Boxes of Clay is the second volume in the series Stories from East Pickerel Corners by Dale Clarence Peterson.
This volume continues the laugh or you’re gonna cry saga of the Peterson family that began with their move from the sunny climes of Arizona to the snowy climes of northern New England. Leaving Arizona in the summer, with an average temperature over 100 degrees, and landing in New Hampshire transitioning to the first winter the family had known since before the eldest child had been born fifteen years before.
The old man, Dale, was a studio potter, a production potter. The family moved into a two hundred year old house with an old cow barn attached. Dale set up his production pottery in the old cow barn and the family learned in humorous detail what their new home required of them.
Which was never-ending chores, fixing stuff around and in the house that never seemed to stay fixed and making the best of a new life under a deep blanket of snow in the winter. Summers were a constant fog of mosquitos and black flies.
Peterson makes you laugh, makes you think and sometimes makes you misty eyed.
He takes you back to his studies in Art School where he learned his craft in order to bring you to the place where the telling of this saga takes place. Then he takes you in his kayak onto the narrow channel of moving water on a frozen river and out onto Big Lake under falling snow.
In this second volume of his three volume series, we introduced to two more of his children and taken out with his second son to play baseball and hockey. We are given some clues on raising a large family on a very small income and how that can actually be seen as an advantage … if you allow yourself to be drawn into their world.
These pieces of life are told in the first person narrative with such skill that you feel as though you are sitting across a table from the author, in your favorite coffee shop.
Undoubtedly to become an American classic.
