Picking up shells for firing ...

I spent part of the day yesterday walking the Falmouth beach along Vineyard Sound, head down, filling an old clay bag with bay scallop shells. The shellfish live on the bottom not far from shore. Their shells wash in and eventually are crushed and become part of the beach.
My old hometown of Vineyard Haven is on the horizon there; that part of Martha's Vineyard lies only three or four miles from the Cape Cod mainland. I always wonder what's happening in that place I left so long ago.
Anyway, these shells will hold wadding and lie against the Shino glazes on some of my pots in the wood kiln in Truro next weekend. Their remnants will be ground and sanded down a bit after the pots are out of the kiln, but that mark of where they were made will remain. They'll fit right in with the kind of glazing I do - overlapping Shinos and general glaze chaos, combined in this case with the ash and flame of the Castle Hill kiln, fired on the bluff above the Atlantic.