Gearing Up

This has been a unique week in the Pottery Kitchen.  After eighty firings of the salt kiln, eight firings of the alkaline kiln, and about thirty Kiln Openings, many things had become routine - meaning easier!  Joan and Betsy made delicious cookies, and Simi and I added various local cheeses and dips and vegetable bits. There was coffee and scones, hot cider or lemonade depending on the season, and whatever else I had fun rustling up to serve to our customers.  Good food, good friends, and pretty pots as well.  It has been a good twenty years or so.

I can’t help it. With Italian heritage, and from generous stock, emotionally and physically (those of you who had the good fortune of knowing my parents will attest to this, I expect) it follows that I like to feed people.  And I care about the food I serve, and I care about the people that are indulging in my choices. Delightful conversations, connections with old friends and new, seem to happen again and again around the refreshments table in the pottery workshop. 

Which brings me to this event. This is the 80^th firing of our first and only Salt Kiln.  I remember, as a young bride, watching it being built, six thousand bricks and several months of Mark’s labor in the midsummer heat. He had left England to try his luck in the US, and together we had chosen this somewhat isolated location. I remember thinking to myself as I watched the bricks being laid,  “clearly, I’m not going anywhere, anytime soon.”  Raised in New England and having traveled to forty-two states as a young adult (stopping to live in four of them) this was a new paradigm. I loved to travel, and never stayed anywhere for very long. But stay we did.  We chose this town, this farm, and we settled in.

It was 1983. Mark dug sixteen post-holes for a kiln shed in the heat of the summer sun.  Lucien, eighty year-old neighbor, said it best. "He’s not from ‘round here, but he’s the workin’est young man I ever did see." Luckily Mark only had heat stroke a couple of times that summer. Compliments about newcomers from Lucien, who had lived on this road for decades, didn’t come easily.

Then, with help from his German friend, Stephan, they built the kiln.  Meanwhile, I went off and got a real job to pay the bills. 

While he turned a chicken house into the workshop.

Today, we are still here. And, thankfully, those bricks have held up for yet another 2400 degree firing. The new pots are lovely.

So we have invited all of you to come and celebrate with us.

Our daughter, Emma, a natural events coordinator, is getting tents set up, and has been invaluable in helping coordinate what has grown into quite an event. We could not have done this without her. (Thank you so much!)

Our daughter Meg will be here, with her friends, to help with the checkout.

And so many others are cooking, cleaning pots, helping park cars, and the like.

Happy Birthday, you champion of cooked chunks of clay.  You have done a magnificent job at making soft clay into treasures.

We salute you. And we will eat delicious mostly local foods from farms and friends nearby, we will toast you with local beer and not-so-local-wines, all because of the gifts you have given to us all.

We are gearing up for quite a celebration.

Now all we need is a few folks to come and join us. Please do.

 Mom and Dad cleaning planters in the sun, about 1990