123 Easy Lane. The site of my personalized surprise.
On the door, a decal reads EARTHEN, along with some hours of operation, but in the glare of bright sunlight, I can’t make out much through the windows.
I check the time on my phone: 9:16 a.m. If I remember correctly, the itinerary said Sabrina’s “personalized surprise” for me would start at nine. I waffle for a moment about going in, then bite the bullet and push the door open.
A gust of warm air meets me.
“Harriet?” a woman’s voice says.
I blink as I wait out my pupillary dilation from the sudden change in light. “Yes, hi!”
I turn toward the voice, wondering if she can tell I can’t see her, or anything at all, yet.
“Your space is all ready in the back,” she says.
“Great.” For some reason it doesn’t occur to me until a half second too late that I could tell her I have no idea why I’m here. Or where here is.
My vision resolves as she leads me to the back of the shop, the floating oak shelves that line the walls coming into focus along with all the kitchenware for sale on them. Bowls, plates, cups, all in candy-colored tones that pop against the gallery-white walls.
The shop’s attendant—a woman with blunt fringe, flared pants, and hoop earrings, all of which look plucked from the seventies—leads me down a hall to a room twice the size of the first one.
I pull up short, no less shocked than when I walked into the cottage and saw Wyn there.
“Feel free to take whichever wheel you want,” the woman says. “No one else has space booked until four.”
I still haven’t managed a syllable when the bells over the shop doors ring behind us, and the seventies demigoddess says, “Let me know if you need help finding anything,” and excuses herself to greet the new customer.
I stand there, computing.
The back wall is all windows, looking out onto the next street. Wooden shelves, like the ones in the front of the shop, stretch from one wall to the other, laden with bowls and vases and mugs. On the right, clay-streaked, pastel-toned aprons hang on hooks, and down the middle of the polished concrete floor sits a long wooden table, potter’s wheels atop it at even intervals, stools pushed up to each of them. On the left wall, there’s a long counter with a sink and a bunch of cabinets and drawers, and from the ceiling, pothos and philodendrons hang like living streamers, catching the light as the pots twirl one way, then back the other.
A lump is rising in my throat.
I couldn’t have mentioned my pottery class to Sabrina any more than three times. I know this, because in general, I find talking about the class embarrassing.
Afraid people will take me too seriously, then be disappointed when they find out how mediocre I am at it. And somehow, nearly as afraid that they wouldn’t take it seriously, that they’d brush it off with a mild Well, everyone needs a hobby when it feels like so much more.
Not a career—I’m not good at it. Something else. The place I go when I feel trapped inside myself. When I’m terrified that all my happiest moments belong to the past. When my body is humming with too much of something, or aching from too little, and life stretches out ahead of me like a threat.
In our few phone calls since I’d started the class, Sabrina asked a couple of blunt follow-up questions about it, and I gave succinct answers, then turned the conversation in another direction. It was one more piece of my life I hadn’t felt ready to share before this week, and yet Sabrina saw it, saw me more fully than I realized.
Because this week wasn’t about torturing Wyn and me, and it wasn’t just about preserving our delicately balanced found family either. Everything she did, misguided or not, was out of love. Out of knowing us and caring that we’re happy.
I go to the wall of hooks and choose a blush-pink apron, looping it over my neck. Then I go to the drawers on the far side of the room and begin gathering supplies.
I fill a bowl with water and set it on the table along with a couple of tools, a sponge, a hunk of clay.
Not having a distinct plan before I start a project rarely turns out well for me, but I don’t care right now. It doesn’t matter what I make, only that I appreciate the time spent making it. It will feel good to dip my hands in mud, curve over the wheel until my back aches.
I take the stool closest to the windows and pound the clay into a ball. Then I plop it onto the wheel and flatten it with the heels of my hands.
The moment I slip my fingers into the water to start coning the clay up, calm floods me. My thoughts fritter away. I press the foot pedal, maneuvering the lump of muck upward as it centers on the spinning wheel.
I lose myself in the rhythm of it.
Coning it up. Coning down.
I won’t have time to glaze it before I leave Knott’s Harbor, won’t have room to take it home in my luggage once it’s fired. I don’t think about any of that.
Throwing makes my mind feel like the sea on a clear day, all my thoughts pleasantly diffused beneath light, rolling along over the back of an ever-moving swell.
My meditation app often tells me to picture my thoughts and feelings as clouds, myself as the mountain they’re drifting past.
At the wheel, I never have to try. I become a body, a sequence of organs and veins and muscles working in concert.
I ease off the pedal, opening the clay. My elbows lock against my sides, thumbs dipping into the center, and as the clay whips past, a mouth widens within it. My thumbs curve under, thinning the walls beneath the lip.
The earthy smell is everywhere. Sweat pricks the nape of my neck. I’m dimly aware of an ache in my upper spine, but it’s only an observation, a fact requiring no action. There is no need to fix it, to change it.
Just another cloud drifting past.
The loose shape of a bowl appears within my hands. I take the yellow sponge from the table, pressing it lightly against the bottom of the bowl, smoothing the rings. Sweat beads on my forehead now. The ache in my spine snakes through my shoulders.
I take hold of the bowl’s thick lip and draw it upward, stretching the clay, coaxing it higher. When it’s risen as high as it safely can, I bring my hands back to the base, funneling them, collaring the piece upward.
This is my favorite part: when I’ve worked the clay into a stable cylinder, when the slightest touch can shift and shape it. I love the way that everything can so easily fall apart, and the ecstasy of finding a groove in which I know it won’t, without understanding the physics, the why. The clay becomes an extension of me, like it and I are working together.
It reminds me of something Hank told me a long time ago, about growing up on a ranch, training new horses.
He’d been good at it, apparently, and attributed that to his patience. He could wait out any bad mood. The anger of an animal didn’t make him angry. It helps you understand them better, he told me. You don’t want that anger becoming fear. You want it turning into trust.
And while there were a lot of things he’d hated about working at a ranch, he’d loved the feeling of coming to an agreement with another living thing, of understanding each other’s needs, giving space when it was time for it, and pulling close when it was needed.
Wynnie would’ve been good at it too, he told me. He’s always known how to listen.
At first, I mistake the sting for sweat catching in my lashes. Only when I feel the warm trails cutting down my cheeks do I realize I’m crying.