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I had a conversation with a friend about this type of thing last week. He and his family have an old farmhouse sitting on a lovely little farm, too. They own a natural building materials shop and participate in a lot of training and education around their paints and other products. No, not “products” - scrap that. We were talking about the differences between that word, “products”, and the word “materials”. Products being the mysterious, trademarked concoctions of businesses, overseen to be good for us and this world by mostly nobody. Products are anonymous, marked by logos. And there’s that relationship thing I’m always talking about. Materials, in contrast, are the raw, honest things we can use around our homes and in our lives. Materials are mendable and restorable. They can fade and chip and wear and we can do something about that. They come from the earth, not the by-products of the chemical industry.