Every couple of months, Nancy and Abbott Meader come down from Oakland, Maine, to buy food at the Haymarket, to go to the Museum of Fine Arts or the Gardner Museum. We have a regular procedure: Nancy brings supper, usually something she has frozen from her garden, like zucchini, or eggplant, a lasagna, or something very special like rosemary chicken. We have nibblies: beer nuts, peanuts, pickles from the garden, sesame butter. Abbott makes a bacon breakfast.

I met Nancy in Paris when we both took our junior year abroad, she from the University of Michigan. We roomed together for a few weeks, until she met Abbott -- he'd won a grant from Dartmouth to go to Europe to paint. Much later, after the birth of her first child when she was twenty-five, Nancy started to make pots, Now she is one of the best potters in New England; the vase on the table and the coffee mugs in the kitchen photographs are hers. Most of the paintings in the kitchen and living room are by Abbott. For twelve years, until June 1974, he taught at Colby College; he gave it up to see if he and Nancy can support their family totally on their work.

It's important to me to have close friends like Nancy and Abbott with whom I can discuss the ins and outs of marginal living, discuss the problems of putting the last dollar on materials or equipment. It takes a sort of courage and daring -- at least the conviction/assumption that nothing drastic or awful will happen in the next month or two. And then there are the questions about getting the work done, the energy drain of teaching, putting together a body of work, making it, getting grants, endless subjects to work over. The vocabulary is there for us.

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