When to close a door

Who said that growing old is easy? I guess nobody, right? or at least whoever says it doesn't mean it. And it's a bit contradictory because most of us want to grow old, but that doesn't mean the process is easy.

Today I spent the whole morning at my mother's house helping her dismantle her pottery workshop. And I spent the morning a little nostalgic. I can't imagine how hard this is for her.

My mother always had an artistic streak, although she never made a living from her art. When I was a little girl, I remember that she painted in oil, but a few years later, she discovered pottery as a true passion.

For years, making pottery was her favorite hobby. It relaxed her, and it allowed her to explore all her creativity. She experimented with lots of techniques, modeling, lathe, working with sheets, and extruders. But she also mingled materials.

I like all her pieces. But my favorites are the ones she did for a while to be mounted on wood, to hang on the wall, like the one at the beginning of this post. That one is at my mother's house, but I have some of those pieces at home.

My mother hasn't done anything in ceramics for some time. She stopped working after she had a bowel obstruction in 2019. However, she refused to dismantle the workshop with the idea of someday taking up pottery again, but then in 2021, she broke one of her wrists, and last year, she broke his humerus shortly before she was fitted with a pacemaker. So this year, she is facing it. She will never do pottery again.

So today, we were cleaning up the workshop and took inventory of all the tools and materials. She has a lot of everything. Some girls might want a lot of the stuff because they are starting to set up a workshop for themselves and to give lessons.

While I was cleaning the tools, and sorting them, I couldn't help but think about what it all must mean to my mother. It seems a little sad to me. You shouldn't get attached to material things, but many of those tools have a story and cherish memories for her. She told me some as we cleaned them.

At some point, she told me to break the pieces that were in the workshop that she never baked. I didn't have the heart for that and suggested that we ask someone else to bake them for her. She could even paint them later.

So at noon, I came home, and besides being full of clay dust, a little sad and nostalgic. For my mother, it must be really hard, making pottery has been an important part of her life. It's like closing a door that you know you will never open again. Hopefully, she can start doing something creative that is more in line with the limitations that age has left her with. Her arms are no longer strong enough to use the lathe or the extruder, but she could paint.

I still have to sort through all the pottery books she has and, of course, try to sell all the things from the workshop. I hope whoever gets them will put them to good use and enjoy them as much as my mother did.

That's all for today, thanks for reading.

_{All images and writing are my own unless otherwise stated.}

© CoquiCoin

February 16, 2023

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