I’m back up to my old tricks remodeling our house – this time we decided, after much discussion, to add a jacuzzi to our lap pool. We know we’ll enjoy it and obviously guests and family will too. Right now, they are just digging an enormous hole out there, but when it’s done it’ll be great. We are “between” house guests right now and of course it is the dry season so it’s definitely the time for construction, and we have it going on both in front of the house and in the rear, so it’s a bit nuts around here these days, with two crews working at the same time. And in typical Mexican fashion, they arrive around 7:30 a.m., have a quick breakfast under a tree out there, and then are hard at work by 8.

There were two burglaries on our little “privada” a few months ago. It had to happen sometime. In the first, some garden tools were stolen from a neighbor’s cochera (garage) and in the second, the burglars apparently managed to get into the house – it’s a weekend house and the owners are rarely there – wandered around checking things out but for some strange reason didn’t take anything. Still, it made us stop and think that our front fence was sort of a joke for any determined ratero (thief) and we though we should build it up higher and make a solid rock wall with iron spikes on the top. I of course asked our architect for his opinion and he came up with a couple of really great ideas for redesigning the entryway and front garden, and then I began looking at the whole thing with fresh eyes, and now I am doing a bunch of things out there that will make it a lot nicer, in addition to giving us a much greater level of security and privacy.

Having the new wall go up just forced me to finally inaugurate my ceramics studio, which has been unpacked and waiting for my arrival in there for more than two years. I knew there was going to be a big, new, blank cement wall facing the street that just cried out for me to make our own address tile and some other elements that could be embedded into the cement around it. My plan was to have the tiles all done by the time the wall facing the street was ready to be cemented over — and that day was today. Of course it didn’t happen, too many things got in the way — for one thing I’ve had a horrible flu-like bug for a month and am just now coming back to normal. Then when I finally did get out there and get the long-dried-out clay ready to use and all the equipment functioning, we hit an unusual-for-us-here cold spell and the clay I had rolled out and cut has just refused, for at least a week, to dry. So I missed my deadline but rather than get too discouraged about it, I just told the guys to cement it with a half-inch less at the wall surface so we can loop back in a couple of weeks, install the tiles when they are done, and cement it all over then and finish it. I am working on the whole project every day and it will be done in a couple of weeks, I am sure. No real harm done but it would have been nice to have the pieces all ready to go up onto the wall today!

The good thing about the whole exercise is that it did, by hook or crook, finally get me back into ceramics. I have a great little studio now in back of our house – it is too small to house all my stuff but I’m figuring out how I can work with things spread out all over the place. The kiln is in the laundry, the slab roller and extruder are in the cochera, and all the glazing, painting/forming supplies and tools are in the studio itself. There’s a lot of running back and forth between “work areas”, but I figure the one thing I have learned is that – at least, the way I am wired – a studio that is too pretty and clean just doesn’t get used. In our old house, my studio became the guest casita whenever that had to happen. It was such a hassle to clean everything up in order to switch its purpose every few months as we had visitors, that I just stopped working completely after awhile. Now, it seems like it might be different with this crazy arrangement we have here. The guest room is its own separate thing and I don’t need that space for my work, so I have hope that now that I seem to be conquering whatever demons I had blocking me, maybe I will have better luck this time.

It is certainly harder to do my kind of ceramics here in Mexico than it was in the States, which is ironic since so much of my work is built upon and influenced by Mexican folk ceramics. But as a practical matter, the clay is different, the glazes are different, and a lot of the techniques I used back in the old days need to be modified here. But on the other hand I have found a distributor in Guadalajara of at least one kind of the glazes and underglazes I have used for years, and I’ve bought from him every now and then when we have gone into the city. The last time I was in there he said “you know, Señora, for the gas you have to buy to get here, and the time and stress of you coming into my shop, why don’t you just email me your orders, pay me by bank transfer, and I’ll ship your glazes out to you the next day?” I had filed this conversation in my mind at least a year ago, but this week I picked up the phone and called him and asked if he remembered me, the American lady who was trying to do ceramics in her home studio and needing materials. He said of course he remembered me, and what did I need, and he’d get an order together for me and ship it out right away.

I managed to haul myself into the bank in Ajijic to make the bank transfer this morning after I had emailed him my list, replacing dozens of bottles that were nearly empty, dried out, crystallized, and past reviving. So my new supply of glazes and underglazes should be here in a couple of days and now I am researching some new-to-me, at least, clays that are available here and which I can experiment with. Of course you can have things sent from the States, but it is horribly expensive and slow. Plus, one has to think that obviously Mexico is one of the world’s great ceramics centers, and someone or other here has to be selling clay, glazes, tools, whatever people need to do their work. So my job was just to get over my nostalgia for the way I worked back in Santa Fe and begin to figure out what might work here.

It’s been ironic that I’ve had so much trouble getting myself back into the ceramics part of my life, now that I theoretically have all the time in the world, being retired. When I was working my problem was trying to cram precious studio time into nights and weekends, but Santa Fe Clay and the big ceramics supplies store in Albuquerque had absolutely everything and anything I could have wanted. But such is life, I guess – anyway it is fun to be slowly figuring, or re-figuring this whole part of my life out. When the tiles are installed up on the wall I will take some pictures of them and then hopefully start all over again with a new batch of clay. I had forgotten how much fun it is, and hopefully I won’t forget again going forward.