The flower pot is an earthy terracotta, all the more beautiful for its unadorned confidence. My eye follows the gentle curves as once the hands of the potter did, their experience as their magic, taking clay and forming this. I touch the rim to feel some of the sun's warmth given back into my fingerprints, absorbed into my circulating blood. In that moment I feel a frisson of joy, a sense of home, a comforting emotional surge from something so simple.
The pottery glaze is liquid sky in deep set and generous droplets, each one makes its own pathway, free to navigate the unique surface it glides over. Where once it was born in the fire of the kiln, it now soaks in the sunny rays and shows more hues of blue than it could ever make sense to name.
This gift of the earth, this clay fashioned into a flower pot so generous in its curves, hold a beauty neither camera nor canvas can fully honour, yet it is such a blessing to try. For when I can be captured so entirely by the beauty of the simple, how much more amazing the rest of creation becomes.
The flower pot has seen so many seasons, been joined by the lives of so many gorgeous blooms. As the seasons have been given in the succession of time, so it has aged. Yet I love it all the more, this humble vessel of life.
Over the terracotta there is a white sheen, the two hues so different yet blending as earthen toned marble does. Were it blues it would be the pattern of incoming waves of the sea, the kind that invites surfers to play. Maybe that's because it reminds me of the summer time, childhoods with family, with emotions of every sort, with music and good food.
We went to buy flower pots, my aunt and I, yet for her the time we spent was the gift, as if she took those memories of our laughter and love and put them in the pot itself. She said that the pots we bought together grew the best flowers, that the colours were brighter and the aroma sweeter.
My puppy loved the flower pots. He would dig in them in the autumn, turning out the roots and soil. If the pot was small he would put his head inside and wear it for a few moments, making a game out of flicking it into a carefree arc before chasing it once more.