I don't remember a time while growing up when there wasn't clay, glaze, and kilns in my house. My mother had studied art when I was a baby, and she began producing a series of decorative and useful ceramic items in the '60s while we lived in Oakland, and later in the Nevada County foothills of California. She had a distributor in San Francisco who would order these pieces by the gross (144), and several friends of hers served as employees when the orders came in and the workload increased. Even my dad would take a bag of clay on his work voyages as a Merchant Marine and make beads or such to bring home later to finish off. Part of the process of working with this material involves firing the once pliable clay in the kiln, after making sure the moisture has dissipated. For the type of clay my mom used, the pieces would go through an initial bisque firing in the kiln and then glazed – where a substance is fused onto the surface of the ceramics in the next kiln firing.