When it became clear that we all needed to mask up, I made sure that the cat on my office mate's desk was compliant. The mask material is a long story.
At home, it was time to decide what to keep, what to smash, and what to give away. Mojo helped with the sorting.
I decided to keep these three and took the middle one to work.
With us all being shut in, we kept in touch online. One of my friends got creative in her yard, turning glass plates and saucers she'd found over the years into flowers and whimsy in her yard.
I felt inspired. I ordered a bottle tree, which is a real thing. I wasn't going to cover mine with bottles. Not exactly.
For the base, I used the bottomless Maine attempt.
It's slug-approved.
On the branches, I posed all of the practice vases that were too messed up to give away but not quite bad enough to throw away.
I posted pictures online, of course, and told my friends that, for a small donation to TASK, they could pick pieces from the branches. Two went to my friend around the corner, who is my biggest patron.
That left room for other pieces. After three iterations, the bottle tree stood.
In early June, a derecho tore through our neighborhood, taking out power and branches, including two from the oak in our front yard and one from the maple out back. The bottle tree didn't even shake.
Tacky? Yes. Fun to photograph? Of course!
In mid-June we got the all-clear to return to the lab. I set two of the pieces from the aborted semester on the shelf above my desk and cut some samples of the ornamental grasses outside of the building.
One of the vases at home got the chance to hold a sprig of hydrangea. More ornamental grass got shoved into one of the first vases of the semester.
June melted into July melted into August and we heard no news about class. The virus waned, then surged. I tried not to think about glass. I started photographing orb-weaving spiders in my yard instead, much to the chagrin of my online arachnophobic friends.
Sleepless and I would text each other regularly, in sprawling conversations about everything and nothing. Eventually I decided to break the silence and emailed Our Instructor. With less than a month to go before the fall semester, much was still up in the air. All he could offer was that we should all get our own eyeglasses. LT1 didn't have any insight either, but she noted the times that Sleepless and I would be able to work together all the same.
With two weeks to go, we finally heard something. Our Instructor sent us two videos of himself, in a mask, at the bench in our former classmates' studio, the end of his pipe attached to a tube that delivered air, controlled by a foot pedal.
The college sent specific instructions about how we were to proceed to a particular parking lot, report into a specific building, demonstrate our good health, receive a wrist band, then, and only then, trundle off to class.
Immediately, I knew that my first piece of the semester would have to have an opening wide enough to hold every wrist band from September on.
I'd have to make another drinking glass for my office, too. As if to mock me, my computer's slide show rolled around to the time the wrapped cup I was trying to make fell into the block bucket. The one I succeeded in making had served as my office drinking glass ever since. Crooked and off-center, the more I used it the less I liked it.
When I bumped it with my coffee mug and a piece of thread fell off, I found myself with a warm-up project for the fall.
Our first class session was five hours ago. We met on Zoom. Until I signed in, I hadn't realized how much I'd missed the whole scene. It was less of a class and more of a reunion, with several new beards, a couple of new faces, some missing familiar ones, and inside jokes that I understood, and even made. We know it's going to be difficult to blow glass without actually blowing. We know that we need to be strict about cleanliness and social distancing. We know we have to keep our masks on at all times. We know that our breath can never meet a pipe. If we need to drink, which we will, we need to step outside. We know that, with the maximum number of people allowed in the classroom at once restricted to five, we might not see each other face-to-face for a long time. We know that all it will take is one person to break the rules, or one person to get sick, and the semester will be over.
During all this time away, only one thought has remained consistent: I am no longer going to pressure myself in class. Every hour I spend in there could be my last for a long time. I'm not there to become a famous artist. I'm there to muck around. Sure, I'll work on fixing my errors and improving my skills. But I will never let the pressure of perfection steer me away from the sheer joy of being in a room full of nerds who, like me, can take a molten blob of viscous goo and turn it into something colorful and shiny.
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