2010- my little brother Jared helps me set up a website and connected me to Etsy. However, I give birth two weeks later to my first kid. Life changes a little. I get busy with full time solo parenting and full time teaching and I sell whatever art I can muster hot off the press to mostly folks that (maybe) are, more than actually needing a new mug or painting for their home, (most likely?) wanting to help me out as a single mom and keep me on track to fulfilling some art dreams while I figure out the reboot on adult life…

Nothing used and suitable was popping up on Craigslist and when I calculated how many mugs I’d have to sell to break even on a new one, it got me pretty down. I admit I looked into doing a go-fund me, but at the end of the day, asking my friends and family for cash for a kiln of MY dreams felt ick when everyone is working so hard on the basics and not always getting to their own dreams of music, surfing, travel, yogaing etc. Plus my spouse was still saying, let’s do this! Let’s just do it right, it’s an investment, it’s too late in the game to get cheap…

I’m very cheap. Nice things are usually overrated wants that I don’t really need, so building a home pottery studio started out with a zero dollar budget in my mind.

Accepting that we would actually need to spend money was a process. My spouse and I have a therapeutic saying when we need to joke away our buyers remorse after falling for a sale, “You have to spend money to save money.” This saying also applied to wrapping my head around an $18,800 studio quote: 1. if I stayed at the community studio for at least 94 more months (9.83 years) at $200 a month, I’d have paid the same $18,800 and have no home studio. If I was going to be doing pottery for longer than 9.83 years, it was worth it to build it. You gotta spend money to save money. 2. It would add value to …

A tree fell and I heard it.

Back story: right before the pandemic, we moved from our teacher housing to go in on buying a building with two apartments with my father-in-law. He’s a great neighbor! The bonus of finding this little property was NOT that I got to share one bathroom with my beloved family of five, it was that it had this big momma tree in the back yard that was bigger than the house and became our living room and playroom. It was the key to our sanity during the pandemic when even the playgrounds were closed. We hung swings and trapezes and placed a hammock under it to watch the kids play under the bow of its branches.

But in the fall of 2022 (no foreshadowing pun intended), we had some rainy days, and then a few really hot days, and our thirsty old Italian pine sucked up too much water at once and the next morning …