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Twenty four years, and a gift for you.
12:00 AM (Today)•clarksbotanicals
Hi there,
This June the arithmetic of my life becomes even. I am forty eight. For the first twenty four years I walked. For the last twenty four I have not. Half of me on each side of one afternoon, the way a city is split by a single street, and you spend your whole life crossing back and forth.
I thought that number would arrive as grief. It did not. It has made me hungry, the way my grandmother in Italy was hungry for life, for the whole of a thing, the noise and the heat and all the people inside it.
When I was twenty four, a diving accident broke the third and fourth vertebrae in my neck and I went numb below them. A surgeon told me, with the warmth of a man reading a parking ticket, that I would spend my life in a bed in front of a television. My mother heard him out. Then she looked at me and said, in Italian, "sposta qualcosa." Move something. You do not argue with that voice. I twitched my shoulder. She turned back to him and said, "I think my son has other plans."
Clark's Botanicals is what those other plans became. My father and I built it out of need, not out of a brief, because the skin I came back to could no longer bear anything made for everyone else. Every formula since has been one long, stubborn argument that the body, given the right conditions, already knows how to repair itself.
I did not make that argument by myself. You make it with me, every day. You are the reason a thing that began as one man trying to heal now helps other people's skin grow stronger across years instead of weeks. I sit with that more than you know. Some mornings I can hardly believe it is real.
So this is not a sale and not an announcement. It is a thank you, said plainly, the way my family says things. For twenty four years I counted those two halves of my life against each other, certain one had stolen from the other. I was wrong. They do not cancel. They add. I am still crossing that single street. The only difference now is that I am never crossing it alone.
I thought that number would arrive as grief. It did not. It has made me hungry, the way my grandmother in Italy was hungry for life, for the whole of a thing, the noise and the heat and all the people inside it.
When I was twenty four, a diving accident broke the third and fourth vertebrae in my neck and I went numb below them. A surgeon told me, with the warmth of a man reading a parking ticket, that I would spend my life in a bed in front of a television. My mother heard him out. Then she looked at me and said, in Italian, "sposta qualcosa." Move something. You do not argue with that voice. I twitched my shoulder. She turned back to him and said, "I think my son has other plans."
Clark's Botanicals is what those other plans became. My father and I built it out of need, not out of a brief, because the skin I came back to could no longer bear anything made for everyone else. Every formula since has been one long, stubborn argument that the body, given the right conditions, already knows how to repair itself.
I did not make that argument by myself. You make it with me, every day. You are the reason a thing that began as one man trying to heal now helps other people's skin grow stronger across years instead of weeks. I sit with that more than you know. Some mornings I can hardly believe it is real.
So this is not a sale and not an announcement. It is a thank you, said plainly, the way my family says things. For twenty four years I counted those two halves of my life against each other, certain one had stolen from the other. I was wrong. They do not cancel. They add. I am still crossing that single street. The only difference now is that I am never crossing it alone.
With love,

Francesco Clark
If you would like to mark the month alongside me, the code JUNE25 will take twenty five percent off whatever you choose, through June.
A small gift, from my house to yours.
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