The Snowboarder's Journal - The Snowboarder's Journal 20.4
LILY CALABRESE: Two in the Hand
Words: Evan Litsios 2023-01-24 08:00:42
Lily Calabrese and her trusty dog, Angus, at her home studio in Burlington, VT. Photo: Peter Cirilli
I’m surrounded by boobs—some droopy, oblong, bug-eyed, others petite, like they’ve just barely been pinched into existence. None is identical to its partner. Every pair is perfectly imperfect. Art imitating life. I’m talking about mugs, of course. Boob mugs. That is, clay boobs on clay mugs. I’m sitting in Lily Calabrese’s pottery studio, a little cabin with good natural light built in the backyard of her house in Burlington, VT, and these boob mugs are Lily’s bread and butter.
“Yep, my life is pretty much all boobs and gardening,” Lily admits. The 28-year-old sounds pleased. Resigned to her place in the universe. And why not?
Be it boob mugs, cat faces or plate sets, you can see Lily’s hands in every ripple in the clay. Her work blends precision with a looseness that keeps it all honest. Her snowboarding’s actually pretty similar. Precise and proper where it counts—boardslides locked up square between the bindings, and presses held true—but loose in the shoulders, droopy in the mitts and never too hasty from one thing to the next. Her local mountain is technically a hillside on her family’s land in the woods of Vermont. She hasn’t had a season’s pass in three years. But folks recognize her every time she shows up to Sugarbush to lap the park.
Last winter was one of Lily’s most active in a while. She spent time filming with people she loves and who she loves to watch ride, which is always special. You might have caught her street clips in Bookclub’s Loser Lap video, or the 60/40 crew’s Golden Ratio. She went on a road trip last spring with two big dogs and her partner in a Subaru Forester to catch Snowboy Productions’ Holy Bowly and IT’S TITS!. Apparently not a lot of snowboarding. Lots of dog parks. All worth it when the pups sprinted into the Pacific Ocean chasing seagulls.
Every area’s got its steady fixtures. Lily wouldn’t like to admit it, and would probably roll her eyes at me for saying it, but in Vermont she’s one of them. Heck, here’s an example: I have a few lovely neighbors, old hippies who bought their farm in the late ’70s. We’ll call them Peggy and Steve. They’re the kind of neighbors who will make radical gestures like inviting everyone from up and down the road over for coffee and homemade muffins just for the niceness of it. Terribly kind, enough to make you want to try a little harder to be good. We’re well away from sin city (the tiny metropolis of Burlington) where Lily lives, tucked up in the foothills. So, this one time, Lily overhears me telling someone about these great neighbors.
“Oh I know Peggy and Steve,” she says. “Yeah, I help them with their garden.”
“Of course you do,” I say, not even surprised. It just made me glad for Peggy and Steve, and gardens, and little boobs on mugs, cats and dogs, and good boardslides. Lily teaches pottery classes at the local university with Peggy, and Peggy got her set up helping all her old hippie friends with gardening and stonework. Lily grew up dry-laying stone walls with her dad. Steady work for steady hands, centered on the earth. Not a phone in sight. Just people living in the moment.
As I get to know people in snowboarding, they’ll often start to peel back and reveal layers of investment where they’ve cobbled together a life with all the things they love—each passion holding up part of the whole. Keeping things from getting too wobbly.
“Learning how to run a business and make time for snowboarding has been a challenge,” Lily says, “but it makes both feel more fulfilling. Having two things I love to do and not get burnt out at either.”
For those of you taking notes, that’s the secret: two in the hand, and it’s never a bad idea to keep a few more in the bush for good measure.
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