There has always been an apothecary somewhere in the background of my life.
I was an only child until I was 8 and we lived not in the country but at the edge of the suburbs in a rapidly growing city. No children in the neighborhood and the hilly 2 acre lots made it feel quite remote for a curious 6 year old girl.
My 70 year old beloved neighbor would indulge me for a while, a cheese straw or chocolate chip cookie and he would share a small juice glass of his special cold water. Every morning he would fill a cork topped1liter bottle with tap water and keep it chilled to pull a little from each day. Cold tap water… not a gold mine, but to be given 4 ounces of this special commodity on a hot July afternoon was precious. No ice - no garnish - just tap water so cold it made your teeth hurt. God love Harry!
Anyway back to the apothecary. I was bored stiff. Father was working/traveling… mother was always busy doing something to or in the house or garden. I read voraciously and for a short while had a wonderfully fat pony to keep me company, but mainly it was just wandering barefoot outside - playing in the creek, eating honeysuckle, climbing trees….
One day my mother changed out her spice rack and gave me all her old glass spice jars with glass stopper lids… jackpot… the beginning of an apothecary. Now to fill… leaves, dead roly polies, dead bees, rocks, dirt, sand, water, anything I could collect that would not smell. My dresser was my grandmother’s, a pseudo Victorian veneer piece with deep drawers perfect for my glass bottle treasure. But I needed a deeper dive… a microscope and slides to examine all these treasures up close.
So I asked for a microscope from my father. He found an ancient microscope in a wooden box from a lab in the back of one of the textile plants he would visit each week on his sales calls. The mechanism that adjusted the height of the lenses was broken, so to lift the lens off the glass slide you had to hold with your hand constantly, but I did not care. I dissected deceased honey bees and put the different parts on glass slides to observe @10x and 20x normal. I could see the pollen collection, the minute hairs that gripped the pollen, the strong wings and legs that worked so hard.
My “apothecary” swelled with discoveries as I made notes and then researched my findings at the library when school was back open. So how do bee legs and cold tap water influence a skincare company 50 years later?
Inquisitiveness, research, joy, exploration, science, knowledge, satisfaction, etc. I have often said the joy of aging is that if we choose to evolve, truly open our hearts and dig for enlightenment, then we eventually come back to our true self. The child we were when we entered this world before we were influenced by the baggage, expectations and limitations of the people who controlled our paths. When our paths become our true self we center back into what our core is meant to be.
So for the founder of Kindred it is a mind that never stops asking
why?
how?
where?
can I make it better?
How does it all work together?
Can I make it myself?
Those little spice jars of insect parts have transformed to big glass jars of oils, botanicals, wax, plant butters and finished products of oils that when put together are much more than the sum of their parts.
The apothecary has always been there, different versions along the way, but it was always there.