Kathy Brant

The small ceramic pinch pot is marked "UND E Tompkins". Evangeline Augusta Case Tompkins was my great-grandmother, known within the family as Mum.  Orphaned as a teenager, her care was entrusted to a family friend who promptly married her.  She was 16; he was 30. 

When Mum was seven months pregnant, William brought her in a covered wagon from New Brunswick, Canada, to the wild, treeless Dakota Territory, where she gave birth to her first child in a tent. 

Five children and several moves later, this tiny, slender woman worked tenaciously with her husband creating a good life on the prairie. They did well until she caught him with another woman.  Outraged, Mum divorced William, which was scandalous in those days. 

She destroyed all photographs of him and refused to talk about him. Soon she opened a boarding house near the University of North Dakota and also sold fruit cakes which she made.  When Roy, her youngest, finished medical school at the university, she decided to focus on herself and enrolled in a ceramics course.

When I taught ceramics, the first project was always a pinch pot:  push dull-colored clay with thumbs to stretch and hollow a pot, smoothing with fingers, and repeat.  Glaze.  Fire.

I keep Mum's creation on a table in my bedroom; I see her every day.