The Potter and His Wife

In the small town down the mountain from our village once lived a wonderful potter and his wife. We learned about them very soon in the village, our first year there, when neighbors, in thanks for us inviting their children to our house, gave us two of the potter’s bowls. They were very simple bowls, a lovely mottled beige, sandy like a seashore, perfectly round, reminiscent of monks’ bowls we have purchased at monasteries. Later, we went down ourselves to the potter and his wife’s house-studio. They had purchased an old ruin in the fifties and had rebuilt and restored it: creating the potter’s workshop and display room on the ground floor, and their home on the upper floors, all of it set in a garden of trees and flowers just on the eastern end of the town of Luc-en-Diois. We fell in love especially with the blue pottery, a very special dark blue with little dots of silver-white. To look at the potter’s blue was to gaze at starry skies, and little by little we purchased starry sky bowls, and starry sky cups, and starry sky vases and pitchers and, most beautiful of all, a starry sky teapot, an elongated oval teapot with a great loop of a handle and a special spout—developed by the potter himself—that pours as smoothly as a waterfall and never spills. When guests would come, we would take them down to the potter’s and often they would go away with their own teapots or bowls or vases or pitchers. Over the years, I purchased many pieces of Monsieur Dehoux’s pottery, making gifts to family and friends (often carrying a piece or two back with me on trips to the States). And so one brother has a beige teapot, one sister has a blue one, another brother got a large green pitcher for Christmas, I gave an elegant blue pitcher to my youngest sister for her marriage….and just last March my second sister came to our village with her family and as it was her birthday, I took her down and she chose her birthday gift—a graceful pitcher in the potter’s latest color, a deep dark delicious rosy pink.

Almost everyone in our village has something from the L’oiseau de feu, The Firebird Pottery shop. Because of my frequent visits there, I began to get to know the potter’s wife as well, a gentle and gracious woman with hazel eyes like pure transparent pools whose name is Marie-Claude. I remember her telling me one time that she had heard that there were wonderful vibrations up on our village mountainside, and I could well believe it, given the immense joy and peace we felt every time we arrived to stay at our cottage. I remember another time when she was having some serious trouble with those beautiful eyes of hers, and this was a concern as she too is an artist, making pieces of jewelry and bright colored lampshades for lamps that light up her husband’s pottery.

Last summer I met Marie-Claude in our little grocery store and we were very pleased to see one another and exchanged news (we had not seen each other since the March before when I had purchased the vase for my sister). But I began to notice there was something strange in her conversation, for instead of saying “we”, she was only saying “I” and finally I asked her, “but your husband is going with you to your daughter’s isn’t he?” And her luminous eyes grew liquid, had I not heard..? (No, I had not, that the potter had died just two months before, died at his potter’s wheel of an aneurism).

I was shocked, as we always are when we learn of the death of someone, even though we know that death is never far—yet we push away the thought of it until the next time, and are shocked anew, and push away the thought again. How could the potter be gone—he was a part of our small town, a part of all our lives, he was with us when we made our bouquets, when we had our breakfast cereal, when we set our tables with his dishes, when we poured tea from his perfect teapots. I was also deeply saddened, for I knew how close the potter and his wife had been—close in the way I am close to my own husband. I had heard the story of how they had met, about their whirlwind courtship, how they married less than two months from meeting one another, a marriage that had lasted 51 years.

I promised I would come by the studio, and did so a few days later. The display room looked much the same, pottery still lining the walls, all that had not yet been sold. In the back, in the workshop, were rows of unpainted bowls and pitchers and cups, pieces the potter was working on when he died—he had not had time to paint and re-fire those pieces. But his widow could not get rid of any of them, they remained on the shelves (and in fact, with a little sigh she said she should really not go back there, it was too hard for her to see all that). I purchased more of Monsieur Dehoux’s work, I would keep it for future gifts. Marie-Claude, knowing we had some of the big blue bowls, insisted I take two others, and would not take any money for them, telling me they had small imperfections, she would not be able to sell them. Later, we took tea together in her home upstairs (yes, of course, she poured from one of those remarkable teapots). The potter was our main subject, she missed him terribly, she found it hard to sleep at night, all alone in the house. Yet she was grateful, for his sake, that he had gone so quickly, and while working—it was, she told me, how he had wished to leave this world, in his studio, working on his unique pieces of pottery.

It’s a year later now, and I just went down to see Marie-Claude again. I’d heard she was having an art show in the studio. She was in there with a young friend who was taking pictures of the show. Marie-Claude had invited a sculptor and a painter and a watercolorist to display their works. Amid those works were last of the potter’s pieces. I purchased another little green pitcher-vase. I have one like it full of garden flowers just now, and I thought I would get another for someone else’s garden flowers. Marie-Claude insisted once again on giving me a gift—one of the unfinished pots, pure and white, which I could use, she said, for dried flowers.

While we were talking, two other women entered the shop and walked around looking at the works of art. Then one of them came up to Marie-Claude and asked, “Where is the potter? Where does he work?”

There was a deep pause while Marie-Claude gathered her words together, and then she told them. What they saw on the shelves were all that was left.

Both women looked stricken, and one of them seemed almost to crumple before our eyes, her face was a study in sorrow. The other woman, the one nearest me, a woman with clear chiseled features, said to us that her companion had just lost her husband too, only a couple months before. The newly-widowed woman was shaking her head, tears spilling from her eyes, whispering, “It is terrible, terrible.” My friend Marie-Claude, gentle soul, went to comfort her, and let her tell her story, the two of them—strangers just five minutes before—united in their grief. I talked to the other woman. She was a widow too—had been for a number of years. She was accompanying her friend who had been unable to go on vacation alone back to the place where she and her husband used to go—so instead, the two women were vacationing together. This woman (who had certainly been a very beautiful woman in her youth) said to me that losing one’s partner was like losing the other half of oneself. I told her it was my greatest fear—I could not imagine surviving it. She made no attempt to mitigate my fear. How could she? She knows what it is like to lose half of oneself. Nothing is ever the same again, she said. Nothing ever will be.

There I was, with three widows. I, who still had a husband back at my cottage. I knew he was home, perhaps printing photographs, perhaps stretched out reading on the couch, perhaps going up to see his favorite plant, the bamboo, giving it some water. I knew he was there and my heart filled with gratitude. There I was, the lucky one, the happy one. so conscious suddenly of my special privileged status. Unlike these three women with me, I was not alone. After the two visitors left, I made my purchase and talked a little more with Marie-Claude, she with her generosity of spirit, never a trace of self-pity or envy, simply glad for me that I am still “whole”, still have my other half, gently reminding me to cherish, and savor our time together.

I couldn’t get home fast enough. I parked and rushed up to the cottage. Where was he? No, not in the front yard. Not in the veranda. Not in the living room on his favorite pink couch. Not in the bedroom. Ah, there he was, out on the terrace now that the heat of day was gone, in the freshness of the late-afternoon shadows. You can imagine his astonishment when I embraced him as if we’d been separated for months—years even—instead of just a couple hours, and kissed his precious head, and told him I loved him. He looked at me as if I were a little crazy.

 Indeed I was. Crazy happy just to be alive and to have him be alive, and to be together in our own little corner of paradise. I let him put on his favorite Kate Bush music which I usually find a trifle too noisy for my tastes. Made him a nice dinner, opened a good bottle of wine. Knowing that one day…he…or I…. But no, let me just stay in the present moment, this one that exists right now, the two of us safe and together within it. Lucky me, oh lucky me.