some potters can connect their love of working in clay to early childhood memories of clay-making with a parent, grandparent or in a youth class. I have no such memories but I do find an early connection to my clay-working addiction. Two, in fact. First, I have always been strongly attracted to ‘hand-made, home-made”—textiles and food, for example. I never feel more elegantly dressed than in some of the wonderful Mexican hand embroidered shirts and dresses that crowd my closet. (That is one in the photo under "About Me".) I love setting my table with the hand-made pottery that we bought in Dolores Hidalgo so many years ago and I love serving the food I make in stoneware cooking vessels. I can’t imagine a more beautiful bedroom than one with a hand-made quilt for the cover of the bed. Second, I am stuck at the two-year old level of wanting to “do it myself”. If I am treating someone to dinner it will be a dinner I have prepared myself! When I see something beautiful in a gift shop I want to figure out how to make it—more than how to have it! So it is no surprise that I love getting to make pottery. The big surprise is that it took me so long to discover that I might do just that! Perhaps I realized that with raising a family and helping to run the Montessori school we started I had not the time or the money to get into such an avocation. That was the surprise waiting for me at my retirement! And what a glorious treat it has been for this end of the journey. The challenges and the successes are constant joys. I consider myself incredibly lucky and fortunate to be doing what I am doing and to have the support of Jim, my husband.
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