fresh from the kiln, after a graceless fall

Never good when you go to bed at midnight and you are up and working at 1 AM. And not very pretty when, hours later, in an all-out sprint in your graffiti Doc Martens, you run to catch a train and fall on the escalator that (darn) keeps going up and up.

Good when you save yourself in the nick of time.

But such a pretty day it was, and so nice to be in the city among friends and a former student and kind strangers. And how nice to return home to three new kiln pieces, collected by my husband earlier in the day. As always, the organic shape is mine from scratch. The well-made bowls are well made by my husband, but glazed by moi.

I'm going to miss the world of ceramics, as new responsibilities force me to put that once-a-week hobby at rest for the time being.

Off to make my first holiday meal for my father and a friend. I'm not sure why I chose to work with new recipes at this hour, this late in the day. But the house is pretty. The tree is up. There is wine. There is the cake baked during a dawn hour.

We will be fine.