Saturday, July 18, 2009

Inventiveness

This is my daughter, up on the dining room table, painting her toenails each a different color.

Here's her inventive method for quick drying...lay out on the table and point your extremities toward the blowing fan.

It's hard to keep your stomach muscles tight so...

This is the easier way to dry...lay down and relax while the fan does the work! Smart girl!
Such a good example of ingenuity and creativity and such a perfect metaphor for what we are doing to keep our lives rolling right now. My husband and I, as you may know, own a pottery studio and gallery in our home. The gallery resides in our front livingroom and the studio is an old barn in our backyard that has been partially reconstructed and improved to house pottery making equipment and work space. We have been in Toquerville for 9 yrs. this Aug. 15th and, after much ado, we are still struggling to make ends meet. We have been faithfully trying to market, sell, wholesale and reinvent ourselves and Russell's work all these years. For a few short years we felt we had successfully 'made it' and that maybe our 'ship had come in' finally. But, as you well know, the economy has thrown everyone to the curb and we are not an exception. We rely upon local customers and all those visitors to Zion who drive right past our front door to the national park, but as of late, or as of the last year, we have seen less and less interested tourists. Our Toquerville Pottery sandwich sign languishes in the southern utah desert sun day after day without nary a stopper. Not only do our pocketbooks suffer but our spirits begin to lose hope.
I'm not telling you this so you can feel sorry for us or have pity, I am just giving you the big picture of our lives right now. Amidst this mess of a livelihood I am also a midwife to a dear, past client. I have helped her with two of her other children and by special request I am going to be in on 'catching' the third. I am excited and engaged but still feel like one foot is in the midwifery arena, one is in the pottery business and my third, spontaneously growing leg, seems to be in the elem. art teacher's arena. I also teach elem. art at my children's neighborhood school part time. This time of year I am moving my classroom to another one and redecorating and reorganizing and cleaning...the list goes on! You see, I am currently a tripod of sorts. I have a small or sometimes very large effort in each of these capacities. My husband is also growing an extra leg to join my three legged-ness because he is a full time potter and sculptor and tile maker, a part time Zion Nat'l Park shuttle bus driver and will teach part time at the university next spring. Between the two of us we are juggling six jobs...not to mention being parents to our three children and homeowners to a home from the 1920's that seems to always need some repair lately!!! Overwhelmed...tired...losing heart...feeling like we're having a mid-life crisis....we're ready for a streamlined change. So, this morning when our youngest decided to paint each toenail a different hue and dry herself with the nearby fan, I just couldn't help but draw a similarity between her inventiveness and our predicament which is requiring some serious inventiveness. I've thought about drowning my sorrow in a huge frozen custard or a long, long movie in the dark, cool theatre but that would only be a temporary fix. Maybe a good cry over a freshly picked onion out of the garden will do the trick....anything to get through another day!



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