Daydreams are serious business. It's three blocks from home to studio, but it's only six in the morning. So Kathleen Walsh walks Vinnie to the beach. Vinnie barks at a jogger, then sniffs at a prehistoric seedpod. "No, Vinnie," she says, snatching the pod. A shimmering clatter rains out of a nearby beach house. Beer cans rattling into barrels recall her waitressing days. If something happened to her design business, she could wait tables again, if she had to. Flicking seeds, she thinks of the vacant building in the gentrified downtown, her dream store. What she wouldn't give. But it's so expensive. She tosses the seedpod and hears a volleyball thumped by the Amazonian women who populate Hermosa Beach. Vinnie noses driftwood. A man says hello. Kathleen worries she looks homeless, with her patterned sundress and her scrappy little Chihuahua mutt and her driftwood. The man passes, she pockets two pieces, and as she walks uphill, past her dream store and toward her tiny studio, she fingers the driftwood, which is forked into the satisfying shape of a wishbone.

The door to Walteria Living, her three-year-old design studio, sticks, like always. Fix it, Kathleen, she tells herself, shouldering it open. Fix the air conditioner, too, while you're at it. Make your life easier, why don't you? Kathleen motivates herself the way her resourceful hero Pippi Longstocking does, the way any creative entrepreneur learns to do: by talking to herself. You can do it, Kathleen. Get it done. At California College of the Arts, she'd worked in the woodshop past midnight, sometimes until dawn, proving her worth to her wealthier peers, to her academic parents, to herself. Now she has her own studio. Sunlight billows into the long narrow room like a soft clarity, revealing her ceramic thornbud vases made late last night and set carefully in rows, their shadows lengthening down the table like dark roots reaching toward another world. Are dreams as real as work? where does the real world end and the dreamworld begin? The thornbud shadows reach back toward the kiln, where the vases are fired. The air still holds the odors of carbon and talc.