Natural State of Things
Copyright© 2026 by Kate Evergreen
Chapter 1: Mug and the Market
The Santa Fe Farmers’ Market opens at eight o’clock on Saturday mornings, and by eight-fifteen it is already a crush of bodies, canvas bags, and the smell of roasting green chile. I was there at eight-twenty, which tells you everything you need to know about my life that autumn: late, hungover on loneliness, and buying vegetables I would probably forget to eat.
I had moved to New Mexico five years earlier, at twenty-four, for a job at a small academic press in Santa Fe. The job lasted two years. The state had lasted longer. By the time I turned twenty-nine, I lived in a drafty adobe house outside Dixon, editing manuscripts remotely for a publisher in Boston, and drove into Santa Fe every other Saturday because the alternative was sitting alone in my kitchen, listening to the wind.
That morning I was buying chili. A pound of red, a pound of green, a bag of dried posole, a loaf of bread from a woman who wore her gray hair in a braid down her back. I was not looking for anything. I was not looking for anyone. I had recently ended a relationship, if you could call it that, with a woman named Brooke who had told me, on our last night together, that I was “very good at being what people want.” She had meant it as a compliment. I had been thinking about it for three months.
The market stretched along the railyard under the white peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and the morning was warm for late September, the kind of dry golden warmth that makes you forget winter is coming. I was standing at a produce stall with a plastic bag in my hand, trying to decide between two heads of lettuce that looked identical, when I heard a voice behind me say:
“The mugs are twelve. Their bowls are twenty. The look on your face is free.”
I turned around.
There was a woman behind a folding table, and she was completely naked.
I want to be clear about this, because I have thought about it so many times since. She was not partially dressed. She was not wearing a scrap of fabric anywhere on her body. She was sitting on a wooden stool behind a table covered in pottery mugs, bowls, small sculptural pieces, all of them glazed in deep greens and browns and a red so dark it looked like dried blood, and she was entirely, unapologetically bare. Her dark hair was pulled back with a leather cord. Her skin was tanned and freckled and streaked with what I would later learn was clay dust. She had a potter’s hands, broad and strong, and she was holding one of her own mugs up to the light, examining it.
She looked at me. I looked at her. The market went on around us, people buying tomatoes, a child crying, a man arguing about the price of honey, and I stood there with my plastic bag and my open mouth and my complete inability to form a sentence.
“I’m sorry,” I said finally. “I think I’m having a stroke.”
She laughed. It was a low, warm sound, like something coming up from the earth. “You’re not having a stroke. You’re having a reaction. It happens.” She set the mug down. “Most people pretend not to look. You’re staring. I appreciate the honesty.”
“I’m no.t. “ I stopped. I was staring. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. It’s a free country.” She picked up another mug, a celadon-glazed one with a thumb-rest carved into the handle, and held it out to me. “Here. This one’s for you.”
“I don’t”
“Twelve dollars. It’s a good mug. I made it. It holds coffee. It will not change your life, but it will make your mornings slightly better.”
I took the mug. It was cool and heavy in my hand, and the glaze was the color of a winter sky. I turned it over. There was a small stamp on the bottom, a stylized Z with a line through it.
“Zephyrine Osborne,” she said. “Zephyr. I’m the naked one. In case you were wondering.”
“I wasn’t wondering. I mean, I was. But I wasn’t going to ask.”
“You can ask. Everyone does. I don’t mind.” She leaned back on her stool, entirely at ease, and I noticed that her posture was the posture of a woman who had never once in her life considered covering herself for someone else’s comfort. “It’s a sensory thing. Fabric feels like static to me. It always has. I stopped wearing clothes when I was fourteen, and I’ve never looked back.” She shrugged. “Some people think I’m making a statement. I’m not. I’m just comfortable.”
I stood there holding the mug. The market swirled around us. A woman in a sun hat bought a bowl. A man in a feed-store cap asked about the mugs, s and Zephyr told him they were twelve dollars, and he bought two. No one stared. No one pointed. A child looked at her and then looked away, bored, the way children look at things they don’t yet know are supposed to be strange.
“I’m Calla,” I said. “Calla Woodrose.”
“Calla Woodrose. That’s a good name. It sounds like a plant.” She smiled. “Do you want to sit down? You look like you might fall over.”
I sat down on the folding chair on the customer side of the table, and I held the mug in my lap, and I stayed there for forty minutes.
Here is what I learned about Zephyr in those forty minutes:
She was thirty-three years old, which made her four years older than me. She had been a ceramicist since she was sixteen, when she had run away from her mother’s house in Santa Fe and apprenticed herself to a potter in Taos named Esteban Cruz. She had spent three years with Esteban, learning to throw and glaze and fire, and then another ten years building a reputation. Her work was in galleries in Santa Fe, Taos, and Albuquerque. She had a kiln of her own, an anagama, a wood-fired tunnel kiln she had built herself at the property she rented outside Taos. She had one living relative she trusted: her father’s sister, Fern, a retired schoolteacher in Española. Her father had died when she was eleven. Her mother was a gallery owner in Santa Fe, and they spoke twice a year, on birthdays and Christmas, conversations that Zephyr described as “diplomatic missions to a country where everyone speaks the language of appearance.”
She told me all of this without preamble, without self-consciousness, the way she did everything. She asked me questions too about my work, about my house in Dixon, about the manuscript I was editing. She listened to my answers with the same quiet attention she gave to everything, and when I made a joke she laughed that low, warm laugh, and I felt something in my chest loosen.
“Why did you stop wearing clothes?” I asked. “I mean, you said it’s a sensory thing. But when did you know?”
“I always knew,” she said. “I just didn’t have the words for it until I was fourteen. My mother put me in everything organic bamboo, hand-spun cashmere, whatever the therapists recommended. I spent my childhood in a state of constant, low-grade sensory distress. By the time I was fourteen, I was having panic attacks every morning just thinking about getting dressed.” She paused. “So I stopped. My mother tried therapists, psychiatrists, behaviorists. Finally, when I was sixteen, I ran away to Taos. Esteban didn’t care what I wore as long as I could throw a decent bowl.”
“And your mother?”
“She’s still trying to understand. She’s been trying to understand for nineteen years.” Zephyr smiled, but there was something tired in it. “She’ll probably be trying to understand until one of us dies.”
I wanted to ask more about her father, about her childhood, about the years in Taos, but I could feel the conversation reaching a natural edge, the way conversations do, and I didn’t want to push. Instead, d I asked, “Do you do this every Saturday? The market?”
“Most Saturdays. It’s good for work. I sell directly to people who are going to use my pots, and I get to watch them handle them.” She gestured at the mug in my lap. “You’ve been holding that mug for forty minutes. That’s the longest anyone’s held one without buying it. Are you going to buy it?”
I looked down at the mug. Celadon glaze, thumb-rest handle, the small Z stamp on the bottom. I had been holding it the entire time, the way you hold something when you’re afraid of what your hands might do if you put it down.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m going to buy it.”
“Good.” She stood up, and I noticed again, with a kind of dull shock, that she was entirely bare, that this was just what she looked like, that the world was not ending, g and came around the table to take my money. I handed her a twenty. She made change from a canvas apron that was tied around her waist, and I tried to do the math in my head and failed. She handed me eight dollars in bills and coins, and I put them in my pocket without looking.
“Do you want to get dinner sometime?” she asked.
I looked up at her. “Dinner.”
“Food. In the evening. With me.” She smiled. “I’m asking you out. I’m being very direct about it because I’ve learned that people get confused when I’m naked; they think I’m not serious, or I’m performing, or I’m not really there. I’m there. I’m asking you out.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Good.” She went back to her stool. “Tuesday? There’s a place in Taos called the Love Apple. It’s in an old church. Good food. I’ll meet you there at seven.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Bring the mug. I want to see if you use it.”
And then she turned to the next customer, a man in a straw hat who wanted to know about the bowls, and I walked away through the market with a celadon mug in my hand and my heart doing something complicated in my chest.
I drove home to Dixon that afternoon with the mug on the passenger seat. The road from Santa Fe wound north along the Rio Grande, through the red rock canyon at Española and out into the open country, and I drove it on autopilot, my hands on the wheel, my mind elsewhere. The mug sat upright on the seat beside me, and every so often I glanced over at it, as if it might explain something.
I lived in a small adobe house on two acres of high desert outside Dixon, a village of two hundred people in the Embudo Valley. The house had been built in the 1940s and renovated haphazardly by a succession of owners. It had thick walls, small windows, three wood stoves, and a view of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains that had stopped my heart the first time I saw it. I had bought it five years earlier, with help from my brother Sunny, and I had spent those five years slowly making it mine.
Sunny was the reason I had stayed in New Mexico. When I had moved out from Connecticut at twenty-four, I had lasted eighteen months in Santa Fe before I started thinking about going back east. Sunny had driven up from Abiquiu. He restored historic adobe properties and was always working on something. He had taken me to see the house in Dixon, and he had said, “You need land. You need quiet. You need to stop trying to live in a city that doesn’t fit you.” He was three years younger than me, and he was right.
I parked the truck, carried the mug inside, and put it on the kitchen table. Then I sat down across from it and looked at it for a long time.
I was not a person who did things like this. I was a person who planned. I was a person who thought through the consequences of every action before she took it, who made lists, who considered the angles. I was a person who had spent her whole life trying to be what people wanted: the good daughter, the promising student, the reliable colleague, the considerate partner, and I had gotten very good at it. Brooke had been right about that.
And now I had a mug.
I picked it up. The glaze was cool and smooth under my fingers. I turned it over and looked at the stamp on the bottom of the Z with the line through it. I set it down on the table, went to the kitchen counter, and made myself a cup of coffee. Then I poured the coffee into the mug and sat down at the table and drank it.
It was a good mug. It held the heat. The thumb-rest was exactly where my thumb wanted to go. The coffee tasted like coffee.
I thought about Zephyr, her bare shoulders, her dark hair, her potter’s hands, the way she had laughed when I said I was having a stroke. I thought about the way she had asked me to dinner, direct and unembellished. I thought about the fact that I had said yes.
I finished my coffee. I washed the mug by hand and set it on the shelf next to the sink. Then I went to my office and opened my laptop and tried to work on the manuscript. I was editing a history of the Santa Fe Trail, full of the usual problems, but I couldn’t concentrate. The words swam on the screen. I kept seeing Zephyr’s face, her steady gray eyes, her slow smile.
I closed my laptop. I went outside and stood on the porch and looked at the mountains. The sun was going down, and the sky was turning the color of the celadon glaze on the mug, and I thought: What am I doing?
I was going to dinner on Tuesday with a woman I had met that morning, a naked woman, a woman who had asked me out in the middle of a farmers’ market as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. I was going to drive to Taos and sit across a table from her in a restaurant in an old church, and I was going to have dinner with her, and the world was going to keep turning.
I was terrified. I was also, and this was the part I couldn’t explain. I was also the most alive I had felt in years.
Tuesday came slowly.
I worked. I edited the manuscript. I called my brother and told him I had met someone, and he asked what she was like, and I said, “She’s a potter. She’s very direct.” He said, “That’s good. You need someone direct.” I didn’t tell him the rest. I didn’t know how to say it over the phone. She doesn’t wear clothes, so I didn’t say it at all.
I thought about canceling. I thought about it on Monday night, lying in bed, staring at the ceiling. I thought about it on Tuesday morning, drinking coffee from the celadon mug. I thought about it on Tuesday afternoon, standing in front of my closet, trying to decide what to wear to dinner with a woman who would be wearing nothing. I thought about it all the way to Taos, driving north through the canyon with my hands tight on the wheel.
The Love Apple was in an old church on the road to Taos Pueblo, a small white adobe building with a red door and a garden full of herbs. I parked the truck and sat in the cab for a minute, my heart pounding. Then I got out and went inside.
Zephyr was already there. She was sitting at a corner table, entirely naked, a glass of wine in front of her. The restaurant was small and warm, lit by candles, and the other diners were eating their dinners and talking and not staring. A waiter passed by her table and refilled her water glass. A woman at the next table smiled at her. She looked up when I came in and smiled that slow, warm smile, and I felt the floor shift under my feet.
“You came,” she said.
“I said I would.”
“People say a lot of things.” She gestured at the chair across from her. “Sit down. They have a good green chile stew. And the trout is excellent.”
I sat down. The waiter appeared, a young man with a kind face, and I ordered the trout and a glass of wine. He took my menu and went away. I looked across the table at Zephyr, her bare shoulders, her steady eyes, the leather cord in her hair, and I said, “I have a confession.”
“Okay.”