Boxes of Clay

By Dale Peterson

Boxes of Clay is the second volume in the series Stories from East Pickerel Corners by Dale Clarence Peterson.
This volume continues the laugh or you’re gonna cry saga of the Peterson family that began with their move from the sunny climes of Arizona to the snowy climes of northern New England. Leaving Arizona in the summer, with an average temperature over 100 degrees, and landing in New Hampshire transitioning to the first winter the family had known since before the eldest child had been born fifteen years before.
The old man, Dale, was a studio potter, a production potter. The family moved into a two hundred year old house with an old cow barn attached. Dale set up his production pottery in the old cow barn and the family learned in humorous detail what their new home required of them.
Which was never-ending chores, fixing stuff around and in the house that never seemed to stay fixed and making the best of a new life under a deep blanket of snow in the winter. Summers were a constant fog of mosquitos and black flies.
Peterson makes you laugh, makes you think and sometimes makes you misty eyed.
He takes you back to his studies in Art School where he learned his craft in order to bring you to the place where the telling of this saga takes place. Then he takes you in his kayak onto the narrow channel of moving water on a frozen river and out onto Big Lake under falling snow.
In this second volume of his three volume series, we introduced to two more of his children and taken out with his second son to play baseball and hockey. We are given some clues on raising a large family on a very small income and how that can actually be seen as an advantage ... if you allow yourself to be drawn into their world.
These pieces of life are told in the first person narrative with such skill that you feel as though you are sitting across a table from the author, in your favorite coffee shop.
Undoubtedly to become an American classic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dale Peterson
• Release date: Dec 23, 2013
• ISBN: 9781311981882

Dale Peterson

Raised in a military family, Dale Clarence Peterson spent most of his childhood out of the United States. He attended British schools in Bermuda and later in Liverpool, England and a High School of just 35 students in Keflavik, Iceland. His childhood experiences encompassed much that would seem wildly exotic to the average American child.He attended college in Utah and graduate school in the hippie culture of 1970’s California. He was a war-time soldier. He became an artist, a husband and father and finally a teacher. He has been recognized with two National Teaching Awards. His art work has been exhibited and sold across the country for over 25 years. Including in the Smithsonian Gallery.Mr. Peterson has written many Educational Grants and presented many professional papers at Teachers’ Conferences and workshops. He has served as member of the National Association of Independent Schools Accreditation Committee for technology. While he began teaching Art, Dale was one of the first educators in the U.S. to embrace technology in the classroom and served as a consultant in this area for two decades.What he truly loves, by choice, is the joys of life as a husband/father/teacher. Raising six children, and teaching hundreds of others in the classroom, beginning in the back woods of New Hampshire to the sophisticated whirl-wind of Washington D.C.. With everything he writes, he speaks from hard won experience.Retiring from teaching in 2012, Dale now spends his time writing and pursuing his other passions of sea kayaking and motorcycle riding. “The Dollar-Table Hammer” is his first published book, but far from his last. He is currently at work on no less than three others. You can expect a lot more witty observations on the wonders of big family life and the nature of the artistic mind, sometimes gone amok.

Book preview

Boxes of Clay

Written and illustrated by

Dale Clarence Peterson

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 Dale Clarence Peterson

First e-published 2013

Hartfield, Virginia

Volume II in the series Stories from East Pickerel Corners

License Notes: This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this ebook with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Edited by Heather N. Lennon

Ebook formatting by www.ebooklaunch.com

Look for The Dollar-Table Hammer. Volume I of Stories from East Pickerel Corners, also available on Amazon Kindle.

Whenever I get a new book, I have this habit of going to the back cover inset and checking out what the author looks like.

Not that it should matter. I just find reading the book more fun if I have a mental picture of the writer.

So I'm jumping the gun and putting me up front here just so's you, dear reader, will have some idea of what you might be getting into.

Dedicated with eternal love to all of my

children and grandchildren.

Author's Note and Acknowledgements.

It would be an irrevocable sin if I did not do more than just dedicate this book to my wife, Kathy Osinski Peterson. My writing any sort of literature at all is due to her faith in me and her unceasing encouragement.

My favorite authors, self-adopted mentors, and inspirational attachments are listed in a brief bibliography at the end of this volume.

In this day and age, I must reinforce the actual truth behind these stories; in that all names of persons or places are completely made up. For everyone's safety and security this is necessary. So, don't bother to go looking for an actual town of East Pickerel Corners, or try to find any of the characters described in these stories. In a very real fashion it does, and they do, exist and it all did happen, just under different names. I have mixed this with that to try and add additional disguise to real people and places.

Now ... I just love footnoting. Getting in some extra facts, or witticisms, without breaking the rhythm of the story's meter and action is something I love to do. But in the world of e-publishing, with all the many, many required formats for proper downloading, footnoting can be a pain. Every different e-format changes the page count and placement, and, in some cases, even the actual font size. So getting the footnotes to appear on the same page as the footnote marker is straight-up impossible.

What this means is that all my footnotes become endnotes for e-publishing.

Some readers and some e-formats will bring up the footnote by just mousing over the footnote (endnote) marker. Which is very cool. But not all of them do that.

So if your reader does not do that, the footnotes are at the end the book; being as how they are all actually now e-reader endnotes. Which is fine, once a reader (as in a person who is reading) becomes adept at e-reading. What you do is this; if you want to read the footnote (endnote) right away, to get the immediate context of its application, just click on the footnote (endnote) marker - as in this[1]. Then when your device reader takes you to that endnote, simply click on the marker in front of that endnote and your reader will take you back to exactly where you were in the book.

You can also just wait until you finish the whole book and enjoy all of the endnotes as a sort of a bonus chapter.

I hope this bit of techie advice adds to your enjoyment of my efforts. Love.

The House at East Pickerel Corners

(Circa 1984)

Contents

Four

The House at East Pickerel Corners Revisited

The Abyss - Discovery

Moses

Boots and the Wood Stove

Hockey

Black Ice

Snow on the Water and Candle Ice

Getting Ready

The Smithsonian Called

Is it a Mound or a Hump?

One Hundred Thousand Cups

Mixing Memories

Un-inventing the Wheel

Flaming Hot

The Great Mouse Massacre

The Folklife Folk Festival

Is That My Kid!

The True Bliss of a Teapot

It's All One Thing

Acknowledgements

Addendum I - Ode to the Written Word

Addendum II - About the Illustrations

Bibliography

Coming Soon ....

Endnotes

Four

It is possible to avoid talking to other people, but not to yourself.

Inside my head I find three voices. These three voices are indigenous to the life of the artist. In my experience, there is the brain, which is kind of the do-er. The entity that steers the car - the driver, the operator. Speaking to that operator, that driver, is a deeper awareness. This awareness can be an angel, or a devil. The being that passes judgment and makes decisions and solves problems, and this is commonly called the mind. I do see the mind as separate from the brain. Kind of like the General is separate from the Army.

The brain does, the mind decides what to do.

Standing a bit in back of the conversation between these two, is the memory. Memory, I see as separate because both the brain and the mind are constantly asking it questions, but they don't always listen to what the memory says. Stupid as it sounds, sometimes the memory recounts its knowledge, gives advice according to the real experience of a particular life, and it is ignored.

Both brain and mind just clomp ahead and repeat mistakes and stupidities.

The artist has to, almost by definition, spend a lot of time inside his/her head. It is a very solitary endeavor. If the Art being constructed is unique and original, it has to be done alone and generally in solitude. And yet no man/woman is ever truly alone. A conversation is always going on for as long as the person lives. If not externally, it is internal.

If the universe is infinite, it is only because some thinking entity perceives it as such. The brain perceives infinity, the mind analyzes the data, and the memory compares it against all prior knowledge.

So I often use this interpretive conversation between these three parts of my own dealings with situations in my stories. So that is what is going on with those odd little pieces of dialogue.

Then there is the fictional assumed you, which is a character I also make use of, a lot. Dear reader, I am not referring to you you, or specifically you as the reader. I am referring to the more general you, as is the most common general responses or assumptions I have run across in my dealings with social humanity. I admit, yes, I admit this may not be as respectful, well it's not meant to be disrespectful, as it should be. My respect for my reader, any reader, every human being is as high and big as the mountains. But it is a time-saver to obsessively use the universal you.

This is another tip I hope will help ya'll[2] enjoy my stories[3].

The House at East Pickerel Corners Revisited

Memories are more than just stuff that happened...

There are basically two ways a man can earn a living.[4] He can work for somebody else, or he can work for himself. I have heard it said, If you want to work for a real sonuvabitch, open your own business. And, when you work for yourself you only have to work half days; i.e. you can work the first twelve hours, or the second twelve hours.

Most of us who have had our own businesses up north, where mine was, would say, Twelve hours! What are you on vacation? I work six hours before I start working that twelve hours.

How's that? you say.

Before I start working, I've got chores or I can't even start. I've gotta bring in firewood, or I'll freeze in my workshop. Before I bring it in, I've gotta break it outta the snow and ice that's frozen it all together. I gotta stack it inside the night before, to thaw out and dry it off a bit. I gotta clean out the stove-ash outta the stove. I gotta spread the ash on the walkway, or I'll slip and crack my head. I gotta bang the stove pipe and brush it out a bit, so I don't get a chimney fire. I gotta get a good fire goin'.

An' that's just to keep from freezin'. There's about a dozen other things, like knocking the icicles off the eaves. When the place warms up, those things can melt from the eaves and skewer you like a shish-ka-bob.

My first career upon finally graduating from college was to open my own studio to make handmade pottery. I had wandered into a pottery studio many years earlier and it became my total passion. I graduated in Studio Ceramics. As luck would have it, I was pretty good at it. I loved it and worked hard at it. I displayed a knack for good design and workmanship. It was a sort of natural thing. Soon enough people seemed to want to buy my work.

I sold what I made, bought clay and glazes, paid for firings, and the cycle went on. You might say I sort of made my own scholarship fund. That, along with the G.I. Bill from my two years in the Army and some outside janitorial work, and life was just peachy.

I never really thought a lot about money.[5]

Never thought about money? That's a switch. All you talk about now is money,[6] my friends would say.

The first thing I learned as a Studio Artist is that getting paid is the hardest part! You get a dozen professional artists together and that's all any of them seem to talk about. We don't have to worry about inspiration, or muses, or any of that silliness. We have to worry about galleries comin' through with the sheckles, the bread, and the big green.

I've worked on many big projects with architects, interior decorators, and galleries. Believe me, the last guy to get paid is the artist!

That is (part of) of how I got to where I was. That is, making pottery in a cow barn, attached to a 200-year-old house in the Lakes Region of New Hampshire. What I want to focus on, for a chapter here and there, is what it was like to make pottery in that old cow barn, which had about a fifteen degree lean to the west. And, what it was like to live and raise a passel of kids in that 200-year-old house, which had a lean of about five degrees to the south and was set way back in the Great North Woods.

The barn, from the street, looked as though it was really tired and was in the process of laying down for a nap. The house, on the other hand, leaned in towards the street and looked like it was deciding whether to take a sit on the truck that was parked too close, or just ignore it.

Directly across the potholed, clumpy country road from the house in East Pickerel Corners, was the Country Store[7] and local Post Office. The Post Office part was a kind of section in the wall in the back of the store where there were a bunch of personal Postal Boxes, and a little window where you could yell for somebody to come and give you any packages that might have come for you.

This Post Office part was what brought every local resident, or native, into the store every day. Check your mail, grab a cup of day old coffee, maybe a stale box of cheez-doodles, or a pack of dead batteries. Just one of the daily tasks taking up the time of those who choose to Live Free, or Die - in the cold. To some, the