My name is Claire Yates. I am 27 years old, tall for my age, and reasonably fit but not what the fashion magazines would ever call beautiful. I don’t think much about that, having never spent any appreciable time looking at fashion magazines. I think of myself as a woman alone who makes pots in the desert. I have good life when I think of it at all.
The Official version of my childhood is that I was carefully raised by a successful business man and his wife. He was a salesman with pretensions he never quite attained. I was to go to college, study business, and do better in life than he had. That was the plan.
That worked well enough in the early grades. I did fairly well in school. I had my stubborn side, but usually backed down when it came to real punishment.
But as the school years passed, I became more and more of an artist and less and less of a future business woman. I did all the art I could get away with in school, accomplishing math courses to satisfy papa and to a lesser extent mama.
Then college came and I rebelled once and for all at the business major I reluctantly signed up for. I was not interested in economics, or business law, or management. I sneer at business ethics. An oxymoron if ever I heard one.
After one semester of business, I had it out with my family. I would not continue in college as a business major. I was interested in art. I would study art or not at all. Papa chose not at all. I left home at age 18 and went to the west coast hoping to study pottery making.
I enrolled in an art program. I was advised that art would encompass pottery making. Well, it did and it didn't. I got the degree, and did some 3D work that passed muster, or at least passed me, but I wasn't interested in large portions of what an art degree encompassed.
The ugly truth of the matter is that I am a potter. That means I make pots. You would be surprised how hard it has been for me to do that over the course of my admittedly short life. I knew I wanted to make pots while still in high school. I didn't make any pots then, but the art teacher did, and brought a few of them to class.
I was amazed at how beautiful they were, and functional too. It really took me that you could make something useful and beautiful at the same time out of what is basically dirt. It further amazed me that people had been doing that for thousands of years. That was an important part of my appreciation of the craft.
To put a simple end to this, I wanted to do that too.
Only after I graduated from college did I learn that artistic ability and desire to make pots did not produce an income, and that I would have to work at just about the same jobs I had held while in college, waitressing and barista work. I could do house cleaning, but there wasn't any money in it. House sitting, when it came along, was easier but paid no more and none of this permitted making pots. To make pots, you have to have space and time at a minimum. There is some equipment involved too.
So here I was wasting my time and my life surviving with temporary work, with no possibility of ever doing pottery. I was too busy and too poor to even think of it. But just for laughs, I picked up a copy of the free real estate sales rag on my way to work one day, just to look at pictures of houses I would never be able to live in. While looking at the houses, I saw a small ad for a caretaker for a house out of town with a number to call.