Every now and then I’m amazed as to how small the world is. And, seriously, I shouldn’t be. After all, don’t we all remark at one time or another how “small the world is”, when really we’ve forgotten that, or take it for granted?
Whether it be the neighbor who lived half a mile from me and I found out she went to the same high school I did, on the other side of the continent, and graduated just four years after me. Or when in my early days as a Computer Science teacher I was teaching my adult students just how far The World Wide Web spread. The gasps on their faces when I had them send an email to the person sitting next to them to introduce them to computer networks. And then explained how an email could hit a server in another state and then come back and land in the classroom right next to them, all in a matter of seconds.
But yes, I took this for granted and was reminded with the sale of two items from my shop; one was a teapot cozy and the other a bed caddy. The teapot cozy story first
A woman in France purchased a cozy from me. It was fantastic enough that my little meager shop reached so far that someone in France loved it so much she purchased it. But it wasn’t a large city in France; oh no, but a small village. This came to light when I was printing out her mailing label. No street address, no house number, no street name; just a town in France.
I contacted her and asked if she might have not been able to fill out the shipping information. “Oh no”, she replied. “It’s a small village in the mountains. Not many streets and no house number. If you have to write a house number, you can write number 1″. She went on to say that she felt confident it would be delivered with the information she entered. Somehow I got the picture of my teapot cozy being delivered on horseback, walking up a steep mountain slope, the cozy strapped to the saddle, lumbering along. Then the next mental image showed it sitting on a shelf, in a corner of a dark kitchen, lit only with a candle and a wood stove for cooking. It was delivered and the customer left me a wonderful review, in French.
The next was a bed caddy.
I got an email from a woman who asked if I could make her one with pois. I thought she meant, “peas” as in “green”. After a few emails back and forth, I learned a new word: Pois = dots. Of course, I didn’t have any of that kind of fabric. Just when I was thinking of going out to find something, she sent an email of a photo of an item in my shop (a teapot cozy, what else?)
with the very colors and some of the print she wanted. What a great idea! I found some of the fabric and managed to find another print she liked better. When I went to print out her shipping label, I saw she was in Milan, Italy! A very small world indeed, as both of these incidents were within three months of each other.
It’s a wonderful feeling knowing that somewhere in a small village in France, my teapot cozy is sitting on a shelf in a corner of a kitchen possibly heated with a wood stove. And that a bed caddy is on someone’s bed in a country that is so different from mine. I won’t take the world for granted again!
Aunt Mayme's Attic 