During college, Nancy Rasch Salamon got to apprentice with a potter in St. Lucia, decades before it was a tourist destination. As a rank beginner, she did the grunt work. Clay was dug up out of the jungle and dumped on our patio. Her job was hitting the dried lumps with a 2 x 4, soaking them in buckets of water, sieving the mush to remove rocks and leaves, and pouring it out on plaster slabs until semi-dry. Then she wedged it into usable clay. Her very kind employer tried to dissuade me from a career in clay, emphasizing the hard work. But on a tropical island, everything seems possible.