Breaking Bad

[offcntr]

For as fragile as my product is, I get surprisingly little breakage from customers. (I can think of maybe two pieces in 20 years.) Other vendors are occasionally a risk--my second year at Holiday Market, someone banged my shelves through the curtain from their booth and vibrated a pot off the shelf.

Booth assistants can also be more trouble than help. The Coupeville Arts Festival provides load-in crews, energetic teenaged volunteers the better to get vans unloaded and off of the crowded streets. More than once I've gotten to the bottom of a box to find someone set it down on the pavement a little too enthusiastically and broke the bottom pot.

Even the wind is a hazard. This past June at a show in Roseburg, several spaces to the west of me didn't sell, so I had an unexpected corner booth. Equally unexpected were the wind gusts that blew up Friday, rattling the canopy and actually blowing pots off the shelves. Several plates flipped off their stands on the grid panel, and a soup bowl--stand and all--slid over the edge of the shelf, taking out another bowl on the table below.

But by far the worst culprit, where breakage is concerned, is me. I'll stack boxes precariously in the van or on the ground. Take an overloaded hand truck over uneven footing. Bang pots on other pots while reaching them onto the shelves. Sometimes I'm amazed I have anything to sell at all.

But I'm reminded of what my friend Deb said after we returned to our respective homes after a pottery workshop, and discovered what airline baggage handlers had done to our pots.

They're just things. You'll make more.