Great, now I need to go polish my balls

I sort of did this as a kid, but didn't know you could polish them like that.

At one time, my family lived just down the road from a place where red clay was dug out for laying building foundations. It was fenced off because some kids had died there when a collapse buried them alive, but there was a place outside the fence where the clay got washed out into a storm drain. some other neighborhood kids and I used to grab handfuls to make stuff with.

The clay had a lot of fine particulate and could be easily sculpted. If our sculptures were allowed to slowly dry, they would become very hard, but could still break easily and would, of course, dissolve in water.

A few of us tried putting our clay creations in a campfire to make them permanent, but they just crumbled. Either the clay wasn't the right consistency or we were too dumb to know how to fire it properly.

For some reason, I was briefly obsessed with making a perfectly round ball of clay. The problem was even if I formed it perfectly round, it became oblate when I set it down to dry. I tried frequently turning it, but that left little flat spots all over. I tried setting it on a nest of clear food wrap, but that caused them to dry unevenly and split.

Then one day my mom went in my room, saw about a dozen dry mudballs on my dresser and told me to get them the Hell out of her house. She let me keep one. I kept it stored in a Leggs plastic egg. I found it when going through some old stuff back when I was in high school. It was completely desiccated and hard as a rock. I put it back in the egg and put the egg back in the box.

It's probably still in a box of junk here somewhere.