A glow worm is a small insect

A glow worm is a small insect that glows to attract a mate. It's not the same as a firefly, though they are of the same family, I think. The one and only time I ever saw a glow worm was while I was living in France for several years. The people who pointed it out to me also told me that they rarely are seen anymore, due to environmental issues no doubt.

I also became acquainted with pottery in France. I knew that I would be living there for awhile, and that I needed to learn the language, and taking pottery classes with a group of French people who were virtually my new neighbors, seemed to be a perfect way to help accomplish that since I had been interested in working with clay for a long time.

These two things, the Glow worm and pottery might not seem related, but you haven't heard the whole story. It's a very long story, and I'll only tell some of it today.

Sometime while struggling with learning the French language and learning how to work with recalcitrant lumps of clay, I decided to take pottery workshops. The first one that I signed up for was in England since I mistakenly thought that the language would be the same. The second workshop that I took the following year was held in the Jura Mountain region of France. I felt like I was comfortable enough with French to think that I could do that. I probably didn't read the ad in the Ceramic revue magazine very well, however, since my main concern was that it should take place not far from where we were living. It turns out that it was taught by a ceramic engineer who had his degree from a really prestigious university in France, and was used to teaching professional potters who were looking to refine their knowledge of glazing chemistry. Wow, the only way I got through chemistry in college was by becoming friends with a really nice, sort of nerdy chemistry genius in my class who took pity on me and my girlfriend and gave us the answers. In other words, I really didn't know anything about chemistry. Actually, I don't think that any of the other participants in the workshop read that ad very well either, except for one know-it-all who came to classes dressed in a sparkling white labcoat every day. "You didn't read the ad very well, did you?" she asked us while shaking her head.

The instructor hated us from the start. Well, that's not exactly true, he actually didn't hate me. In fact, he seemed to like me? I'm not sure why, but I did take advantage of it. "You cannot imagine what jerks you are!" he told us several times during those two weeks.

Oh, and I didn't tell you about the accommodations. We each had our own sort of little sheds. Really very rustic, to say the least. They were closed up all year except for July and August when he conducted his workshops, so the mildew was pretty bad. I had severe headaches from the smell each night as I tried to sleep but couldn't. When my husband saw the sheds the first time, he said, "you aren't going to stay here are you?" What could I say, my obsession with clay had started, and there was no going back. I needed to learn more than I needed sleep, or cleanliness, or all the other things missing there, so I did stay. All the other participants, even the lab coat lady thought that the accommodations were 'charming'. At least they did until the mice running back and forth in the attic space right over all of our heads got to be too frantic and noisy.

We struggled along with our daily work. Mornings were spent in scientific lectures with our handbooks that we were given at the beginning of the class. Afternoons we took to the studios where we attempted to create great stuff while enduring the disdain of the dreaded instructor. After our evening meals made by our instructor's elderly mother and taken together at an outside table under a tree, we all would set off as a group on our nightly walks. Since the other participants were all either French or French-speaking Swiss, our walks were not strolls around the village as a couch-potato American might take, but rather long, and to me, grueling affairs taken well into the French countryside, over fields and under barbed wire fences, through thick woods and deep valleys. To someone like me who wasn't sleeping at all, it was going to the point of exhaustion and further.

This is where the glow worm comes in. When we finally arrived back at our little group of sheds each night in the most profound of darkness that one can only find in a tiny French village tucked away in the countryside, I would look with anticipation for the faintest glow in the damp dark grass. There it would be - like a beacon, or a small beating heart - waiting like the best of friends to a lonely stranger, a tiny glow worm.