Unexpected Connections • Notes from the Mountain No. 20

Unexpected Connections

Notes from the Mountain • Issue No. 20

Notes from the Mountain is Mountain Goat Soap Co.'s weekly journal, where I share stories from the outdoors, the workshop, travel, and the everyday adventures that inspire both my life and my work.

This plant has a story. It started with a single clipping sent to me by someone who started out as a Mountain Goat Soap Co. customer and, somewhere along the way, became a friend.

We had gotten to know each other through conversations that started because of the business. As we chatted, we discovered that we had once lived surprisingly close to each other and that our childhoods had more than a few things in common. Eventually, we got to talking about our grandmothers. We both had memories of particular flowers and plants growing in our grandmothers' gardens. The kinds of things you remember decades later, even though at the time they were simply part of the scenery of childhood.

And apparently those memories stuck with both of us, because we had each continued to love some of those same plants as adults.

One of hers was a Queen of the Night. The plant had been handed down in her family, and one day she sent me a clipping from it. Just one little piece of a plant with its own history.

I planted it. And it grew. Today, that single clipping has become a beautiful plant in my home. Every time I look at it directly across from my desk, I'm reminded of how unlikely it is that it's here at all.

If she hadn't ordered soap from me, we probably never would have met. We wouldn't have started talking. We wouldn't have discovered that two people who seemingly had no connection at all actually had quite a few. And there certainly wouldn't be a piece of her family's Queen of the Night growing in my house.

Funny how that happens.

Mt. Garfield - Grand Junction, Colorado

I've noticed versions of this same thing many, many times since starting Mountain Goat Soap Co. An order will come in and I'll recognize the town immediately. I've lived there. I've been there. Someone I know lives nearby. I've driven through it, hiked somewhere close to it, or have some other connection that makes me stop when I see the address.

Grand Junction, Colorado, is one of those places. We lived there years ago, and whenever an order comes through from that part of Colorado, I can't help but notice. There are places all over the country that are just names on a map to most people, but to me they hold a memory. Then one of those names suddenly appears on a shipping label sitting on my worktable in Kansas. And I find myself thinking...

What are the odds?

I've packed a lot of orders over the years. They've gone to places I've never been and places I know well. They've gone to tiny towns I'd never heard of until I printed the label and cities I've visited dozens of times. And every now and then, one of those orders leads to a conversation. A conversation leads to discovering something you have in common. And occasionally, a person who was once just a name on an order becomes someone you know. I started Mountain Goat Soap Co. thinking it might make my world bigger.

I didn't expect it to make the world feel smaller.

But there's another side to all of this that I've come to appreciate just as much. There are people here today who knew me long before Mountain Goat Soap Co. existed. People from completely different chapters of my life have somehow followed me into this one.

Some have been friends for decades. Some are people I worked with. Some knew me when making soap wasn't even remotely part of the plan. And when I say they've supported this business, I don't mean they've only bought soap.

They read these stories. They comment on posts. They send me messages. They share something I've written. They celebrate the good things with me and laugh along when things don't go quite according to plan. Somehow, people I've known for years and people I never would have met if I hadn't started making soap have all ended up in the same place.

That's a pretty remarkable thing when I think about it. And maybe that's why I like my Queen of the Night so much. It isn't just a beautiful plant. It's a reminder of all the connections we never see coming, and how easily our lives can intersect with someone else's in ways we never could have predicted.

The world can feel awfully big sometimes.

And then something happens that reminds you it really isn't.

From the Trail:

A short reflection inspired by the outdoors.

“Sometimes two trails meet in the most unexpected places.”

More soon,

Dianne

Bring the outside in.