a love letter to the ghost town ceramicist

Dear ghost town potter,

I hold your coffee mug in my hand this morning while I write: rough adobe-colored clay, the outside surface striated by the pressure of your fingers, the seam of the handle indented where it meets the mug.  My fingers trace the shape of the cup, nearly cylindrical but for a tiny, graceful tapering at the base.  A parallel taper makes a ring just below the lip, which my own lip nestles into with each sip. The texture is of fine-grained sandpaper, finer than fresh stubble on a man’s cheek.  The effect is more polishing than abrasive.  My tongue at times slips over the lip of the mug and slides down the smooth, glazed inside.

The arch of the mug’s handle is surprising, a slightly oversized ear on the side of a delicately sturdy container.  In the candlelight, the handle throws a loop of a shadow onto my paper.  In the dancing light, I can see tiny flecks of black on the barely grainy surface. I rub my thumb over these as I write, the warmth of the mug pressing into my palm. I sip and run my lip again around the mouth of the mug, dry and sandy.  I think of you, the potter.

What can I know of you through your craft, this piece of functional beauty I found at your roadside stand? 

Or from the few artful photos on Instagram – the most recent from over a year ago? In one of them, you are intent on the ceramic bowl on your wheel, your strong, slight hands cupping the clay inward.  Your hair is up on top of your head in a messy bun, feminine and practical.  At the back of the frame, a man comes around a corner past the shelves of completed potter.  Your boyfriend?  Partner?

       On your Etsy page, there is only this:

                                0 items available

Wheel thrown and hand built ceramics made in a ghost town in Texas.

                   “I live to make things with my hands.”

Ghost towns. Pottery.  I imagine that Chaco Canyon pottery might feel like yours does on my skin. And that those potters, too, lived because they made things with their hands.  Where did those artisans go, the ancestral Puebloans who for centuries built structures of exquisite utility with their hands, like you do, and then, like you, disappeared?  Now theirs are ghostly towns, shards of pottery strewn on dirt floors, less populated than even your own – London, Texas.

Was it chance that your stand caught my eye?  I was on my way to the London Dance Hall – a one-Saturday-a-month-life-filled place in what was once a busy cattle and farming town.  Through the windshield, I saw your handpainted sign perched on the back of old blue pickup:

DUCK EGGS

CERAMICS

GOODS

and I bid my cowboy to turn around.  That day and only one other, I hopped down from his truck to look over your art. Your mug in my hand this morning reminds me that you do exist, for that world now seems a dream for me, the deep Texas that I long for and know is not my destiny.

         Do I know this about my destiny?  What is your destiny?  Why London for you? Why an almost ghost town? What made you vanish from online storefronts?  I turn your mug in my hand and let the mystery of you turn in my mind.  I love your craft, this mug built by your hands because you live to make things with your hands.  From your hands into mine, this mug - heavy and fine - brims with ghosts.