The snow is finally melting, even the pile off the side of the house, that mountain that grew from plowings. Temperatures are easing into the forties. I can spy grayish grass between the islands of snow and the tips of daffodil leaves poking through the ground. Daffs, hyacinths, mud, birds, green: Spring promises all of these, plus, for me, pottery. My unheated studio is fit for nothing but firings during the coldest months, but in a few weeks, as soon as it warms up a bit, I can start puttering out there.
I’ve missed pottery, especially the feel of the clay, sumptuous and unctuous and malleable. It’s a forgiving material. If I mess up—say, bump into a pot—as long as the damaged piece hasn’t met the kiln yet, its body is salvageable. I can pat the clay back into a ball, rewedge and rethrow it. Even a bone-dry, unfired vase can be reborn if it breaks. Thrown into the watery scrap bucket, it will lose its vase-ness but not its substance which merely returns to a state of softness. Sure, accidents cost time. And there’s no reattaching a bone-dry handle to a bone-dry mug. But in the pre-fired period, everything isn’t lost. The essential medium remains. There’s consolation in that. What’s the worst-case scenario? Start over.
Most of the pieces I share on social media are finished and therefore past the point of no return—mugs, bowls, plates; glazed, fired, ready for use. But every so often, I’ll post a pic of a pot in the works, a cup, freshly thrown and wet on the wheel, or a just-trimmed bowl, the red-brown of spring muck. And occasionally, in response to these underway projects, a friend or two will admit they like pots best like this, when they’re in-progress and more kin to clay than dinnerware. I get it. I’m partial to the unfinished, too.
After all, endings are hardly ever purely happy. Finished isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Though I labor in the direction of completing whatever I start, the completion doesn’t necessarily satisfy me. Glazes may turn out drippy, flat, lackluster. A foot fractures. A side warps. An air bubble pops. There’s an explosion. Or perhaps the culmination of the creation satisfies a little too well. When a piece turns out particularly pretty, like a gift from the kiln gods, I’m tempted to keep it. I rarely do. I wouldn’t be able to afford to make pottery if I didn’t sell it.
Better to love the process, even when it’s rife with mishaps and mistakes and bumps and blunders, and to take comfort in the promise of do-overs. This may be a cold comfort, I know. The larger world teaches us that. When things look bad, carrying on is hard. The prospect of fixing is daunting. How much has been destroyed, we think. How needlessly senseless the destruction, we say.
But the story’s not over. Until the final crucible, the story is still happening. And a story, my friends, can be changed.
