Read Online Joy For Beginners by Erica Bauermeister - Free Book Online

flattening her ball into a circle, then rolling it up into the roundest shape she could create, feeling the silkiness of its surface against the skin of her palms, the calming weight in her hands. She listened barely, dreamily, to the teacher explain the origin of clay, imagining the particles letting go of the big rocks and rolling downstream, flattening, smoothing out, blending with others. She wondered where her clay had wandered from, which river it had floated down, what made it stop and settle. The teacher was calling clay common, but Daria knew better. Every particle in her hands came from somewhere, traveled to somewhere else. There was nothing common about that; it didn’t matter that they were cast off in the first place.
     
    EVEN NOW, every time Daria soaked the hard scraps from previous projects and watched them turn back into wet clay, she marveled at how infinitely forgiving her medium was. Up until the time it was placed in the kiln, any pot could be sent back to its beginning, any mark could be undone, the final piece holding all its iterations within itself while displaying only the final one.
    As Daria cut and wedged her last chunk of clay for the day, she heard her cell phone ring. Rinsing and wiping her hands, she reached over and opened the phone, seeing Sara’s number on the screen. Daria and Sara had met a few years earlier, when Sara’s twins were only a few weeks old. Marion had organized a baby-holding circle, to give Sara a chance to use one of her arms for something other than cradling a baby, Marion had said. Daria was not a big fan of babies—in her experience, they tended to crawl on the floor and eat clay—but Marion had insisted Daria join the group, saying they needed five people, one for each day of the week when Sara’s husband was at work. And even though Daria and Sara were completely different—Sara quintessentially domestic, tied to her three children and her house and her husband—Daria couldn’t help liking her. There was just something so genuinely friendly about Sara, and her children’s Halloween costumes were something you didn’t want to miss. Daria always thought Sara would make a wonderful artist, if she’d just stop making peanut butter sandwiches.
    “Daria?” Sara’s voice on the phone sounded more excited than Daria had heard it in a long time. “I have someone here you have to meet. Can you come for dinner tonight?”
     
    SARA’S KITCHEN WAS a chicken farm of chaos, the twins, Max and Hillary, sitting in booster seats at the kitchen table, board books and grapes and crackers spread about them, seven-year-old Tyler’s soccer shoes dripping mud in the center of the floor. Sara negotiated the obstacles unconsciously, her eyes on the children, the ingredients for the meal she was preparing. Daria stood at the kitchen island, tearing lettuce leaves for a salad.
    “So, who is it I’m supposed to meet?” Daria asked. Sara pulled a cooking tray of chicken strips out of the microwave and arranged them on plates. The twins whooped in anticipation.
    “You remember me talking about my brother, Henry?” Sara’s voice was lit with happiness. “He’s been traveling for years, but he’s in town now for a while.”
    Daria had heard about the elusive Henry, Sara’s twin brother, the one who left home with a backpack after college and returned only sporadically for a dose of family before heading out to a new country whose language he didn’t speak, a culture whose food he’d never tried. Last Daria had heard, Henry was in Peru, but you never knew. Postcards sometimes took months to arrive, and Henry was not a big believer in email. His last stint had been long enough that he had yet to meet Sara’s own twins.
    “What does he think of the rug rats?” Daria motioned toward the twins at the kitchen table.
    “They adore him, of course. He let them go through his backpack. There were presents. I’ll never be able to keep them out of my luggage now,” Sara