The mixing bowl is large enough to hold a basketball. The rim is unglazed, the color of sand. A few black specks look like stones on the beach, but one of those is a small hole in the ceramic, a piper's footprint or the burrowing of a sand crab.
The outer surface of the bowl is a shiny gray-brown tone. There is a rim along the top about an inch-and-a-half wide, perfect for holding the bowl, steadying or carrying it. There are chips along the lower part of the rim and around the base of the bowl, too. It is a bowl for a brave cook: it can take a few chips and remain a bowl.
Inside, the surface is smooth save one area with three smll indentations that must be the thumbprints of the potter as she lifted it off the wheel. There is no other sign of the origin of the bowl, no brand or stamp on it's base.
When I hold the bowl in my own hands and feel its smoothness, its weight, its imperfections, I see her handing me the bowl across time and space. Here is my work, the potter says, here is my hand, here is your bowl.
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