Ophelia's Brush

Once inside Connie turned around and stopped in her tracks.  The first thing she noticed was the heat coming from the brand new smelting furnace at the back of the room.  Then the marver table, the racks along the walls filled with a dozen blowpipes and an assortment of hand-tools, pincers, shears and wooden shaping mallets.

"It's magnificent, Ty."  She walked over to the furnace.  "Somebody's prepped it," she said as she read the temperature gauge. "It's already at nine hundred Celsius."

"Antonio.  He and a contracting crew have actually been working on getting this room ready for the past ten days.  I called him this morning before we left and asked him to fire it up."

"Why?"

"For you."

"What?"

"I thought maybe, you'd grant a dying man's last wish."

"You want me to make you something?" Connie looked at him like he'd gone mad.  "I haven't worked glass in almost fifteen years.  It would only end up being a disappointment to you."

"No, absolutely not," Ty stated firmly.  "I don't expect you to make some museum quality piece.  I just want to watch you work.  When you were young, I got a chance to watch you play brilliant tennis, to watch you win a championship.  You were beautiful.  Your agility, your focus, your competitiveness.  I have spent countless hours staring at your artwork in my house and thinking about what you looked like while you were in the process of creating it.  I'd like, more than anything, and I mean literally anything, to watch you in action.  And as far as not doing it in such a long time, I haven't ridden a horse in that long but I'll bet I could still get into the saddle."

Connie listened to his sincere, moving plea then looked around the room.  She ran her hands along the metal cooling troughs then lifted the bin lids and inspected her raw materials.

"Quartz sand silica," Ty said.  "Is that the right base?"

"Yes."

"And two different alkali, wood-ash and sea-weed ash.  I wasn't sure what you preferred."

"As rusty as I am, soda-glass, which is what we call glass made from sea-weed or any other marine plant ash, is what I'd need to work with.  It remains in its plastic state over a wider range of temperature.  But it doesn't yield potassium carbonate which makes the glass hard and brilliantly reflective."  Connie paused, took it all in again.  "Listen to me, lecturing yo