Late Winter Gardening
Mary Ellen Gambutti

As St. Patrick’s Day approaches, my anticipation heightens with periodic bursts of mild air. Each day, a strengthening sun calls crocuses and daffodils to rise. No matter that there are still snow patches at the end of March, they cool and temper a day that turns suddenly too warm. I peel off layers of down and wool as activity warms me.

It’s time to begin. Time to start in the garden. I know what I’ll do first. Leaves, having lain in moist beds since autumn rains, oak and maple matted and stuck to frosted soil, can be pulled off in small sheets. Nothing is more delightful than revealing strong yellow-green growth, the musty smell of humus. Even wearing neoprene, I feel the slight bite of fingertips on part-frozen earth. I resist gloves, preferring direct contact in all seasons, but late winter tasks demand them.

Warmth settles on my back as I crouch along the border, still stiff from the winter couch. I know it will be weeks before I freely maneuver through the beds, hauling soil and mulch, planting, before the need for water returns.

With this bed free and breathing, I pull my Felco pruner from my jeans pocket and move to clip the Perovskia, Russian sage, dried, bleached, still faintly fragrant. Left to bloom out its blue scraggle and twist, now leaning and broken from months of snow, I shape it back toward its base, to any new pale growth along the stems, as I would lavender. If there is nothing but wood, I go further, to the bottom tuft of green. By May, it will be full and fragrant in the breeze.

These tasks bring joy, to feel the life around me, the life within me. Snipping rose bushes encourages April growth. I recall how: just above a five-leaflet leaf. How deep the satisfaction in simple actions that will create blooms. And again, more bloom, if, in a month, the work is repeated.

towering tulip tree
buds dance in the breeze,
trill of a pine warbler

Thank you for stopping by!

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Writing a story about fae and the adoption system, Through the Yew Hedge: A Tale of Identity Magic, I found that magical realism and Celtic traditions offered fertile ground for the myths around identity and belonging, Stella’s story. I hope you’ll enjoy it.

My father was one of five sons of Irish immigrants to New York City. He shared recordings of traditional music with me. My mother surrounded me with British and European fairy tales, folklore, and fables. I learned to read inside those worlds. I still do.

Many years later, a DNA test revealed my ancestry is rooted in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. My full-length memoir explores what it means, as an adopted person, to learn and live in both my native and acquired heritage, and whether it is possible to accept both as gifts.

As a retired landscape gardener, I have long felt the deep connection between humans, wild, and cultivated spaces. We ignore that relationship at our peril. The Silverton Estate imagines a world where such liminal spaces are honored. Elizabeth Silverton’s work as a botanist, herbalist, garden designer, and medieval historian draws from British horticultural traditions and medieval monastic gardens. Sarah Caldwell follows in her footsteps, making the Estate her home and living laboratory. Sarah’s scientific approach and Cedra’s Magic are part of Stella’s life, not in opposition, but somewhat in dialogue.

In the worldview and practice of the eminent 13th-century Myddfai Physicians of Wales, Rhiwallon the Physician and his sons, healing takes place when ways of knowing are aligned with the empirical and the intuitive, the botanical and the spiritual, the rational and the mystical. Although boundaries between the supernatural and human world exist, they are permeable, with various consequences. The Myddfai Physicians were descended from the Lady of the Lake, according to the legend.

I am not a folklorist like Helen, nor an herbalist. I approach these traditions with respect, while also trying to tell a truthful story about adoption from an adoptee’s perspective; about the systems that act on human lives.

Stella’s gifts are real. Her half-fae heritage is linked to the Tuatha Dé Danann, a mythic people of Ireland with the skills of demi-gods, artistry, and druidic magic. After a final battle, they retreat into the Otherworld, where they are transformed into the Irish fairy folk. Their legacy is chronicled in The Invasions, set down by Medieval Catholic clerics, offering the Irish a sense of origin, identity, and belonging.

In the novella, the Fae Council: Cedra, Selwyn, and Eleris are complex, capricious, and unreliable. Cedra’s training method is bizarre, but Stella needs her guidance, like she needs Sarah’s observations and notes. They both seem to have a benevolent aim: to see Stella as a whole person.

Celtic tradition recognizes the power of naming, and of holding more than one truth at once. Either-or thinking can fracture identity. We are complex, nuanced. Imperfect. Can’t be fixed. Ruth Ann, Stella, Questa. Three names, dual nature, one life.

Thank you for reading,

I’d love to hear from you. What resonated? What did I leave out? How do we honor traditional stories while also shaping new ones?

Have you read the novella, either in the series on Substack or the ebook?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

In the Attic Mirror
It ripples, responding to me the way it has since I was ten, in another hallway, another room in this house. I am thirteen now.

The attic air hangs heavy with dust. I’ve ventured up the narrow stairs after midnight, drawn by a humming that no one else seems to hear. In the far corner stands an uncovered mirror in an ornate silver frame. I expect my reflection. I dread the distortions I’ve seen since I was ten.

A half-moon casts its light through a dormer window. The mirror’s surface ripples like disturbed water. The attic behind me disappears, replaced by a small room I’ve never seen.

A woman sits by a window. Her copper-bright hair catches the light. She is working on a bracelet of blue forget-me-nots. I can only see her profile, but the curve of her cheek, the shape of her hands —

Ellen.

The name comes from nowhere and everywhere.

She looks up. Has she heard me? Her eyes — my eyes — widen as she stares at me through the glass. She reaches toward the surface, and her fingertips leave fog-like impressions. She is in the mirror. She is in her room. And she is in the attic with me.

Then we are disconnected. Like a phone line cut.

The mirror clears. My own reflection returns, and I see what I first noticed at age ten: a woman weaving an enchanted forget-me-not bracelet without knowing her name. Like her, my eyes shift color, from amber to watery green. Our hair is the same copper.

I press my palm to the cool glass where her hand had been moments before.

Something has awakened in me. Something that was always there, waiting for the right moment. The right reflection.

That night marked a turning point. The mirrors weren’t showing distortions or frightening illusions. They were windows to connections I carry in my blood.

If you’re not already a subscriber, please consider joining the Roots & Branches community today. It’s free!

Thanks for your support!

© Mary Ellen Gambutti 2025-2026

When I found my biological family, I realized that things had happened to me before I had words or memories for them. Intrinsic moments were unrecorded or forgotten.

Did those things even happen? How real or meaningful were those occurrences to me? What is the truth of one’s origin when there is no original story to tell?

Many people are troubled by these questions. Adoptees live with them in a particular way because of how our origins are recorded, sealed, and rewritten by law.

I never questioned the circumstances or location of my birth. What I knew of my origins came from my adoptive parents; they drove from Sumter, where my dad was stationed, to Rock Hill and brought me back to their tiny apartment. The tone of my mother’s notes, which begin with my joining them in late February 1952, reflects their excitement and their duty to their new parenting roles. Everything else is thin. A thinness that speaks volumes in myth, mystery, and magic.

My baptismal certificate served as my valid identification until I attempted to obtain an updated passport at age forty. As a military dependent, I had traveled overseas with my family, and at age nine, I posed for a passport photo with my adopted baby sister and my mother.

I was astonished to learn that South Carolina law denied me access to my original birth certificate, the document I needed for a new passport, when I was a married adult. Until then, I had accepted the legal suppositions handed to me: the vocabulary of my baptismal certificate from Saint Ann’s Church in Rock Hill that doubled as a South Carolina document, and the myths it carried. The document’s new information glared: Birthplace, Greenville, S.C., Saint Francis Hospital. I needed the full story.

My request to Vital Statistics triggered the release of an amended birth certificate. The person on the other end of the line casually mentioned she would obtain the information from Catholic Charities in Charleston, since I had none. Clearly, what she sent was not an original document. It displayed the names of the parents who had raised me.

My adoptive mother mailed me the adoption papers, the original packet from the law firm in Rock Hill. “I don’t know why you would want these,” she wrote.

I contacted a local adoption triad search and support group in Philadelphia. My awareness and righteous indignation were now raised. Too much had been kept from me. It was time to search for my first mother.

Would she be alive?

Step one in the search was to obtain my original birth certificate. Two years of calls and letters ensued before she and I reunited.

Accuracy does not ensure understanding. Many adoptees’ lives are shaped by a strange doubleness: belonging and not belonging; being someone’s daughter while also somehow standing slightly outside the familial circle. Not ostracized, certainly, but carrying the sense of existing just beyond its edges.

One mother is lost. Another offers the silver platter of adoption, with its uneasy privileges and obligations.

At the age of seventy, I finally held my original birth certificate. Life writing honors what can be documented, yet beneath the evidence lies an earlier layer of experience that precedes the record.

When an infant is separated from her mother in the first hours of life, the event does not live in time but in the newborn’s nervous system. The displacement. The dissociation. Mirrors that hold questions.

Many adoptees recognize their heightened sensitivity: a quick response to emotional undercurrents and an ability to read the room. Perhaps these are survival adaptations. Or call it primal wounding, intuition, or an extra-sensory awareness, the separated newborn’s vigilance. Always waiting and watching. Adjusting to loss before she has words for it.

This is where the story begins to change.

I did not set out to write magical realism, though I was intrigued by the form. I would be approaching fiction for the first time, which was daunting given the relative ease I had cultivated in writing personal narrative. The process of writing my own story, the stir of memory and emotion, had brought me closer to understanding my truth.

Memoir allows the evidence to stand: the military family transfers, bases, and separations; the impermanence, the tensions, transitions, the discipline, and the dinner-table silences.

Still, something essential lay beyond literal description. I needed a language strong enough for the contradictions of adoption, and the language that could hold the truth that both love and harm are real. Magical realism allows those tensions to remain intact.

In my new book, written under the pen name Islay Corwin, the central character is afflicted with mirror-sight: the ability to see through reflections and across thresholds. The inherited trait opens a conversation about adoptee heritage and reflects the effects of newborn separation, as the child senses the world long before language arrives.

The earliest impressions, formed in the womb and in the first moments of life, are stored in the nervous system, in the body itself. They may last a lifetime, as trauma clinicians have long observed.

The adoptee at the center of the story carries three names. One was taken from her. One was given to her. One she ultimately claims for herself.

Most adoptees require little explanation of this. Severance disrupts the self, and reunion does not magically reset or repair. Stella’s meeting with Ellen is tender, awkward, and necessary. It offers a connection to biological family, yet the wound of loss remains and cannot be undone. Not in the child whose first bond was broken, not in the first mother whose circumstances shaped an impossible decision, nor in the adoptive mother who loves fiercely yet imperfectly, her protectiveness shadowed by insecurity.

Adoption discourse often presses toward simple answers.

Was it a rescue, or was it a rupture?
Are you grateful? Angry?
Do you belong to this family, or to another?

Of course, the answer is yes.

Where ordinary language struggles to hold such complexity, magical realism widens the frame, allowing truths to exist that resist the narrow limits of literal description. The mirror remembers what the record sealed away.

For many years, I searched for the right words to describe something that happened before I could speak. In the end, the language that came closest was the one that allowed for magic, not because magic is untrue, but because some truths loom too large for the literal.

Note: This essay was originally published as “Expressing the Inexpressible.”
It has been revised and expanded. I wanted to share it widely, because it sits near the heart of my work.


Spring is on the way!

Share

Leave a comment

Most recently, my work has found a form in fiction, and I’ve just published a magical realism novella under the pen name, Islay Corwin. You can find it in serial form in the section, Through the Yew Hedge a A Novella Series. It’s all there! Or you might prefer to read a digital copy.

The Silverton Estate is the backdrop of Through the Yew Hedge. Its enchanted garden shapes the lives of Stella, her adoptive mother, Dr. Sarah Caldwell, and their close-knit community.

Elizabeth Silverton’s vision was to build a restorative botanical estate, a contemplative space modeled on historical precedent where scholars of her university community could find rest and relaxation. A medievalist and a botanist, Elizabeth carried her expertise from the British Isles to New England; her stated purpose to acquire land and design gardens where the integrated healing traditions of the Celtic monasteries could be studied, preserved, and experienced.

Her plan for quadrant layout with reflection pool and fountain at the central axis, and concentric herb beds was guided by ancient apothecary herbals. The astronomical alignments; the iron fountain, the obelisk, and the arbor marking solstice lines echo patterns documented in the Welsh Myddfai manuscripts.

The Physicians of Myddfai were thirteenth-century gardeners and healers whose manuscripts Elizabeth studied, classified plants by their effects on the body, emotional conditions, spiritual transitions, and interpersonal bonds. Long before the modern view of separation of body from spirit, the Celtic monks and herbalists developed a pharmacy rooted in place.

In Elizabeth’s scheme, herbs for calming the mind grew in one bed. Those for strengthening the heart in another. Those for clarifying vision in a third. The arrangement itself was part of the medicine which clients from the university community might benefit.

Elizabeth, directed by three fae, ancient as the cedar groves, designed the medieval-styled garden with wall and yew enclosures, boundaries and thresholds, progressions from outer to inner spaces, and herbs chosen for resonance as much as remedy for those with difficulty navigating unprotected places. Like Stella and Ellen, her natural mother.

The Silverton Estate, its Gardens and Cedar Groves, are Thin Places. The rhythms of Silverton Estate are the narrative’s truest metaphors. The garden offers Stella what her loved ones struggle to explain: that loss has seasons, that transformation doesn’t demand resolution, that some things renew on their own timeline. Here, Stella’s gifts are not merely tolerated or endured. They are accepted. Even in her half-fae nature, she is at home.

When Sarah and Helen later decoded Elizabeth’s herbarium, they discovered that she had cross-referenced every pressed specimen with both standard taxonomy and older Celtic classifications. She annotated properties beyond what modern pharmacology would recognize in Victorian times, as well as in Sarah’s modern day. Elizabeth was not merely recreating history. She was testing it. Sarah was skeptical.

This is one of the threads I found most compelling: the tension between Sarah’s disciplined method and the older, stranger knowledge Elizabeth left behind. Sarah documents, measures, and observes growth patterns and soil composition. Yet Elizabeth’s notes keep pulling her toward a system of understanding that resists the tools Sarah trusts most. Sarah’s mother, Helen, the folklorist, reads the same evidence differently. For her, the framework of healing traditions was never irrational. It operated according to principles that the modern world gradually forgot.

An adoptee’s perspective
Stella’s mirror-sight, her ability to perceive reflections, ripples, and presences in water and glass that no one else can see, is the story’s magical expression of something very real. Research on adoptees consistently documents heightened sensitivity: hypervigilance to emotional undercurrents, acute responsiveness to the environment, attunement to the resonance and nuance of unspoken words. These are often survival adaptations from early severance. The infant’s system must calibrate to loss before language.

In the world outside the Garden, that sensitivity is treated as pathology and managed conventionally. When Sarah finds Stella frozen before the hallway mirror at age eight, the pediatrician calls it a disorder to be managed. Sarah hides away the prescription. Margaret Hawthorn brews tea from the garden’s innermost circle to soothe Stella’s spells. In time, those closest to her, accept her differences in perception as her own faculty, like ordinary eyesight or hearing. Cedra teaches her to steady herself in mirrors, dewdrops, and cedar ice reflections.

The Garden does what Elizabeth, guided by the fae, designed it to do. It does not explain. It simply demonstrates, teaching Stella to trust the spaces between knowing, the seasons where nothing seems to be happening, even as everything shifts beneath the surface.

As a horticulturist, long retired from working on large estates, I relate to the meaning of garden as a sanctuary. A sacred place. The garden, elevated to its highest form, is a refuge. Nature itself. Working in old estate gardens taught me that landscapes hold time and memory. Gardeners witness the walls built by hands long gone, beds dug and amended by generations, decades-old trees whose shade we inherit without knowing whether it was sown by a bird or grafted by hand. Woodlands where leaves and moss have accumulated, layered like time. Like meaning. A garden is never just a design. It exists from season to season in cycles of growth, dormancy, decay, and renewal.

I return to gardens in my writing for the same reason I returned to them in life. They are the most honest spaces I know. A garden does not pretend. It shows you exactly where it is in its cycle. It does not hide its dead wood or bare soil. Beauty and decay occupy the same bed without apology.

For Stella, shaped by sealed records, the silence of systems, and the guardians who mean to protect her, it is the garden’s honesty where she thrives. Here is a space that conceals nothing. Here is a space where every stage of life is visible, where memory is written in bark and root and volunteer seedlings.

Elizabeth Silverton understood that. She designed a contemplative space for a university community, yes, but she also planted something deeper. A place where ancient knowledge could take root again, where an ancient cedar forest is preserved. Where the full truth of a life could be held without flinching.

That is the sanctuary she left behind. That is what Sarah tends. That is what Stella, slowly, learns to trust. And that, for me, is the heart of the story.

Thank you for reading,
Mel x

© Mary Ellen Gambutti 2026

Dear Readers,
How many of us have a similar sensory memory?
I hope you’ll enjoy mine while keeping cozy. Here in New Jersey, we’re contentedly snowed in.
Much love and warmth,
Mel

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

© Mary Ellen Gambutti All Rights Reserved 2026

Like the best hybrids, the Silverton Estate’s Medieval Monastery Garden is a liminal space where growth thrives with both structure and a bit of the wild, where roots connect past to present. Where boundaries blur.

Stella, an adoptee, begins to sense her half-fae nature as her metaphysical abilities awaken, stirring longing and confusion about her place within her extended family. From her omniscient–transcendent perspective, she explores identity fracture, the ethics of adoption, the right to one’s true story, and the tension between what we observe to be true and the myths we choose to believe.

In this enchanted tale, ancient cedars serve as anchors, black roses mark thresholds, and morning glories bloom between worlds. The narrative shifts, like the Cedar Dryad herself, between clarity and lyricism, between forest wilds and manicured medieval garden, weaving botanical wisdom, fae magic, folklore, and the ache of adoption, identity, and the longing to belong.

Through the Yew Hedge is a coming-of-age story for anyone who understands what it means to live between worlds: caught between love and loss, concealment and radical truth, Stella must claim her entire inheritance.

Magical Realism and the Language of Adoption

As an adoptee, I’ve found that writing magical realism helps illuminate psychological experiences, offering a way to explore interior fragmentation, inherited trauma, and identity formation through images and metaphor. When I sat down to tell Stella’s story, I realized that the stark language of adoption law, severance, sealed records, and legal erasure didn’t capture the full texture of what it feels like to live inside that rupture. What little I know of the clinical language doesn’t hold the dislocation, the sense of being divided from yourself, the strange double-consciousness of belonging and not belonging simultaneously.

That’s when magic entered the telling.

Through the Yew Hedge is my attempt to make visible what is masked in infant relinquishment and the transfer of the child to strangers, the pre-verbal fracture that occurs when origin stories are stolen and sealed. My young adult experience was marked by identity bewilderment and fragmentation, a nonsensical state of straddling two worlds: one lacking an intrinsic bond and one entirely faceless and disembodied. Yes, that was a scary story!

Many adoptees will recognize this duality. I hope I can give a voice to these sensations where diagnoses and ordinary language fall short and can be hard to articulate to others.

The Story as Framework

When botanist Sarah Caldwell finds an infant in the fairy ring of Silverton Estate on a Winter Solstice morning, she names her Stella and raises her with love and scientific curiosity. But Stella possesses “mirror-sight,” the ability to see across time and through reflections, to perceive the thresholds between worlds that others walk past without noticing. I use this as a central metaphor for the adoptee experience: the sense of holding multiple realities at once, of perceiving fractures in identity that others cannot see, of living in a kind of heightened perception that can feel isolating.

Through Stella’s journey, the story explores several interlocking themes:

Severance and Reunion

At fourteen, Stella meets her first mother, Ellen, whose own mirror-sight shaped her impossible decision at a bus station on a winter morning. The reunion doesn’t erase the years of separation, and it doesn’t resolve the grief. But it begins the work of integration; the slow process of learning that you can love the person who raised you and grieve the person you were separated from, that these two truths don’t cancel each other out.

What I wanted to show was reunion as it actually is: complicated, tender, sometimes awkward, and necessary. Ellen is not the savior who “makes it all better.” Sarah is not the villain who stole Stella’s life. They are both women who loved Stella in the best ways they knew how, within impossible constraints. Stella’s task isn’t to choose between them. It’s to learn to hold them both. That is no easy task.

Identity and Wholeness

Stella carries three names: Ruth Ann (the identity sealed away at birth), Stella (the name given to her by the woman who raised her), and Questa (the name she chooses for herself, albeit with guidance from her fae guardians, her own reclamation). Her movement toward wholeness reflects what happens when an adoptee finally gains access to her full origin story. It’s not that one name is “real” and the others aren’t. They’re all real. They all matter.

Withholding a person’s vital information, whether for convenience, protection, or by state seal, is an injustice with lasting psychological impact. When Sarah keeps the adoption papers hidden, she believes she’s protecting Stella. But what Stella experiences is a theft of self-knowledge, a message that parts of her own story are dangerous or shameful. The book doesn’t ask us to condemn Sarah for this. It asks us to see the cost clearly.

Adoptive Parenting Across Difference

Sarah struggles to support her adopted daughter’s abilities, which she cannot fully understand. As a scientist, she measures, documents, and tries to make sense of Stella’s unusual gifts. But Stella’s mirror-sight isn’t a disorder to be managed. It’s an inheritance to be cultivated. Sarah has to learn this slowly, through watching her daughter work with Cedra, the Dryad guardian who understands what Sarah cannot.

This mirrors what many adoptive parents face: the reality that your child’s inner experience may remain partially opaque to you. You cannot access their genetic history, their family patterns, the invisible inheritances they carry. You can’t know what triggers might surface years later, the sensitivities that might emerge from their neonatal loss. We hope to have the space and support for naming those experiences without shame or disappointment, without them being explained away.

Patterns

Ellen’s uncontrolled mirror-sight shaped her entire life and her devastating choice to place Ruth Ann. What goes unnamed in one generation often reappears in the next, demanding acknowledgment. Stella inherits not just Ellen’s gifts, but also the weight of the decisions Ellen made under conditions of crisis.

This is where the magical realism deepens the story. The ability to see across worlds isn’t just poetic. It’s a real inheritance that carries real consequences. And learning to work with that inheritance rather than running from it or denying it becomes part of Stella’s healing.

Belonging Without Choosing

The story resists “either/or” thinking. It imagines belonging, not by choosing between identities, but by building bridges between them. To learn to hold both truths at once. Stella doesn’t have to decide whether she “really” belongs to Sarah or to Ellen. She belongs to both. She is both Ruth Ann and Stella. And when she chooses the name Questa, she’s not erasing the previous names. She’s integrating them.

This matters because so much adoption discourse forces people to choose: Are you grateful? Are you angry? Do you belong to your adoptive family or your birth family? The real answer is always more complicated. The real answer is yes to all of it.

The Garden as Sanctuary

Elizabeth Silverton’s medieval monastery garden serves as both a literal sanctuary and a symbolic container. It is a space intentionally designed: water systems, plant selection, and architectural intention for those with heightened perception. Where differently abled is not a pathology but a gift. Where unusual ways of seeing can be cultivated rather than suppressed.

I spent fifteen years working as a horticulturist, and I learned something essential: plants respond to attention, to intention, to the person tending them. A garden isn’t passive scenery. It’s a relationship. The Victorian botanist, Elizabeth, understood this. She designed The Garden not just as a beautiful space, but as a healing space, where the plants offer solace and comfort, medicine in the ancient monastic tradition. Where water channels mark thresholds, and the cedars hold memory.

Nature becomes teacher, witness, and stabilizer in the narrative. The cycles of growth and dormancy help us understand grief and healing: the slow return of what seems lifeless, from the patient roots beneath the surface. The healing that happens in the quiet tending, in the presence of something older than one’s own confusion.

For the Adoption Community

The adoptee’s dual consciousness. The simultaneous belonging and not-belonging. The feeling that you’re never quite fully here or fully there. Stella’s mirror-sight literalizes this: she can see both worlds at once, but moving fully into either one requires grounding and intention. This is the psychological reality of many adoptees: you’re always perceiving multiple realities. The work is learning not to get lost in the reflections.

The adoptive parent’s navigation of unknown, invisible inheritances. Sarah can provide love and protection and botanical expertise. But she can’t know Ellen’s story. She can’t fully understand the fae inheritance. She has to hold space for knowledge that will always be partially opaque to her. This is the actual work of adoptive parenting across difference; not trying to fully understand your child’s invisible inheritances, but creating a sanctuary space for them to be explored and honored.

The birth parents’ impossible choices were made under conditions of crisis or coercion. Ellen’s decision to place Ruth Ann comes from desperation, from the whispered promises of the fae that her baby will be safe and found. She doesn’t have access to the information or resources that would have allowed her to parent. The story doesn’t excuse the systems that created this impossibility. It honors Ellen’s humanity and her ongoing love.

What wholeness can look like when identity has been legally and emotionally severed. Not “getting over it.” Not “moving on.” But integration—the work of learning to hold Ruth Ann and Stella and Quella simultaneously, without choosing between them, without erasing any part of the story.

Sarah’s character arc, using her botanical expertise to support her daughter’s development, reflects something I believe is true: professional passion can meet personal mission when parents learn to work with rather than against their child’s essential nature. Sarah doesn’t try to “fix” Stella’s mirror-sight. She creates conditions where Stella can develop her gifts safely. She bears witness to her daughter’s integration. She learns to ask Cedra for help. This, I think, is what adoption-informed parenting looks like.

Thank you for following Stella’s journey through all twelve episodes. Whether you’ve walked through the yew hedge with Questa from the beginning, or you’re discovering the garden now, we’re grateful you’re here.
More to come on Behind The Hedge, Roots & Branches, and Seasons.

The complete novella is available as an e-book. The illustrated serial version remains here on Substack for reading at your own pace.

There’s space in the comments, if you’d like to share: What resonated with you in this story? What did you recognize as your own experience?

With gratitude,

Leave a comment

Episode 12 carries the story from Cedar and Iron through The Third Council at Winter Solstice, Stella’s closing ceremony of integration.

If you’ve been reading along, thank you for accompanying me on Stella’s journey, as well as mine to publication. If you’ve joined somewhere along the way, this final chapter gathers the arc into alignment.

You can read it here: → https://www.melandislay.com/p/twelfth-in-series-through-the-yew

Here is a brief description of Through the Yew Hedge:
This debut novella of magical realism explores adoption, inheritance, and identity. Set within the Silverton Estate’s medieval garden, the story follows Stella, an adoptee whose awakening “mirror-sight” becomes a metaphor for living between worlds.

What begins as a fairy tale unfolds into a reckoning with truth, belonging, and the right to one’s own story.

Thank you for being a subscriber. Many of you have followed my blog for a long time, and I appreciate your continued support.

Warm regards,
Mary Ellen Gambutti
(Mel)

Welcome back!
Our story began on a Winter Solstice when a botanist found an infant in an enchanted garden. We close at Solstice and the Third Council, in the same fairy ring, with the integration of Ruth Ann’s inheritance and identity. The ceremony does not repair what was shattered in severance, undo the system’s erasure, or deny grief. It affirms continuity.

Cedar and Iron
As the days grew shorter, Cedra began to train me to prepare for the Third Council on the Winter Solstice, to commemorate the day Sarah found me in the Fairy Ring when I was three months old. It would mark a new threshold.

The first time Cedra trained me at the Iron Fountain, before Ellen came to live at the cottage, Sarah and Helen supported me. Helen said, “Just like in the old story of The Three Wells, how the middle well shows things as they truly are, but requires a proper approach.”

Cedra had said: Elizabeth Silverton chose this Iron Fountain. She understood the protective properties of cold iron, how it anchors and stabilizes reflections.

Helen had added, “Like the iron horseshoes in old folklore, they weren’t just luck, they were boundaries.”

The folklorist understands that iron creates a frame that constrains the opening. Without such boundaries, water reflections become... unpredictable. Remember the sequence: First, ground yourself through the cedar memory. Second, establish your tether, pattern, and purpose, protection through design.

Today, we would work in Cedar Grove, where iron-rich soil provided grounding against the disorienting effects of advanced mirror-walking, the combination of elements, living cedar, buried iron, and snow, creating ideal conditions for developing mastery.

Cedra explained as we practiced navigation through all reflective layers:
The tree represents life, connection, and continuity. The iron provides stability, protection, and grounding. Together, they teach balance; how to move between worlds without losing anchor.

These exercises challenged me more than any yet presented to me, requiring active manipulation of mirror passages, temporary doorways, stabilized reflections, keeping clear return paths, while exploring possibilities. My grief strengthened me.

Loss deepens the sight, Pain creates cracks in perception, giving awareness to emerge.

I was learning to access the deep sight. I later would understand the qualities of empathy and intuition. As half-fae, half-human, I would know this higher truth to be the ability to seek and help lost souls like Emily, for bridging gaps that mundane mirror-walking could not.

The iron in the soil taught me about integrity, about boundary protection. This ability would allow me to hold onto my identity when confronted with collective consciousness, a vital skill in resisting easy and dangerous pulls to escape sadness, which would permit the dissolution of self. Cedars live for many centuries, showing their connection to life-force.

I felt ready for the Third Council ceremony, where I would receive the Fae’s blessing and become an active participant in the magic that this turning of the year requires. My training transformed me from a protected child into a young adult member of the mirror-walker community. I would carry Ellen’s legacy while being true to myself and accepting a role in my human family.

The household awakened before dawn to greet the day of my Third Council. Sarah stood at the AGA cooker, coaxing steam from our old kettle. Tiny Morning Glories, the petite blue cups, were opening against the cold glass, like a memory of the Winter Solstice dawn Sarah had found me in the Fairy Ring.

Helen set out the scones she’d baked the night before. We three were as solemn as the occasion seemed to demand, like the hush of heavy snowfall.

Charles tapped on the kitchen door. He and Margaret stepped in, bundled up. “We’d like to be there, if you’ll have us.”

My chosen family was there, ready to witness the completion of a journey they’d all helped make possible. James had come around with the big sleigh to ride us all to The Garden for what was expected to be a brief ceremony. Charles had wrapped hot bricks in burlap to toast our feet on the wooden floorboards. Margaret tucked wool blankets around us all, and we settled in.

The two ponies knew the way, parting the deep snow like a sea to let us pass. James pulled the reins to a gentle stop outside the Yew Hedge. “We’ll wait here,” he said.

Charles, Margaret, James, and Helen thought it best to witness the ceremony from the warm comfort of the sleigh, while within earshot. Margaret poured tea from her thermos into the four awaiting mugs, steam silvering in the frosty air. “Take your time!” she said to me. “We’ll be right here with the ponies.”

The boundaries between worlds grew thin as I stepped across the herb rings, this time with Sarah. Like my first entrance at three-months, when my Fae Guardians delivered me there in a Moses basket, tepid vapors rose, softening the snow of The Inner Sanctum.

Sarah gasped in surprised recognition of Cedra, who wore snow pants, heavy boots, and a woolen hat with ear flaps. My Mentor announced:

Today marks Questa’s identity integration, the day she completes what began when she arrived in this place.

Several blue morning glory flowers opened on the vine as Selwyn materialized through the arbor, saying:
Fourteen years the seasons have turned, and you have grown to be a Seeker, ready for full integration.

Eleris: Speak your name given at birth, child of Ellen’s line.

“Ruth Ann,” it carried on the vapors.

Selwyn beckoned: Speak the name chosen in love, daughter of Sarah’s heart.

“Stella,” snowflakes as stardust alighted on my shoulders.

Cedra: Now speak the name discovered through seeking, Bridge-Walker Between Realms.

“I am Questa!” My voice powered through the morning stillness, across the Silverton Estate.

Three Fae: Speak your integrated truth.

I felt my words rise:
“I am Ruth Ann Stella Questa, born of fairy blood, raised in human love, walking between worlds as Guardian and Guide.”

The Fairy Ring glowed like the Aurora. The herbs shone like silver moons. Above and around us, the blue winter air pulsed, and the Cedar Grove swayed.

Cedra intoned:
So you are named in all realms, Guardian of Thresholds, Keeper of the Sight, and Bridge Between Worlds.

From the sleigh, I heard Margaret, “Oh my.”
Charles and James responded in unison, “Well, I’ll be.”
Grandma Helen, who had nurtured my love of storytelling, held a hanky to her eyes.

The two ponies whinnied and tossed their manes back in pride.

My Three Guardians, as they passed through the Yew Hedge, bowed their heads toward my family before fading back into the second grove into their cozy, mossy-roofed hut.

Sarah and I climbed into the sleigh, James clicked to the ponies, and we started for home.
“Well,” he said, breaking the stunned silence, “that’s certainly going into the Estate’s Archives!”

Seeing Ellen
At breakfast, I’d invited Helen and Sarah to the Hidden Library for a quiet remembrance of Ellen. I led them after the Council Ceremony through the Manor’s quiet south wing and drew aside the tapestry that concealed the entrance. As always, Elizabeth Silverton’s ancient volumes breathed a welcome and the excitement of learning into the otherwise stale air.

At my request, Sarah brought three white candles and a chip of cedar.

Helen carried a tiny crystal bowl of snow water. I had on the triskelion pendant and chain that Ellen took from her neck and hung around mine in the days before her passing, insisting I wear it for protection. I carried Ellen’s silver-backed table mirror and the obsidian worry stone from her grimoire box.

“Ellen’s family had a tradition of mirror scrying,” I said in a reverent library whisper. We sat in Elizabeth’s reading alcove around the low, round oak table inlaid with Celtic runes. “She taught me the safe way, with proper anchoring and clear intention.” Sarah was concerned, but I assured her this wouldn’t be like the event that caused such consternation during Ellen’s autumn lesson. Helen placed the candles at three points around the mirror. Sarah sprinkled snow water, and tiny prisms danced in the crystal bowl and candlelight.

“Ellen,” I said to the mirror’s surface, “we honor your passage and celebrate the integration you made possible.”

The mirror’s surface rippled like disturbed water, then cleared to show Ellen’s hands— hands that had written in the grimoire, hands that had held me as an infant, hands that had taught me to read frost patterns for safe reflection only a month ago.

“She’s acknowledging us,” Helen whispered.

“She knows Stella—Questa—is safe,” Sarah said.

In the mirror’s depths, Ellen’s hands held a single morning-glory blossom that bloomed and faded in an endless cycle— a symbol of an ongoing connection across the boundary of loss.

“Thank you,” I whispered to the reflection. “For the name that connected me to our lineage. For the courage to let me go. For teaching me that love transcends separation.”

The morning glory in Ellen’s hands blazed with blue light once, then faded as the mirror returned to ordinary reflection. A sense of her presence, the awareness of her love, lingered.

“The circle is complete,” Helen said. “Birth mother, adoptive mother, and integrated daughter, all honored.”

We blew out the candles and stood to leave the Hidden Library. In a wall mirror, a motion—a blur—caught my eye. Three figures were walking together through a garden. Ellen was not alone.

This Winter Solstice marked my integration as well as the completion of a pattern generations in the making. The Garden remembered everything.

The mirrors reflected the truth. And love, I had learned, was the strongest magic of all.

We hope you have enjoyed the novella-in-series.
Thank you for walking this path with Stella — Ruth Ann — Questa over the past twelve weeks, through severance, reunion, and integration — Through the Yew Hedge.

e-book

Coming soon in illustrated softcover.

What Comes After:

Future posts in Behind The Hedge will include thoughts about adoption from the adoptee’s perspective, process notes about the author’s link from personal essay and memoir to fairy tale, and the myth of the Chosen Child.

Leave a comment

With the Third Council complete, the Garden rests, but not all thresholds close.
For those who sensed that Stella’s integration was not the end,
but the beginning of a deeper reckoning, a sequel is forthcoming…
Thank you!

Subscribe now

Winter Haibun - A Farmland Reverie
Springfield Twp., Bucks County, PA

In memory, I escape from the moral uncertainty of the times into a place where sweet air satisfies, and the spirit of nature presides. A touch of rustic charm once inspired me to restore a German merchant-farmer’s house in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and create an acre of gardens. After Mr. Trumbauer improved an earlier version of an 1800s farmhouse, it was a charming turn-of-the-century village home. We did our research and, within our budget, paid homage to its original character.

One sparkling, still morning when ice and snow encased the valley, I pulled on layers of wool and down, laced up insulated boots, and, careful on the unshoveled steps, I trudged beyond our carriage house into a crisp, crystalline world.

German immigrant families from the Rhineland and the Palatinate left Schoharie-Albany, where British rule had taken their farmlands in the 1700s. With their cattle, they trekked overland along the Delaware and Lehigh rivers, and their vast farms of corn and wheat spread through the fertile valleys. They displaced the indigenous Leni Lenape, who were forced to leave their campgrounds as they had when the earliest Dutch and Huguenot colonists arrived.

Our village remained alive with grain and dairy commerce through the 1950s. Old fallow fields are now copses of scrub oak, wild dogwood, juniper, crabapple, and vine that have sprung up where the plow avoided rocks, providing food and cover for wildlife. I follow deer tracks below glistening boughs to a silverberry enclosure, where blue jays and cardinals feast on the tiny red fruits, and excited finches flit through the twigs. Snow has drifted in the snow-muffled thicket where deer sheltered overnight; the air still holding their musk and hot breath.

Where I sit on a mature, uprooted, golden-barked mulberry tree screened by branches, an array of remnants of farm life is visible through the snow: an antique tractor long ago lodged in mud, its steering wheel a rusted peace sign; an abandoned mule plow replaced by gas power, and a ruined tire wheel that succumbed to shale shards in this fertile soil. I breathe a meditation, grateful for my parka, wool hat, mittens, warm boots, and the pure air.

Our elderly neighbor’s property begins behind our carriage barn, but I’m not intruding here. He came in the 1950’s, his home a way-stop built, like ours, in the early 1800s. From my vantage on the fallen mulberry, I glimpse back toward his dilapidated barn. Collapsed and useless, the slate roof was sadly neglected through too many winters. Had he made repairs, shored up the massive chestnut footings, and repaired the board siding, the barn might have withstood the weight of heavy snow.

Even amid ruin, the land reshapes itself, purposed. The crumbled fieldstone wall that once divided our parcels, another centuries-old relic, is a habitat for the white ferret that crosses the rubble, hunting field mice. Lithe and lean, she is absorbed into the snow-scene. I peer through woody growth, senses alive to the brilliant cardinal’s cheery tune and the screech of nuthatches. Finches flit in and out of the brush, swaying on frost-weakened twigs. They all share my space, but I don’t complain.

I linger in quiet, in the private depths of nature, perhaps the last of a millennium, while, maybe, the backhoe and builder are next. I think of the children who trudged through these snow-covered woodlands, fields, and hillsides. Sere grasses nod in the breeze. Light snowflakes drift like my thoughts.

A collapsed corn bin,
the bleakness of a snow field
No more cows remain

©Mary Ellen Gambutti
First published November 22, 2017, in Vignette Review.

Thanks for stopping by!

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Hello, All ~ Welcome back ~

Roots & Branches has always been a place for reflection on identity, inheritance, loss, and repair, whether through lived experience, the natural world, or story. I began serializing Through the Yew Hedge here because my debut novella grew directly out of those same questions.

Although it is a magical fairy tale for adults, it presents hard subjects. As the story continues, it enters more demanding terrain.

Episode 11 marks a turning point, where myth meets evidence: DNA, family patterns, inheritance, and the systems that decide who is permitted access to the truth of their own origins.

For adoptees, this reckoning often comes late, if at all. For adoptive parents, it can unsettle narratives built with care and good faith. For birth parents, it can reopen histories shaped by silence, poverty, and impossible choices.

Through the Yew Hedge: A Tale of Identity Magic is not a rescue story. It’s a story about rupture and recognition. About what it costs to become whole after legal severance.

Not every reader will want to follow the story into this depth, and that’s understood. But for those who come to Roots & Branches for thoughtful engagement with identity, grief, inheritance, and repair, I hope you’ll enjoy and benefit from the work I’m doing now.

This week’s installment of Through the Yew Hedge marks a threshold. A twelfth installment will complete the series next week. You’re always welcome to step in with the Prologue, or anywhere you’d like.

Leave a comment

Share

Family Patterns

Sarah’s academic world had expanded to embrace the changes. Her study transformed from her academic sanctuary into a liminal space where truths coexisted. Medieval herbals and ancient texts about family magic lived with Botany textbooks. Embellishing the margins of her notebooks and folios with symbols and florals wasn’t unusual, but now she recorded what she once considered peculiar phenomena as mundane occurrences. Most importantly, Sarah showed her acceptance of my reunion with my natural mother after our long, unnatural separation, and my inherited fairy sight.

The Garden’s Essence

Sarah and James, taking a slow Saturday afternoon out of the heat, were chatting in the Archives lab. James set aside the file of genetic reports. “Do you remember that soil sample you collected several years ago? It’s been in the back of the specimen refrigerator all this time.”

Sarah blinked, “What? You kept it? It’s got to be covered in Rhizopus!”

“Yes. I did. It seemed... important. And I’ve compared a sample against Stella’s DNA results. I thought you should know, the fungal DNA fragments show patterns just as unusual as her markers.”

“Don’t try to tell me Stella’s genetic makeup is akin to bread mold...”

Sarah’s chuckle and facetious tone didn’t surprise James. Lately, she seemed freer, more accepting of the magic around her. Still, James rolled his eyes.

The Garden’s blood, bottled in a beaker, had waited for the right moment to speak. “Even the soil remembers,” James said.

Extraordinary Results
On a bright July afternoon, James visited The Guest Cottage with the DNA test kit he’d ordered for Ellen. She’d agreed to provide a saliva sample, as I had the previous fall. The combined results of our genetic tests could help me understand my heritage and bridge ancient lore to modern science.

“What we have learned from Stella’s test is that your family’s genetic pattern is extraordinary,” James said. “There are markers that appear in less than 0.01% of the general population...”

“My grandmother called it ‘the old blood,’” Ellen replied. “She said it came from beyond the mirrors, but I always thought that was her way of explaining what she didn’t understand.”

James said, “Science and folklore may describe the same phenomenon in different languages. What matters is accurate translation between systems of knowledge.”

Shimmering Sequences

Ellen needed more rest on the hottest days, preferring the cedar breezes through the cottage windows. I’d retreat to the cool, quiet of our high-ceilinged first-floor library, and the comfort of Elizabeth’s antique sofa, as I had on hot and rainy days with Helen since childhood.

One stifling late July afternoon, James set Ellen’s results with mine on the reading table. I noticed a silver presence from the library looking glass – Eleris, overseeing us with her spectral gaze.

James said. “There are records, if you know where to look,” a pet expression of his. “It seems that the mirror-sight manifests differently through generations,” James continued, perhaps sensing something beyond ordinary perception. From my point of view, the results glowed; the markers highlighted colors that seemed to shift. Perhaps it was scientific truth reacting to fairy sight—the genetic markers revealing the magic of heredity.

“The markers remain remarkably consistent: what your mother called ‘the old blood’ shows up here—” he pointed to a specific sequence, “—and here. Both locations are associated with neurological structures involved in visual processing and perception filtering.”

While James spoke, the ancient Sansevieria, “Snake Plant,” that rested on the mahogany side table, perhaps since Elizabeth’s day, but never bloomed in my memory, sprouted a long stalk and produced tiny lily-like buds that burst open within ten seconds. It was Selwyn’s presence manifest in the language of flowers.

“The most fascinating aspect is the correlation between these genetic markers and historical records of the Silverton Estate,” James added, gesturing to ancient family trees and property documents where certain names appeared with special notations—symbols I now recognized as private language indicating mirror-walkers in previous generations.

Had James seen the plant bloom? A faint cedar scent filled the room. It was Cedra to acknowledge the connection between bloodlines and land, inheritance and place. The three fae converged as witnesses to the scientific confirmation of magical lineage.

The afternoon light filtered through the sheer library curtains, across the papers, and I leaned forward when I saw something unusual in the printed sequences.

“These markers here,” James pointed to a section of the results, “show maternal lineage from regions with the highest concentration of documented ‘sight’ accounts: Northern Scotland, Western Ireland, and the Isle of Man. It’s the Celtic triangulation where accounts of fairy sight remained strongest into the modern era.”

I wasn’t listening to the geographic explanation, but I was transfixed by what I saw on the page. The silver-blue highlighted sequences now shimmered and pulsed like morning glories outside the library window; that now seemed to beckon in response.

“Stella?” Sarah had entered the library and noticed my fixed gaze.

“The sequences,” I whispered. “They’re moving.”

James saw nothing more unusual in the test results than what he’d noted earlier. “What do you mean?”

“These particular markers,” I repeated, pointing to the sections he had identified, “they shimmer like they’re written in moonlight.”

Sarah exchanged a glance with James. “What do they look like to you?”

“Like Celtic spirals,” I said. “Triple spirals, similar to the ones in the Garden, but alive.”

James took notes, documenting the locations of shimmer to markers. We mapped a pattern that, when traced onto paper later, formed an intricate Celtic knot, like one repeated in the stones of the Monastery Garden.

“Your DNA must carry a signature invisible to standard testing,” said James, holding up his hands, shaking his head, “evidence of your dual fae and mortal heritage, that only mirror-sight reveals.”

Blood Remembers

After James’s analysis, I thought about the silvery patterns that pulsed with life beneath the printed results. That evening, the sweet pea vines in the Keeper’s Cottage Garden drew my attention. Their tendrils curled not only in response to their support but also in double-helix patterns. Like they were telling me something. The Estate had inhaled the day’s discussion and now exhaled in stillness.

I rested on the cedar bench under Margaret’s arbor. In the fading light, I saw the luminescent silvery-blue pattern that James identified as unique to mirror-seers from the Celtic triangulation.

Your mother had this same marker...

The voice came from behind the arbor. I didn’t startle when Cedra stepped from behind a column of sweet peas, her form like moonlight.

...as did her mother before her, and back through your line to when our worlds were one.

A rustling in Margaret’s cut flower beds was Selwyn and Eleris, coming to join us. They flowed toward the arbor, translucent in the deepening twilight. It was rare to see all three fae together outside a formal council, but since the trio had been present in the library earlier, I wasn’t surprised to see them. Their presence made the air feel thinner.

The Garden responds to blood knowledge. Plants recognize what flows in your veins. The sweet pea vines trembled in their spiral patterns.

“Is that why the plants always reacted to me? Because of my blood?” I asked.

Blood remembers, said Eleris, bending to look at the charts beside me on the bench. Silvery trails connected markers. What science has only recently discovered, the ancient ones always knew. She circled the arbor, and in her breezy voice, continued: Your blood carries memories older than human words. Memories of when boundaries between worlds were permeable.

The three spoke in turn, in a rhythm that resonated through Margaret’s garden:

Morning glories bloomed impossibly in the twilight, their blue-purple flowers opening in sequence to form a garden path. I gathered my charts—it was time to go home. Margaret stepped out of the Keeper’s Cottage, smiling and waving.

The nearest window of The Manor House gleamed, although not from light within. In its reflection, I could see the pattern of my Celtic heritage connecting me to both mortal and fairy lineages. The quiet fire of Brigid’s forge and hearth braided with older currents of the Tuatha Dé Danann. I discovered my inheritance was a weaving of song and flame, soil and story, blessing and burden. I stood between worlds; not accident, but memory. My Guardians dissolved into the forest, merging with the shadows.

August Storms

Thunder rattled windows, and pools lay all over The Estate, in reflective surfaces that Ellen warned me to approach with caution:

“Water reflections are the most dangerous,” she admonished, shaking her head, her face shadowed with old grief, lines deepening around eyes that had seen too much across too many reflective surfaces. “They’re less stable than glass or metal, more likely to create false passages to places from which return becomes impossible. Emily found a passage but lacked the training to maintain her connection to this side.

“Without an anchor, she couldn’t find her way back. I was too young to help her then, barely understanding my abilities. By the time I realized what was happening, she had already released her tether to this world.”

I grieved my half-sister and heeded Ellen’s warning. I was learning to anchor.

Season’s Change

At the Autumn Equinox, I turned fourteen. This thin time of seasonal change brought its magic to The Estate. Margaret and Charles hosted a party at their Keeper’s Cottage, saying, “This threshold day needs a celebration among all who have become family through choice, and by blood.” My birthday party would be a blended family reunion, and Charles extended the weathered oak table with its extra leaf. I arrived early to help Margaret with the preparations. Comfortable in her kitchen, their family home was my second home, and as next-door neighbors, Margaret and Helen exchanged recipes and household tips. Margaret shared herbal remedies advice with Sarah and served me tea on many occasions when my mirror-sight troubled me.

The Equinox yielded mixed late summer and early autumn blooms in blue jars on the stone mantlepiece and for a table centerpiece in a white stoneware jug. Margaret’s home-crafted beeswax candles cast golden light from her heirloom pewter holders that stood beside the chunky, brown crock of sunflowers glowing on the sideboard. Garlands of rosemary, thyme, and lavender wound between the place settings, herbs that seemed to respond to the Equinox energy with extra fragrance. “Protection and happiness, according to tradition. They know it’s a threshold day,” Margaret said. We all knew that the Hawthorns wove protective elements into their everyday life with the shared wisdom of those who live close to the land.

James set aside his work to escort Ellen to the party. “No work tonight,” he promised as the two walked through the door of the keeper’s cottage, his home since birth. I could sense his enthusiasm about the genetic genealogy that had revealed so much about mine and Ellen’s ancestral heritage. Ellen was getting around less, taking tentative steps that demanded a bit more of her by the week. She had enjoyed a boost in health and energy when we began training with Cedra in April, but her stamina waned after Midsummer. It hurt my heart to see her limitations, apparent in her every gesture.

“Birthday traditions matter in our family,” Ellen said, her spirits brighter than I’d yet seen them, as she placed a gift on the sideboard.

Our family. It was so good to hear that I was included in another family, my first.

Sarah and Helen arrived together, Helen carrying a layer cake decorated with sugared violets, blue icing, and fresh morning glories encircling the plate. “Mom’s idea,” Sarah said, her smile holding both affection and the scientific curiosity that had led her to research traditional birthday symbolism in Elizabeth’s journals.

As Charles ladled Margaret’s hearty autumn vegetable stew into our bowls and she served warm brown bread with butter and cheese, conversation flowed among this constellation of people who had become family through choice rather than blood. Sarah offered her botanical observations; Helen shared folkloric insights; Charles provided practical gardening wisdom, and Margaret’s gentle household knowledge anchored it all.

Ellen put forth a few Fairchild family anecdotes in a surprisingly strong voice. “My grandmother taught my mother to read folklore and frost patterns.” And “My mother tried to teach me mirror-stabilization...” I sensed there was much more to my birth mother’s family history that she guarded; memories of trauma or shame, knowledge that might be essential to me.

“Stella has already mastered basic stabilization.” Sarah sat a bit taller.

She shows an unusual aptitude for cedar resonance.

The voice caused us all to turn to the kitchen door, where Cedra stood at the threshold, her appearance causing no alarm. We were accustomed to Faes’ visits, both announced and not, especially from Cedra. On this birthday, Cedra’s inclusion might have been expected, and I felt sure Margaret and Charles had invited her: my Mentor, Ellen’s Guide.

I was pleased to see her, dressed in garments far brighter than her usual earth tones: a chartreuse vest, a tartan kilt over heavy black leggings, a white balloon-sleeved shirt with laces, and canvas knee boots. The Dryad stepped toward me, holding a simple circlet woven from cedar twigs and morning glory vines.

The Council acknowledges your progress. You stand now between childhood and completion, knowing all three of your names. Soon you’ll be ready for integration.

I didn’t feel ready to accept more accolades, having only recently passed Second Council. But I bowed my head graciously as Cedra placed the circlet like a crown.

“Ruth Ann, by birth. Stella, by choice. Questa, by destiny.” I echoed the mantra established at the Summer Solstice to gentle applause.

“Names carry power in traditional cultures,” Helen observed, as she had many times in my memory, “both given names and chosen names.” Her expression grew nostalgic. “I have such fond memories of your Naming Ceremony, Stella.”

Sarah smiled at the recollection, though I noticed her glance toward Ellen with a hint of uncertainty. “I cherish the memory; the way you handled the ceremony, Mom.”

Ellen’s eyes darted around the table and focused on Sarah. “A naming ceremony? I wasn’t aware...” She knew that Sarah had changed my name, but must not have been told about the ceremony.

Sarah blushed. Her eyes met Ellen’s. It was awkward to talk about the singular event that Ellen hadn’t attended in my infancy.

“I wanted to celebrate Stella joining our family; I wanted to add more meaning to the moment besides paperwork.” Sarah looked down: The paperwork. Was my tone a bit harsh? Did I sound defensive?

I felt the familiar sting of resentment at the mention of the paperwork; the documents Sarah had hidden from me.

Ellen speared a carrot chunk in her bowl of stew, and raising the fork to her lips, she chewed as she processed Sarah’s words. She then spoke with restraint: “A celebration for your natural child, Ruth Ann. You welcomed her into her new extended family.”

Sarah recovered, “It was a joyful, cool, sunny day,” but her description felt rigid.

Charles leaned back in his chair and sipped his cordial, settling any tension with the peaceful creak of wood. “I remember when Sarah chose your name. We set up the white canopy on the terrace by the Iron Fountain, as we did at Midsummer.”

All shared their memories while Ellen listened. Margaret served more bread. Helen poured elderflower cordial into small glasses, and the candles flickered gently as the story unfolded.

Sarah began: “The adoption had just been finalized. I look back now on the excitement and happiness, as much as the anxiety and fear of failure. Raising a child is a tremendous responsibility.”

Ellen’s face was composed, but I imagined her pain and regret as she heard details about my new beginnings.

“I suggested we do something special,” Helen continued. “The legal aspect felt so clinical. I’d been researching naming traditions, and they all emphasized community acknowledgment.”

“Margaret made a special cake with star patterns,” Charles added warmly, and Margaret smiled.

Sarah continued. “I’d been calling you Stella while I waited for you, and it felt good to make your new name official.”

“The morning glories were blooming early that year,” Charles recalled. “All around the fairy ring, though it was barely spring.”

“I’d written something to say,” Sarah admitted, “but when we gathered with Helen and Charles and Margaret and James, different words came out. I held you up and said, ‘This child came to me as Ruth Ann. I name you Stella, my star, found in darkness, bringing light. May you grow knowing you are both born of one family and chosen by another.’”

“And the Garden responded,” Helen added softly. “The morning glories opened wider, and a black rose bloomed at the edge of the fairy ring.”

“Black roses mark significant transitions in our family line,” ventured Ellen.

Helen was tactful. “What I loved most about it was how complete it felt to affirm Ruth Ann’s origins and Stella’s new beginning. Not erasing her birth name but adding to it.”

I squeezed my eyes shut, willing Ellen to remain composed.

Each birthday present was personalized and unique. Sarah gave me a journal decorated with tiny crystals and sapphires. It had sections for recording mirrorwork, plant histories, and personal observations.

Helen’s beautifully wrapped gift was a collection of her annotated folktales.

The Hawthorns presented a cedar box carved by Charles and lined with velvet embroidered by Margaret.

James’s gift was a silver locket, which, he said, held “an etched representation of your genetic markers,” science transformed into a personal talisman.

Ellen’s gift was a pewter hand mirror engraved with a triple spiral pattern. “This belonged to my grandmother,” she said, as I unwrapped it. “The design creates boundaries that stabilize what you see.” Its weightiness and warmth suggested my responsibility ; a tangible connection to my newly found lineage of women who had carried mirror-sight.

Margaret lifted the cake server to cut the first slice, but she paused and looked around the table at all of us. “Wait,” she said with her warm practicality. “We’ve done and said all but the most important part. Happy Birthday, Stella!”

“Happy Birthday!” came the chorus from around the table. The words were a reprieve from the weighty significance of the evening, bringing us back to the center. My cheeks were warm as I thanked them, returning their smiles. Cedra accepted another glass of blackberry cordial from Charles’s decanter.

Margaret served the cake, and the evening wound toward its close, the cottage having expanded with warmth and love. Ellen took James’s arm, and he followed her painfully slow pace home to the Guest Cottage.

Charles escorted us three Manor-dwellers home along the well-worn path to our kitchen door. His swinging lantern cast dancing shadows at our feet and through the rose edging. “Your birthday matters to all of us,” he said in his straightforward way. “Not just because we care for you, but because each year brings you closer to understanding who you are meant to be.”

I nodded, and the cedar circlet bobbed on my head. That night, placing Ellen’s mirror on my bedside table, I reflected on the layers of meaning that had emerged during the evening:

Ruth Ann, the name connecting me to Ellen, to bloodlines that carried mirror-sight through generations, often without understanding its nature. Stella, the name given by Sarah, recognizing the light she saw in me even as an infant, claiming me as daughter through both a legal certificate and a garden ceremony. Questa, the name revealed by The Council, represents integration rather than division, both/and rather than either/or. Three names. Three aspects. Three truths forming a single whole.

The Garden understood this completeness before any of us could. The morning glories had bloomed for my naming ceremony, as they bloomed through snow when I was first discovered. The Black Roses marked transitions that legal documents missed. The mirrors showed reflections that existed between worlds.

Legacy

In the weeks following my fourteenth birthday, as autumn deepened, Ellen focused on sharing the Fairchild family inheritance. There was little in the way of material possessions, but my first mother wanted to ensure that their history, and the mirror-sight legacy of the half-fae, would be imparted to me. So, she approached our lessons with renewed urgency.

The Guest Cottage had become a sanctuary of quiet rituals. Ellen rarely ventured beyond her immediate surroundings now, her strength conserved for essential activities and, most importantly to her, my continued training.

Ellen’s doctors had given her a poor prognosis: weeks, perhaps months. Her spirit and body, weakened by years of grief and suppressing her abilities, were failing, even in the Garden’s protective embrace, surrounded by the magic she had once fled. But her awakening magic proved too powerful against the long denial of her true nature, and channels had been dug too deeply for her power to flow safely.

Under a raw, pale late autumn sky, The Garden became an eerily silent stage for a spontaneous lesson in controlling feral magic. Ellen, despite her frailty, and I, determined and precise, ventured into the labyrinth of manicured boxwood and rogue blossoms. Ellen’s magic flared, and a blooming black rose cutting undulated into our path, stirred by an unseen current. I moved among the trembling flora and softly instructed my birth mother, “Hold steady! Let nature and magic become one,” as my fingertips brushed against dewy leaves that pulsed with an uncanny warmth; the untrained power wrestling with disciplined guidance; a wild blend of inherited wonder and impending loss.

The exercise was urgent and exhausting. Ellen had limited strength and felt pressure to learn and to teach, in what would likely be little time, what Cedra had been training me as a life skill. Working together among the plants, though, our roles had shifted. No longer student and teacher, we had become partners, navigating dangers, and this lessened our anxiety.

“Evergreen is a constant,” she pointed to the boxwoods. “Some things remain unchanged across seasons. Remember that when reflections try to disorient you.”

Cedra insisted on supervising all mirror-work since the September feral event. Ellen’s moments of instruction on ordinary skills that required no reflective surfaces were precious to us both.

October’s frosts caused the morning glories to retreat, all except those surrounding Ellen’s cottage. They still bloomed defiantly against the chill. Ellen arranged her cozy quarters with intention: An afghan she knit in a blend of warm colors, a patchwork quilt sewn by her sister, Ann.

The spicy scent of cedar bundles cut by Charles and crafted by Margaret hung from the ceiling beams. Charles kept the woodpile stacked for the brick fireplace. Ellen lined up her collection of blue Mason jars filled with dried herbs on the kitchen windowsill.

“Today we’ll discuss anchoring without tools,” Ellen explained to me, as I arranged dried meadow wildflowers on her kitchen table, “for the times you can’t access cedar or iron.” She moved her fingers with the precision honed by habit, stripping the ferny dried yarrow leaves from brittle stems with dedication and care.

Ellen labelled her herbs, botanical bunches, and dried flowers with their names, properties, and uses for mirror-work. “Rosemary strengthens memory anchors,” she told me, placing a sprig in my open palm. “Rub it between your fingers and inhale deeply.”

I obeyed my first mother, and the resinous scent filled my senses. “Now close your eyes and recall The Cedar Grove—the Sentinel Tree where you first trained with Cedra. Hold that image while keeping the rosemary scent in your awareness.”

My visualization was vivid: the Ancient Cedar’s rough bark, the pattern of frost, and the quality of light filtering through its branches.

“The memory itself becomes your anchor,” Ellen continued. “Rosemary creates a sensory bridge when physical contact isn’t possible.”

We worked through the herbs: lavender for emotional stabilization during difficult visions, thyme for awareness of time and reflecting different eras, and the bracing scent and taste of mint to steady us in the present.

“My grandmother taught these to my mother,” Ellen said softly. “Who taught me... but knowledge can fragment over generations if training isn’t consistent.”
As the afternoon light softened, Ellen shared her lore. “I want to show you something important,” she said. “I need the box...” she pointed to it under the iron bedstead. I jumped to assist and knelt on the floral hooked rug, lifting the light maple box onto the table. It was lovely, inlaid with mother-of-pearl. “It will soon be yours.” It was about the size of a legal-sized tablet and opened on silent hinges to reveal objects nestled in tissue paper: a silver thimble, a lock of bronze hair tied in a slender blue ribbon, “my mother’s,” and a thumb-sized stone of obsidian, “a worry stone.”

On the bottom were several sheets of parchment folded in half, “our family’s grimoire,” with rows of handwritten notes. The oldest legible entry was from over a century ago. “You’ll see our family history of mirror-sight...”

The changes in writing styles and inks over time: these were my ancestors, too, by blood, if not by bond.

Our ancestors recounted morning glories’ response to emotions; Black Roses appearing at significant transitions, mirrors most active near thin times, and anecdotes the likes of which Cedra had been warning, and teaching safety—trials and tragic errors.

Ellen’s windows grew dark, but she wanted to show me more family tradition, like how to create protective sachets with the right herbal combinations, how certain crystals could stabilize erratic reflections, how morning glory seeds could be prepared to enhance dream clarity without endangering mirror walking.

Her legends empowered me as Helen’s stories did, and I was grateful for my four mother figures: Sarah, Helen, Ellen, and Margaret. We were all family, each fostered learning and imparted their individual personality strengths.

Ellen’s determination seemed to sustain her as her body weakened. I noticed how she occasionally lost focus, her gaze drawn to reflective surfaces as if seeing or hearing something not in the room.

“Is it getting stronger?” I asked, recalling the signs from our frightful September experience. With a half-smile of sadness and acceptance, she answered, “The call? Yes, as Samhain approaches, the boundaries are growing thinner.”

“Do you hear them? Emily, Ann, your mother...?”

“More clearly now.” Ellen closed the grimoire box on silent hinges. “But I won’t answer until I’ve finished what I came to do.”

I understood that Ellen’s teaching sessions were meant to prepare us for both my growth and her absence.

“There’s one more thing,” she said as I put on my sweatshirt, ready for my walk home. She lifted the silver chain with the iron pendant she always wore, a simple disk engraved with a triple spiral. “I’ve had it most of my life for protection. I want you to have it—it’s yours now.”

“But you need it,” I protested, “for stability near reflective surfaces.”

“I’ve made other arrangements,” Ellen assured me, fastening the chain at the back of my neck, under my braids. “And you’ll use it more effectively; you’ve already shown that. You have a long life ahead of you.”

The triskele pendant felt both cool and warm against my skin. It came with responsibility, not only for my safety in mirror-work, but for the continuity of Ellen’s family legacy, now part of mine.

I hugged her with the care I would give to a fragile doll. We were still about the same height, and I was more athletic from my life in the Garden. I noticed that my mother’s frame seemed less substantial than it had even a week before. Yet her green and amber eyes were clearer than I remember.

“Tomorrow we’ll discuss the specific differences between water reflections and glass,” Ellen said as I stood on the front porch. “Cedra has agreed to supervise a practical demonstration.”

I was aware that each meeting might be our last, and Ellen was planning our next lesson despite her fatigue. Still prioritizing. I blew her a kiss and took the path past the Keeper’s Cottage to our kitchen door. Whatever happened in the coming weeks, Ellen had ensured that the broken chain of heritage was restored.

The Crisis

The Celtic wheel turned toward Samhain. Ellen was determined to pass her family’s heritage and half-fae knowledge. I was getting ready to leave her one evening, and she embraced me with unusual intensity. “The triple spiral protects,” she said with an ominous whisper. “Remember that, when reflections begin to pull.”

“I will, Mom,” I said, and left her in the cottage doorway, silhouetted against the warm light. Walking home, I sensed Ellen’s balance was disrupted by the weight of memories, and her cryptic warning called to mind her times of restlessness and instability, and her tendency to stare into reflective surfaces. The edges of her purposefully controlled demeanor seemed to be fraying. As her daughter, not long reunited, I felt the strain of her demeanor. Did Sarah have second thoughts about offering my birth mother respite?

“You’re certain Cedra knows you’re practicing tonight?” Sarah asked me after tea the next evening. I put on my sweatshirt to walk to the Guest Cottage. “The council is meeting, but we’ll only be reviewing stabilization. Ellen worked with me months ago on the techniques.”

“Okay,” Sarah said, but her face said, I’m worried.

“Just simple reflective anchoring,” I said, to reassure her, as I opened the kitchen door.

The tremor in Ellen’s hands while she positioned a small silver-backed mirror at the center of the kitchen table alerted me to a potential problem. Ellen, seeing my concern, said, “Nothing that requires Cedra’s direct supervision,” and continued to prepare the space, showing unusual attention to detail. She checked that iron nails hung at compass points around the room, and cedar bundles hung over each doorway and window.

“Extra precautions never hurt,” she said. “Especially during thin times.”

Twilight settled over the cottage, and Ellen lit beeswax candles infused with herbs from Margaret’s kitchen: rosemary for memory, lavender for clarity. Their flickering glow comforted me.

“We’ll start with simple reflection anchoring,” Ellen said in the formal cadence she used during lessons. “Remember: one point of contact with cedar at all times, eyes never leaving the mirror’s surface once engagement begins.”

I positioned myself as she directed, my right hand on her cedar block and my left hand free to adjust the mirror. Ellen sat opposite, mirroring my posture. Between us, the small silver-backed mirror reflected the candlelight in kaleidoscopic patterns.

“Begin breath alignment. Inhaling and exhaling. Our breaths synchronize. The mirror deepens, becomes dimensional.”

“Anchor visualization now!”

Ellen’s voice is steady, though her hands trembled. I picture the grove’s ancient trees, feel their roots extend beneath the soil. Shadows shift like cedar branches past the edge of the mirror...

This was as expected, until Ellen departed from the formula. “Tonight we’ll try something slightly different.”

Her eyes never left the mirror. “My mother once showed me this technique.” Her voice trailed while adjusting the mirror’s angle. She sprinkled a glistening powder on the mirror.

“Ellen?” I reacted with sudden uncertainty.

“Just a refinement.” Her voice became resonant, both younger and older. “Watch the silver surface now, not the glass. The backing shows things the reflection hides.”

The mirror’s silver edging begins to glow with an inner light. I see a landscape, unfamiliar trees, twisting paths, and distant mountains beneath a twilit sky, but it’s not my sky.

“Where is that?” My eyes are wide with a wonder that borders on fear of the unknown.

“The otherworld,” she whispers, leaning closer to me and to the mirror. “My mother, Ruth, your aunt Ann, and your sister, Emily, are all there. See how beautiful it is? See how different the light is?”

Ellen’s hand slips from the cedar block as she reaches to touch the mirror with her index finger. A breeze through the cottage, and it becomes cold. The candle flames stretch in a sudden wind.

“Ellen, you’re not anchored!” Each gesture of Ellen’s brings me closer to panic. But Ellen doesn’t seem to hear, and her eyes reflect mirror-light with an intensity I’ve never witnessed.

“I hear my mother’s voice... Emily’s laughter... through reflection...” One touch of the mirror and it ripples like disturbed water for what seems like hours...

I held to my training despite my mounting alarm, keeping cedar contact while reaching with my free hand to touch Ellen’s shoulder. “Ellen, remember the anchoring. You taught me—always maintain a physical connection.”

But it was no use. Ellen’s awareness had shifted elsewhere. When she finally turned toward me, her eyes had changed, her pupils dilated, irises reflecting silver rather than amber. “The mirrors don’t just show, child, they offer passage—if you’re willing to follow.”

The cottage walls receded, and the space between worlds was thinning. I remembered and acted on Cedra’s emergency protocols. My iron pendant would have to do if I were to keep contact with Ellen and the cedar block. I lifted it over my head and pressed it against the mirror’s frame.

“By iron and cedar, by blood and breath, the passage is denied,” I recited, voice steady despite my fear. “Return to true reflection, shadow to substance, boundary restored.”

The mirror’s surface shuddered, then abruptly returned to normal reflection, showing only our faces and the cottage interior. Ellen collapsed backward in her chair, the unnatural light fading from her eyes. Exhausted and disoriented, she asked me what had happened.

“You lost anchoring,” I said, expressing no concern, as if it were a normal occurrence. I slid the mirror across the table, out of my range of vision. “The reflection started to... open.”

Ellen covered her face with her hands. “It happened again,” she whispered. “I thought I could control it this time.”

“You weren’t yourself,” I said gently, helping Ellen to a more comfortable position on the sofa. “You were calling people on the other side.”

Ellen’s eyes were tearing up. “The mirrors are stronger near the equinox. I should have known better than to attempt this without Cedra.”

Sarah’s intuition advised her to check on me. She could see from the Manor an uncanny silver light glowing in the Guest Cottage. She let herself in just as I was making Ellen comfortable. “What happened?” Sarah noted the disarray of ritual materials.

“The mirror-sight went feral,” I tried to seem calm, using Cedra’s term for uncontrolled reflection work. “The boundary started to dissolve.”

Sarah checked her tone before asking, “Are you both alright?”

“I stayed anchored,” I responded. “Ellen lost contact with the cedar block, and I had to use the emergency protocol.”

Ellen looked up at Sarah with haunted eyes, and in a barely audible voice, she said, “Now you understand why.”

Sarah and I both knew.

Satisfied she was alright, we left Ellen to rest. On the way home, I saw Cedra walking from the Cedar Grove toward the Cottage, and she acknowledged us with a nod.

The Balance Breaks

Three days after the mirror crisis, I found Ellen in the Moon Garden of The Guest Cottage, on her knees, her body rigid and dazed.

“Make it stop,” she gasped between spasms. “Too many, too fast!”

She was surrounded by spectral images swirling like visible thoughts. Morning glory vines grew rapidly across the Cottage exterior. Without full protective geometry, Ellen had lost control. The Cottage lacked the alignments that Elizabeth designed into the Medieval Garden.

I shouted for help.

Ellen’s pain and passion for life surged violently with fragments of memory, glimpses of places beyond normal perception, visions of what might have been. Her voice hitched between sobs and whispers,

“I must tether these wild winds!”

I employed Cedra’s emergency protocols, hearing her voice in my memory: To contain wild magic, first establish boundaries. I sketched the main garden’s protective geometry with a stick on the ground around Ellen.
Next, anchors. At cardinal points, I traced the elements: carrying cedar wood, black rose petals, morning glory seeds, and iron filings. Make a connection.

I knelt beside Ellen, taking her trembling hands in mine, and recited an ancient incantation of Cedra’s, the language of thresholds beyond ordinary speech, connecting those with the sight. Words to calm disturbed boundaries and stabilize passage between worlds.Not suppression but redirection, not denial but integration.

Ellen’s body relaxed, and the spectral images slowed their frantic motion. Morning glory vines retreated to normal size and position.

“I’m sorry,” Ellen’s breathing steadied. “I thought I was stronger.”

“You are strong, you’ve survived this alone for decades. I’ve had guidance from the beginning.”

Sarah and Cedra trotted toward my shout for help. I’d been able to help Ellen to her feet, steady her toward the door, and safely inside. Sarah stood aghast while Cedra surveyed the aftermath: the wall mirror covered with a pillowcase, its frame bulging, dried flowers flung on the wooden floorboards, the hearth fire left with only a few glowing cinders.

Sarah composed herself, noting details in her research journal while the kettle boiled for tea. “We need to incorporate the Cottage into the Garden’s full protection. I’m surprised Elizabeth hadn’t seen to extending the alignments from the main garden,”

Cedra tightened the boundaries I’d drawn outside. Yes, and the morning glories can help. They remember the patterns, Cedra said.

Ellen was in awe of the exchange between the scientist and Cedra, a phyto-dryad, who collaborated without argument. “I never saw this, always one extreme or the other, all or nothing,” she whispered.

“But you have it now and for as long as you’re here with us,” I responded, feeling mature and capable for a fourteen-year-old.

This was the complementary support Sarah studied and now practiced. She had grown into her profession. And I, too, was coming into my own.

I had hoped that, since Ellen had learned a modicum of control, her wild-sight episodes would become less frequent and less intense. That by midwinter, she’d be navigating mirrors without fear. And that a year after our first training together, by next Beltane, she’d flourish in a new spring of health, and safely walk the labyrinth alone.

But the years of uncontrolled sight had taken their toll. What Ellen gained in mastery, she lost in physical strength. The integration she attempted to achieve had come too late. Her crossing approached not as a tragedy but as a transformation. The final threshold she would teach me to understand.

Samhein

On the Celtic New Year, when the veil between worlds reaches its thinnest point, and ancestors are honored across the threshold, Ellen prepared for her crossing. Though she never explicitly stated it, she gauged my emotional readiness.

“You’ll continue working with Cedra,” she said matter-of-factly. “She understands the sight.”

The Council Fae manifested more often during this period. We might see them watching a private session from the edge of the Cedar Grove.

Cedra would step in if she saw that Ellen needed further guidance or deeper mythological grounding: The sight existed before mirrors. It began as the ability to see between worlds without reflective tools, to perceive what lies beyond ordinary reality. Your ancestors carried this gift when they crossed between realms during what humans call pre-history.

Ellen nodded in agreement; her thinning frame wrapped in shawls against the chill.

Mirrors make it easier for you to focus, Cedra continued, and like a telescope, enhance natural vision, but they don’t create stars. Mirrors are merely tools of perception.

Weak but determined, Ellen asked to meet with The Council in a setting with the people who had become critical to her well-being during her stay at the Silverton Estate. “I need to establish certain things before I cross.”

Ellen’s Farewell

On November’s Eve, the night of Samhain, Ellen prepared for her ritual of transition. I helped her step into her mother’s black wool dress; its Celtic knot-work, embroidered by her mother’s mother. I tenderly placed Ellen’s grandmother’s iron pendant over Ellen’s head for her protection. Although she’d stopped wearing her leather pouch to hold cedar bark and various herbs, Ellen wanted to honor Brigid, the Healer, so she asked me to draw her leather belt through the slide, positioning the pouch at her waist.

The anticipation I’d experienced before our reunion had been softened by hope. Helping Ellen prepare, I had a sense of dread, thinking about what a funeral must be like. Sarah and Helen would be there, but Ellen’s inevitable passing reminded me that our separation would again bring grief.

And I thought, I must not cry—I must help Ellen.

James met us outside with the wheelchair he kept in his car trunk for Ellen’s appointments. I wrapped her black wool shawl around her for the way down the brick path. Swathed, surrounding her like a shroud, her appearance was somewhat frightening, as it was Samhain. The sky took on the foreboding grey and black of the new November, darkening clouds spreading over the Estate. I’d rarely seen James wear his navy woolen dress coat. He turned up his collar and steered Ellen through the Yew Hedge gate, onto The Terrace. She had chosen the Iron Fountain for our gathering place. James set the brakes and took his leave.

When all were present, Ellen proclaimed:

“I come to establish continuity of knowledge, to formalize what has begun through blood and teaching.”

Though we had discussed this ceremony in advance, at the sound of her formal farewell, my eyes watered.

“To you, Sarah, who found my daughter in the Fairy Ring, who raised her with wisdom and protection, who opened your home and heart to her, I offer thanks beyond measure.” Sarah accepted with humility and grace.

Ellen took both of my hands. “To you, daughter born of my body, I affirm the gifts of our lineage; the sight that bridges worlds, the blood that connects generations, the knowledge hard-won through trial and loss.” I held back tears.

“Dear Helen, your research preserved knowledge that might otherwise have been lost. Stories are pathways no less real than those the sight reveals.”

Ellen addressed the Fae Council: “As my ancestors did before me, I recognize your guardianship of those with The Blood. I ask that you continue to guide my daughter as she develops her abilities and discovers her complete identity.”

Cedra, Eleris, and Selwyn respond, manifesting in myth and magic: The Garden knows its own. The Grove remembers its children. The boundaries will be maintained. The passages will be marked.

The Faes’ voices echoed water flowing through the Iron Fountain. The close connection between us all felt sacred. Ellen’s formal transition was established, responsibilities acknowledged, and continuity assured.

Ellen had further weakened, and we were concerned she would collapse. Cedra wheeled her home, Sarah accompanying them to help Ellen to bed. Sarah explained to Helen, “She asked to be alone to rest for a while.”

We respected Ellen’s request; I returned to the House with Helen.

At sundown, when Sarah went to the Guest Cottage to make tea for her, Ellen was gone. On her pillow lay a single Black Rose stem.

“She crossed,” Sarah told me when I arrived moments later.

Crossed—the word seemed right. My mother had crossed the portal, like from one room to another.

Like a haze, grief hung over the Estate. Moments stretched or contracted without purpose, as time followed by no calendar. The Garden, first despondent, now responded with unexpected blooms despite the deepening chill. Black Roses and morning glories spiraled up Ellen’s cottage, lending a pathway for her anticipated return.

At breakfast, I took the chair opposite Sarah at the kitchen table. Steam rose from two mugs of tea as we sat with our mutual loss. “I only had her for eight months, so why does it hurt this much?”

Sarah reached across the table and covered my hand with hers. “Loss doesn’t measure itself by time. Ellen carried you for nine months, so her absence shaped both your lives.”

I couldn’t cry then, as I had most of the night, but the well stood ready without warning. Sarah came around to my chair and held me the way she had when I was small, and a dream frightened me.

In the days ahead, grief moved me between moments of piercing clarity and foggy disbelief. The Black Rose that had appeared on Ellen’s pillow now grew beside the Guest Cottage door. Charles found me there on the third morning, and his words consoled me.

“The Garden will hold your grief when you cannot,” he said, his weathered hand gesturing toward the beds where Morning Glories had appeared despite the season. “Plants remember differently than people.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, grateful for the conversation that pulled me from my circle of thoughts.

“We remember with stories, from beginnings through the endings. Plants remember through cycles.” He knelt to brush frost from the blooming Black Rose. “Nothing truly ends here,” he said. “It transforms.”

That afternoon, Cedra called me to Cedar Grove. Although the ancient trees stood silent in the early winter stillness, my palm against the rough bark felt a faint vibration. I murmured something between a heartbeat and a whisper, and my Fae Guardian stepped beside me in the shadows.

You seek her...

“I don’t know what I’m seeking. Ellen wanted to teach me so much more—about the mirrors, about my heritage. Who will guide me now?”

The teaching continues, child. Death is merely another reflective surface.

“I don’t understand.”

Ellen gave you something no one else could—the beginning of your story. But she hoped others would help you write the rest. Child, these trees were growing long before any of us walked here. They’ve witnessed countless losses. Yet they remain. Let the cedars comfort you.

At the end of the day, Helen stopped by my bedroom to offer comfort; Elizabeth’s wise words in her letter to a friend:

“The Garden taught me that grief is not linear but a spiral. We return to the same point, yet never quite the same way. Each cycle brings new growth alongside the remembrance.”

“Did she lose someone, too?”

“She had many losses, but found ways to keep them present in her life.”

It had been a week since Ellen left us when Sarah suggested we clean the Guest Cottage. I hadn’t gone inside since her passing, unable to face the emptiness.

“We don’t have to,” she said, “but sometimes handling the material things helps process the spiritual.”

Sarah and Helen understood grief. Robert Caldwell, my grandfather by adoption, whom I never knew, died about a year before I was born. I had learned bits and pieces about his neurological condition that caused his demise, but it never occurred to me until that moment that Sarah’s father could have had a form of the sight.

Sarah, Helen, and I spent the afternoon sorting Ellen’s few possessions. In a small tin box on her nightstand was a tiny silver pocket mirror with intricate engravings around its frame. “She kept this private, I guess. I’m surprised that Ellen kept anything hidden from me at the end of her life, after all she went through with reflections.”

“Perhaps she was saving it for you—for when you were ready.” Sarah’s words had a familiar ring.

I replied, “I think I’m ready for the Third Council.”

Sarah and Helen exchanged a knowing glance. Sarah said, “Yes, I’ve heard a few hints of your Winter Solstice Integration.”

I looked at these two women, my anchors: one who raised me with unfailing love, and one who continued to share her wisdom.

Behind them, I felt the presence of other guides: Charles, with his quiet understanding of the Garden’s language; James, with his scientific validation of magical heritage; and Margaret, with her practical knowledge of plant medicine. Ellen, too, not in the pain of recent loss, but in our shared genetic heritage, and the abilities awakened in me.

Alone in my room that night, I sat with Ellen’s mirror and attempted what Cedra had warned me against: seeking a person through reflection. It caught the moonlight, reflecting it in spirals. The surface clouded, then cleared, but showed only my face.

Disappointed but not surprised, I set it on the nightstand and closed my eyes. Sleep came quickly, and with it, dreams of walking with Ellen through a medieval garden I’d seen somewhere between memory and imagination.

I awoke to the first pale light. The mirror on my nightstand no longer reflected my room. It showed a black rose in full bloom against an image of our home, the Tudor Manor House. As I gazed, the image faded to mirror my room.

My thoughts turned to Ellen. I miss you. I think I always will.

I recalled Sarah’s words, “That’s what love does. It remains.”

I dressed in layers and went down to the Garden to find Sarah kneeling beside new growth emerging near the Fairy Ring.

“The Black Roses are spreading!”

“James thinks they’re responding to our emotions.”

I’d heard him express this theory in the past couple of years, and now I didn’t doubt it. “He’s been tracking magical plant responses,” Sarah added.

“And what do you think?” I asked.

She considered. “I think grief changes the landscape, both inside us and around us. Maybe the roses are mapping changes in our hearts and minds.”

I went directly to the Archives to see James. He was at the worktable with genetic charts and botanical drawings in front of him. Without looking up, he slid a notebook toward me. “I’ve been comparing Ellen’s DNA markers to yours again, now with historical soil samples. The patterns match in ways that statistical probability can’t explain.”

I paged through his notes, finding some comfort in the scientific validation of Ellen’s connection. “So there’s proof she’s part of me.”

“More than part,” James said, finally meeting my eyes. “These patterns don’t diminish with time or distance...or death.”

My grief had transformed from a weight that threatened to drown me into a current that would carry me forward.

Release

The Guest Cottage was now emptied of Ellen’s belongings. The twin bed, kitchen table, pull-out sofa, and a few chairs remained with my memories.

Charles brought Ellen’s steamer trunk to my bedroom, but I continued to avoid sorting through her clothing and other stored items. Another week passed before I was ready. Fragments of her life: old photographs, partially filled journals, trinkets. More of her memories. A green silk scarf triggered the time I shifted to a long, flowy green skirt, a poet shirt with full sleeves, shimmering thrift-store jewelry, and Grandma Helen’s paisley print scarf.

“...Poor, single women worked in factories for a menial wage. If a baby came along, without family support, the single mother couldn’t go to work. This has always been the plight of poor women. Agencies persuaded single women in need to leave their babies, to give them up for adoption. These mothers were promised that their infants would be placed in good homes. The heartbroken mothers felt they had no choice. The agencies urged them, saying they were unfit to be mothers. Whether family circumstances or financial trouble, they were told the baby would have to be “put up” for adoption. Better to have married men and women, couples who could show they were qualified, raise these motherless babies. Deserving couples would have the means to provide for these children.

Does society as a whole benefit? From my experience, the Adoption System does not guarantee a natural mother a better life. If I sound bitter, infant surrender did not help me have a better life. Reunion is my best hope.

My home life was beyond frugal. My father was a millworker and rented a shanty, and Mother did what she could to make it a happy home. They pulled me out of school to go to work, and I never graduated. My older brother, Roland, lived at home. He couldn’t hold down a job because of “spells of behavior”. Ann, my sister, said they were “blackouts.” He couldn’t get along with anyone and was in and out of jail. Finally, he was put in a state hospital. After a few years, he died there. His death certificate said it was due to an “unattended seizure.” Ann, the youngest, had vivid dreams and “spells.” Our father called her “simple,” and I never knew her to work outside the home. She loved to cook and made a recipe book for me when I left home. She grew herbs and flowers, and made herbal remedies, “for the sight.”

My first baby was born in City Hospital, and my husband, Emily’s father, left us soon afterward. Emily had “visions”—the sight. She was sixteen when she walked into a reflection pool in the park. She never came back to me. I’ll never be the same.

My second child, Ruth Ann, was born in Mercy Hospital while I was living in Mercy Shelter. I was eight months pregnant when I admitted myself. We stayed there until she was three months old, and I signed us out and walked through the snow to the downtown bus depot on the Eve of the Winter Solstice. I planned to start a new life with Ruth Ann, but it didn’t happen. I didn’t think she was safe alone with me, with my spells, my mirror sight. Ruth Ann was taken in by a single woman named Sarah. She must have had the means to support herself because she lived in a grand estate.

When I said goodbye to Ruth Ann, I took the bus to a town called Leastways. I had no work and stayed with friends. Nine months later, I appeared at the Kindness Shelter and Hospital for Indigent Care and gave birth to a tiny, sickly boy. I named him Angelo, but I don’t remember seeing him. I was told he had “little seizures,” and that “he’ll grow out of them.” I refused to give the shelter and hospital my family history. I heard that with a few details, it would be easier for them to place the child. Just the birth mother’s signed release was all that was required. No names would be revealed to either party. Only show you can afford the agency fee; have the ready cash and an income statement, and the charity case child would be theirs. As soon as I could get up, I signed the release of Angelo and signed myself out. I left that wretched place and left him behind with the nurses. A couple was ready to adopt a newborn, and I was told they took him home.

I might have wanted to go to my family if I had one. I had no contact with the adoptive couple and never heard from Angelo, although I heard his illness worsened in elementary school. The last thing I heard was that he had to live in an institution because of his seizures and aggressive behavior. The mirror-sight is a burden.

Ellen Fairchild, on my final Samhein

I turned the paper over and wrote my reply:

Dear Ellen,

I couldn’t conjure you without a picture. I couldn’t imagine who you might have been to me. But there could be no one in your place. You didn’t mother me—you admitted you couldn’t—but my adoptive mother couldn’t fully replace you. You were, and still are, the space, the unnamed void.

When the record of my birth was sealed by law, you and I were both undone. Now you are fully gone. Gone soon after my birth, gone eight months after we reunited. When we met that afternoon in your lonely apartment, you were my first mirror. Flashes of long copper hair, amber and green eyes; the gleam in yours weakened by uncontrolled sight, we searched each other’s eyes for mutual recognition.

Once strong and tall like me, your body had grown frail from years of effort and grief, pain, and yearning that lingered. My longing remains unresolved, even after our reunion. Our time was all too short for our complex souls. The well of emotion is too deep. We both wondered, Where are you?

I hope you found peace in knowing what became of me. The ones in power make it hard to find each other. In time, I’ll be content in the belief that eight months was better than none. The spirits intervened again, leading me back to you. You struggled to reveal your whole story, but I now understand how both circumstance and choice determined yours and your children’s fates. It was all happenstance.

Your loving daughter, Ruth Ann / Stella / Questa

As I signed all three names, the puzzle pieces settled into their true arrangement. Outside my window, Black Roses bloomed out of season, their petals carrying secrets—spoken, at last. I folded my letter, placed it in Ellen’s manila envelope with her other memories, tightened its metal clasp, and replaced it in Ellen’s trunk.

End of #11 ~
Thank you for reading the next to last installment of Through the Yew Hedge: A Tale of Identity Magic. Stella’s letter to her deceased birth mother ends a season of discovery and turmoil. What was hidden has been named. What follows will ask how to carry that knowledge forward, and what it costs to protect it.

If you’re new to the page, or want to start over:

We always appreciate your comments!
Mel & Islay

Leave a comment

© Mary Ellen Gambutti All Rights Reserved 2026

The Estate has begun to speak unspoken stories. What was once myth has become mystery, hinting at deeper work: a record of survival, of watchfulness, of bloodlines that endured by adapting. As the sun reaches its height, the living and the not-quite-forgotten gather. What has been hidden is no longer content to remain unnamed, and Stella claims her powers.

Midsummer

Fifty days from our spring celebration of Ellen’s homecoming, our reunion, and the start of her new life on the Estate, I awakened to Charles’s and James’s calling to each other across the lawn. From my window, I saw father and son at work wrestling with the Estate’s white canvas canopy, like worker ants on the Medieval Garden terrace. It was a repeat performance; its premiere having been the day of my infant naming ceremony, on the occasion of my adoption at age six months. Today, my birth mother, Ellen Fairchild, would be with me, and our extended family would celebrate high summer, sharing a meal in the shade of the canopy.

Large festive gatherings on the Estate had taken place several times during my childhood. Sarah and James invited friends from the Village and the university to picnic and lounge on the wide lawns. Winston enjoyed the company of a few friendly fellow canines, chasing a ball or frisbee. Sarah and James homeschooled me, so there weren’t many opportunities to socialize with children my age. Although it wasn’t discussed, I knew our Estate family was insular and that Sarah’s discomfort with my mirror-sight influenced her decision to limit my interactions off the Estate. Yet, I don’t recall being lonely. Considering my relationship with the Garden, Grandma Helen, the Hawthorns, and my companion, Winston, not to mention my mentor, Cedra, my days were full, and my adopted childhood was, if not carefree, somewhat contented.

I overheard Sarah and Margaret say that it would be best to keep the day sedate, since Ellen might find it difficult to cope with a true carnival-like Midsummer event. Nonetheless, the Estate hummed with preparation. Margaret and Helen were busy in their kitchens preparing dishes that honored the solstice: savory casseroles and quiches with vegetables from the Keeper’s Cottage kitchen garden, to be served with Helen’s whole-grain bread studded with herbs, honey cakes fresh from the wood-burning AGA, and fresh strawberries.

“Threshold days deserve proper marking,” Margaret noted.

Charles’s pony wagon made several basket-laden forays with the essence of summer down to the terrace. Margaret recruited her lean and limber son to decorate the Medieval Garden for our gathering. She planned for him to wind and weave wild meadow flowers across and amongst the quadrants’ boxwood edging through the herbs and Yew Hedge. So James did, and reached with his long arms, looping and trailing stems and festoons over the arbor.

When the rented camp table signalled dinner’s readiness with a sigh — was it a gentle groan? —- Charles and Margaret ushered us to the buffet, coaching us with a familiar, “Help yourselves. Plenty to go around, and don’t be shy!” So we each filled plates and took our chosen seats, and we all “tucked in” at Charles’s urging.

Music floated across the terrace: the ethereal sound of Celeste’s Celtic harp. She was a graduate student of musicology. Her draping satin green dress, as she perched on the wide edge of the Iron Fountain’s reflection pool, seemed to reflect the gleam of the slanting light. Strings chimed under her lithe fingers; their graceful bardic tones reverberated against the ancient iron.

As the sun began its slow descent and the harpist’s music wove through the evening air, Helen cleared her throat.

“I’d like to share a story, if you’re willing to listen. One that feels appropriate for this place—and this moment.”

We settled into our chairs. Sarah leaned forward, her skeptical eyebrow appeared as it did so often when her mother prepared to tell an old tale. The Garden, too, leaned in to listen.

Folklore of The Estate
Helen’s story was new to us. The Folklorist, whose sparkling hair shone as the sun dipped behind the Cedar groves began, and all of us were politely hushed.

It’s local lore from the deeper origins of The Silverton Estate: the. story of three sisters and something unusual in this land long before Elizabeth Silverton’s crew laid the first stones. Rumors of the sisters’ odd ways aroused suspicion in the Village. Worse yet, there were threats of retribution for perceived wrongdoings. For fear of persecution, the sisters retreated to The Cedar Grove, where they were said to dwell beneath the roots of one of the largest trees. It was believed that the Cedars’ magic sustained them.

One sister was said to be a guardian of growing things. She understood the language of roots and branches. She knew that the trees bridge the earth and sky. As the legend goes, the second sister was a keeper of thresholds and transitions; veils between moments, between seasons, what was and what might be, and between day and night. The third sister was said to tend the blossoms that bloom between worlds; messengers between seen and unseen realms.

Folklore tells us that when Elizabeth planned The Garden, she preserved what remained of the vast primeval Cedar Forest. The legend goes that she was aware that the sisters dwelt there, and rather than disturbing their sanctuary, she preserved it, designing The Medieval Garden to honor their ancient guardianship.

James interjected, “I’ve heard that Cedra, or maybe a predecessor, was key to the preservation and conservation of the Forest remnant. I heard that on campus from the time I was an undergrad. We know that Elizabeth’s bequest ensured her Estate would be maintained as a botanical paradise where study, physical and contemplative nurturing could continue.”

“Yes, James,” Sarah said, “I recall you mentioned that when you first showed me around, before Mom and I moved in – before Stella came to live here.”

Margaret nodded slowly. “My grandmother used to say something like that. She believed Miss Elizabeth knew about things not written in books.”

Helen added, “Folklore often arises around the qualities of rare settings. Whether these stories are preserved as literal truth, symbolic, or the wisdom of generations, is for each listener to decide.”

Our storyteller lifted her hands in a soft expression of conclusion. I saw the glint of perhaps in her eye, as she turned toward the forest’s swaying branches beyond the Yew Hedge.

The harp, the spray and trickle of the Iron Fountain and in its reflection pool were the sound and light that had accompanied Helen’s ancient tale. I thought of the three sisters who had chosen love over fear, sanctuary over suspicion, and how their choice rippled down to this moment. This garden, this gathering of people who had found their way to each other across time and space.

“The light’s changing,” Charles observed. “Perhaps it’s time,” without specifying the time for what, but we took his cue. James gathered the remains of our feast, while Margaret and Helen collected the dishes, loading the remnants onto the pony cart.

“We’ll leave the canopy for tonight,” said Charles. Ellen, Sarah, Helen, and I watched the terrace settle into twilight. The harpist packed her instrument. Helen stood, extending her hand to Ellen. “Shall we?” Ellen responded, “I’d like that very much.”

The spring of reconnection had bloomed with a promise of power, and the boundaries were brilliantly permeable. On the morning of our Midsummer festivities, the Council summoned Ellen, Sarah, and me to an evening ceremony of reconciliation. Helen was warmly welcomed.

Sarah and I walked arm in arm with Ellen between us; Helen had my right hand. We needed no lanterns; twilight stars and the day’s last gold lit the sandstone paths from the Terrace to the Concentric Circles, our appointed meeting place.

The Rings drew me inward, as they had attracted the Fairies who transported me through the mirror portal on a Winter Solstice dawn. I stepped over the outermost herbs, the barrier of Rosemary, Sage, and Rue, and faced my Mentor where she had instructed me with dewdrop reflections so long ago.

Wearing the long, brown, hooded robe of The Silverton Monastery Garden, Abbess Cedra proclaimed:

The Council recognizes this gathering as sacred. Here, diverse bloodlines converge. Ruth Ann, Stella, Starlit Bridge Between Worlds, you stand in a line older than the Cedar Forest, a lineage that knew Brigid as The Flame, as Keeper of Thresholds, and Healer. You have proved to be a Seeker of Truth and Change. Your Earth Mother, Ellen, bears within her the dormant fire of the Tuatha Dé Danann, gods who once walked among the green hills of Éire.

We three women stood in the Fairy Council’s midst: the adoptive mother, the birth mother, and the halfling daughter. An Adoption triad. A Constellation. A living spiral of entwined love, loss, and finding.

Stella’s Response: I was born under crossing stars. The child, Stella, rode her tricycle on the sandstone walks and dabbled in the fountain pool. I was called to rekindle an ancient Fae line by Cedra of the Cedar Root, Eleris of the Shifting Veil, and Selwyn of the Blooming Flame. In shadow and silence, they guided me to this place. At the height of sun and season, my Guardians bear witness to what was written in The Garden’s bones.

Puca on the Spiral Path:

Eleris and Selwyn join Cedra, and together, we shape-shift into black velvet horses with glowing red eyes. We are Púca, with good fortune and felicitations, with a breath of ominous. The paths have aligned. Watch us move!

The long-legged creatures walk a slender path on The Garden’s rings, their hooves leaving traces of silver Summer Solstice light. Wearing crowns of cedar greens and rowan berries, the Púca weave a path—the triskele—the triple knot. As each hoof rises, frost-light forms a translucent and solid reflective wall, a mirror held by The Garden’s Sacred Geometry. They spiral inward, circling the Fairy Ring; the frosted wall of light, visible only to those with the Sight. The Púca reach the center and return to their Council forms: Cedra, now in Cedar Dryad shape, Eleris and Selwyn return to Elven folk, as they carried me here one long past Winter Solstice Eve—all of us more or less human.

Cedra: Ruth Ann, Stella, the Seeker—Questa, now witnessing your single self. You were found here at the Winter Solstice. Now, at the Summer Solstice, you’ve found yourself.
Eleris: Names hold power in our realm, the name given at birth, the name grown into, and the name chosen— all are facets of your true self.
Selwyn: What do you call yourself, Child of Two Worlds, Daughter of Two Mothers, Keeper of Three Names?

Cedra: Questa, by choosing, so shall you be known in all realms.

With that, the Fae Council returned to their home in The Cedar Grove. The glow of triple-spirals lit the Garden paths to the Potting Shed, Manor House, Guest Cottage, and the Keeper’s Cottage.

No longer in shards or fragments, my facets whole, I felt a reconciliation between Ruth Ann’s human heart, Stella’s fairy sight, and Questa’s full acceptance.

I turned toward Ellen’s sigh to see Sarah take her arm to steady her. I saw wonder in her eyes. Her soft whisper had grown in strength, and she called to me across the Herb Circle:

“The name was in my dreams before you were born, Questa, ‘The One Who Seeks.’”
Sarah replied, “The perfect name for a bridge-walker. Protect, love, and teach.”

Gentle Iron Fountain music drifted in the faint glow of the triskele lights, from the place where our Midsummer celebrations had begun. The longest day was ending, but this reconciliation was the beginning of a love that transcends the boundaries between worlds.

We hope you have enjoyed this episode! Ahead, there is much more to learn, celebrate, and grieve. Next Wednesday, the work turns inward and backward: to family patterns carried in silence, and DNA as evidence and inheritance, as we read what is revealed when biology, history, and love speak to one another.

Please join us! Begin at the Prologue or anywhere in the story that suits. All episodes are free in advance of my release as e-book and softcover.

We’d love to hear your comments!
Mel and Islay

Leave a comment

© Copyright Mary Ellen Gambutti 2025-2026

Uncertainty and longing: We adoptees understand the weight of not knowing. The need behind the urge to search. Today’s episode brings a spring reunion and the mother and child who celebrate a new beginning; a new life together. We start with a poem that expresses an adoptee’s dilemma.

The Search

James followed Ellen’s paper trail: “Mercy Shelter,” he murmured. “Ellen (redacted), was admitted at eight months pregnant, and released in December with her three-month old daughter.” He photographed the faded intake and discharge forms, adding them to his timeline with Ellen’s bus ticket from that day. The police report, and a missing person’s report, were both closed when a social worker reported seeing her in Leastways, a town at the end of the bus line. Not yet discovered were the time and circumstances of the baby’s separation from Ellen, and how or why Ellen disappeared from the Leastways bus station. James was putting together the details and documentation; The Fairy Council recently had revealed their magical transportation -- how Ruth Ann arrived in The Garden of The Silverton Estate.

James eventually connected all the dots. Finally, an address—an apartment building on Willow Street, across from the Silverton campus. The Black Rose petal he used as a bookmark fluttered in agreement: Ellen Fairchild was again residing in the Village of Silverton. She’d been living a parallel life to her daughter, while still separated from her.

That day, James met with his search team in The Archives. He, Sarah, and I gathered at the conference table with our contributions: James’s paper trail research, Sarah’s journal entries about possible magic, and I had my Blue Book of Aunt Ann’s herbal remedies, and the gifts I’d received from the Fae at the Potting Shed Council on my last birthday. I always wore Ellen’s forget-me-not bracelet.

The Silverton Street map James placed at the table center marked Ellen’s apartment building with a red circle. “Three blocks away,” he said, shaking his head.

Sarah reflected his disbelief: “How long?”

James replied, “According to public records, she’s lived in the Village for six years, this time. Before this move, there were multiple temporary addresses, or post office box numbers over the years.”

“Six years,” Sarah echoed. “I bet she returned to be near you, Stella.”

“The Council told me that Ellen is anxious,” I offered. “They said she felt she had no choice but to give me up. Maybe she returned to see if I’m safe but she keeps her distance to protect me from harm.” I wasn’t sure what I meant by that.

James asked, “Well then, what’s our next step?”

“A letter, perhaps,” Sarah suggested, “instead of showing up on her doorstep.”

“No.” I was emphatic. “The mirrors show that she’s unwell. We don’t have time for writing.”

James and Sarah looked at me in surprise. James asked, “The mirrors?”

All I could say was that glimpses appeared in mirrors of a sad woman, too thin, moving slowly and warily.

“We’ll all go tomorrow,” I decided.

The black roses in The Garden turned toward the apartment building, as though they knew the importance of what was ahead.

“Tomorrow then,” Sarah agreed, supportive. Rather than hyper-protective, she wanted to help me restore my fragmented self.

Eve of Reunion

The night before meeting Ellen, unable to sleep, I stood at my window, watching moonlit garden shadows and reflective black roses. In the mirror was not just my face but echoes of Sarah’s determined chin, Helen’s thoughtful eyes, and features I knew from mirror-walking visions. I saw Ellen’s high cheekbones, the slight point to her ears like mine.

“Will she recognize me?” I wondered aloud.

She will know you immediately, Cedra’s voice answered from the mirror, blood calls to blood, especially blood mixed with fairy magic.

“What should I say to her after thirteen years have passed? What possible words could matter?”

Names. Begin with names. Ruth Ann. Stella. Both are true.

My Forget-me-not bracelet glowed in the dark room.

“What if she won’t see me?”

Then you will have your answer, painful though it may be.

Below my window, The Garden sighed, stilled while it listened, poised on the edge of something momentous. Soon, the reunion of two bloodlines. The un-severing begins; the Celtic trinity knot from Helen’s folklore, three interlocking loops with no beginning or end. Past, present, and future. Birth mother, adoptive mother, and daughter. Human, fairy, and the bridge between. Remember that you are neither just Ruth Ann, nor just Stella. You are becoming someone new.

Cedra vanished, and I slept.

The Reunion

The next morning, I stood with James and Sarah on the corner of Juniper and Elm, on the other side of the campus. “Number 42 Willow, Apartment 3B,” confirmed James. “Are you ready?”

My heart fluttered in response. As we set off north to Willow Street, I noticed a sparrow land on a picket fence, then she flew ahead to perch on a street sign with another sparrow. At the intersection, another bird joined, and the little flock watched me before flying off to Willow Street.

“James, do you see the birds?”

He glanced up. “Just ordinary sparrows.”

I knew otherwise.

Out of the corner of my eye, the signs seemed to shift to Threshold Lane instead of Third Street, Keeper’s Way instead of Maple Avenue. At a storefront, the display window showed me the path to follow: “We need to turn here, into this courtyard.”

“That’s not what the map shows,” James said.

Mom replied, “We should follow Stella, James. Let’s trust Stella—it is her search, after all.”

I had walked ahead and turned onto the path only I could see. They followed me through a courtyard that opened to a narrow alley that intersected with 42 Willow Street.

“This is it, but I could have sworn...” James couldn’t imagine how the paths that had gone awry led us to our destination.

A black iron fire escape zig-zagged against the four-story red brick façade of the apartment building. I saw a third-floor window with wavy glass. “Ellen’s apartment. I see it from here.”

Sarah coached, “Are you ready?” My forget-me-not bracelet pulsed like a second heartbeat. My yes sounded uncertain. James said he’d return to The Estate, leaving Sarah and me to the plan.

Five concrete steps led to the landing and the wooden door with a privacy-glass pane. Sarah took hold of the brass thumb-latch door handle, and we crossed the threshold into the dimly lit lobby. Tarnished mail slots were fixed to the metal wall panel on our left. I slipped off my spring jacket.

Sarah led the way up the grimy linoleum stairwell. All the way to the third floor, my thoughts cascaded, tumbling like stones in a noisy stream. Like viewing multiple-exposure photography, I saw myself as abandoned and chosen, lost and found, human and someone other. When would I finally be whole?

Outside 3B, Sarah whispered, “Here we are.” I sensed awareness of our presence and hesitated before lightly knocking.

The woman who held the door ajar was about my height, five and a half feet, with a slight frame that seemed too thin. Copper hair, streaked with silver. Green and amber eyes, wide with surprise. Her plain, royal-blue dress accentuated the pale smoothness of her complexion. Somehow, I knew the Celtic-knot pendant. She whispered, “Ruth Ann.”

“Ellen...”

She opened the door and motioned to us.

No knick-knacks, no photos, no mirrors in her studio apartment.

“You found me.” In both statement and question, her voice was steady, but her hands shook slightly. I was relieved to hear, “I hoped you would.”

I replied, “You’ve been here for a long while. So close.”

Ellen said, “I didn’t want to interfere in your life, I just
wanted to know you were safe...”

“After your older daughter, Emily? The Council told me...”

Ellen’s gasp said she was surprised I knew about the fairy realm, let alone Emily. “They spoken to you. The three who watch from mirrors?”

“They’ve been teaching me about controlling the sight.”

Relief washed across her face, followed by something more complex I would later learn was regret and grief—mourning what she had missed.

“You learned what I couldn’t teach you.”

Sarah extended her hand. “Thank you,” she said, “for trusting us with Ruth Ann.”

My two mothers—one who bore me, one who raised me—regarded each other across the gulf of thirteen years. When their hands met, I felt the resonance of a chord struck in another realm. My forget-me-not bracelet’s tiny flowers were hopeful that this fracture between mother and daughter could mend. This rift could heal.

We three shared Ellen’s humble space over tea that seemed to brew itself. For the first time, my first mother and second mother spoke together—with me. And the moment held only a little strain.

The Guest Cottage

A week after our April reunion, Ellen waited in her apartment building lobby for James to pick her up in his car. Since she decided to accept Sarah’s invitation to stay at The Guest Cottage until she felt better, she cancelled her lease. Long before, she’d pared her life down to essentials, and two suitcases held all her possessions. She lived on alert, ready to flee from reflections or perceived threats.

The Guest Cottage stood at the edge of The Cedar Grove, its windows strategically placed to catch light and opened to a soothing forest breeze. “Thank you so much! It’s perfect,” Ellen said to us, touching the cottage door with wonder. “I can feel the protection already.”

Charles had prepared for Ellen’s arrival by hanging cedar boughs above the entrance threshold.

Sarah gave Ellen two sets of keys: The Guest Cottage and The Manor House.

“The Estate welcomes you, Ellen!”

My first mother’s health had deteriorated from years of suppressing her abilities, Cedra had warned me. Her medical doctors said an early demise was likely, due to a neurological condition of unknown source. What doctors hadn’t suggested was that her symptoms might lessen if she allowed herself to stop fighting her true nature. Neither did her doctors suggest what her “true nature” might be.

As Ellen settled into The Guest Cottage, a curious change began in The Garden. Plants that had always responded primarily to me now oriented themselves equally between the cottage and The Manor House, as if they recognized Ellen’s fairy nature.

In the library that evening, I found Sarah with her journal. “Are you writing about Ellen?”

Sarah smiled. “I’m reviewing my earlier entries from a new perspective. What I had recorded as mysteries now makes sense. I can see them as inherited traits.” She showed me a page where she had annotated her original observations with her new insights.

“Do you regret taking me in? Keeping secrets?”

“I regret the pain my secrecy caused you. But taking you in? Never. You were meant to be my daughter, Ruth Ann Stella. Just as Ellen was meant to find her way back to you when the time is right.”

Sarah’s perspective had surely shifted. We were meeting halfway.

Imbolc

Green promises unfolded as Ellen taught me to read the subtler signs of our shared lineage. “Watch how light moves through leaves,” she said, her copper hair catching sunlight like Brigid’s remembered fire, the same way mine did. My first mother showed me how to notice what lingered: the way frost traced the edges of shadow at dawn, how light lengthened without insisting on warming, how the soil breathed but did not promise to bloom. Imbolc, she taught me, was not a date but practice. The tending of inner fire. The patience of women who knew that survival came before celebration.

We bridged years of separation with Ellen’s Guest Cottage windowsill herb garden where rosemary, thyme, sage, and parsley seeds sprouted and quickly flourished. Speaking of rituals older than language, she set a small bowl of water and a braid of dried grass on the sill. Morning light struck the bowl; bounced and scattered yellow reflections on the kitchen table and across the wall. “Fire and water,” she murmured. “That’s how our people kept faith. Warmth without burning. Sight without surrender.” I would later understand that this was a ritual of dedication; our lineage remembering how to hold light safely; how to prepare for what was to come.

Spring Song

Two weeks after Ellen moved into the Guest Cottage, she and I joined Cedra for our first formal training session. “The trick is not to fight it,” I explained, guiding Ellen’s hand to the frost mirror, which Cedra had placed despite the mild late-April day.

“Let the reflection become a doorway rather than an image.”

Ellen’s hand trembled from habit. “The reflections have always pulled at me. That’s what happened to Emily. She couldn’t resist their call...”

What claimed Emily’s life was not reflection itself but her untrained response. She stepped through without knowing how to return.

Ellen flinched at Cedra’s authoritative voice.

Mirror-walking requires three skills. Recognize thresholds, stabilize your passage, and anchor your return. Today we begin with the first.

As the session progressed, Ellen’s trembling calmed down, and her breathing steadied. When she finally touched the frost pattern with purpose, the reflection responded, like a door ajar, cracked open to share a glimpse of what lay beyond.

“I can see it,” she whispered, wonder replacing terror. “A path, not just an image. Not pulling me in.”

“Yes,” I encouraged. “That’s it exactly.”

For a brief moment, mother and daughter stood with hands extended toward the same frost mirror, seeing the same pathways through reflection—genetic inheritance made visible in shared perception.

As she, Sarah, and I walked Ellen to The Guest Cottage, she appeared to be subtly transformed. Although physically frail, she stood straighter, her eyes clearer.

“All these years,” she said, “I thought the sight was a curse, and something to fear and suppress.”

“As did many in your family before you,” I reminded her.

“If only Emily had this guidance. If only I had understood sooner.”

“You understood enough to protect your second daughter,” Sarah said gently. “That wisdom saved Stella.”

Ellen, the mother who bore me and tried to protect me, turned to the mother who raised me, saying, “We both did what we thought was best. Perhaps together, we did better than either could have alone.”

Bealtaine

Ellen’s color had returned. At times, she walked from the Guest Cottage alone, down the brick path through the Yew Hedge, into the apothecary beds with what seemed to be a renewed steadiness.

On May Day, we celebrated The Garden’s awakening and life’s abundance, all of us gathering in the Manor House dining room. Helen and Margaret prepared a simple meal with the Hawthorn’s spring vegetables, and Helen’s freshly baked bread. Relaxed, but lively conversation and the last bottle of winter mulled cider warmed the table.

Charles was the first to move into the parlor after dinner, where the fire he had set in the stone hearth had begun to blaze, making the room too warm for a few of us. I opened a window to taste the spring evening air, while Ellen and Helen adjusted their shawls higher up on their shoulders, drew up to the fire, and sipped peppermint tea.

Quietly, I removed my Blue Book of Herbal Remedies from the Walnut secretary. Ellen had surrendered it to the Fae at their insistence when I was still an infant, and I wanted to return it to my mother’s hands that evening to honor our new beginnings. I saw her eyes moisten as she leafed with tender reverence through the old, rumpled, water-stained pages; her recollection of Aunt Ann’s herbals she intended to ease the “sight” that troubled our half-fae family. Firelight caught the glow of her copper, shoulder-length hair, and the glisten of her green and amber eyes.

She could have been my twin except for her weakened stature. Her weight hadn’t changed much since her arrival in April, but Sarah and I knew she wasn’t eating much, preferring to prepare her meals and dine alone in the tiny Guest Cottage kitchen; solitude and grief having dampened her appetite for food and life.

Meanwhile, Helen unfolded a six-inch square sketch of the herbal quadrants, saying, “Elizabeth tucked this map into her field journal with these sprigs of rosemary.”

Ellen said, “I couldn’t have imagined I’d one day live where these traditions were kept. If only I had been taught. If only Emily had been trained.” The scent of peppermint tea, rosemary, and wood fire drifted and mingled in the flow of Ellen’s wistful thoughts and the season’s turning. She closed the Blue Book and pressed it to her heart. “It is, indeed, a beginning.”

©Mary Ellen Gambutti 2026

Leave a comment

We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode. Tenth in the series will bring us to a Midsummer celebration, Summer Solstice, and the Second Council with Ellen, Stella, Sarah, adoption Triad —reconciliation and a fearless name-claiming. At least for now, the searching is over.

This novella-in-series is free to read. The ebook, print, and sequel are forthcoming. Please consider a free subscription or follow to support indie efforts. Thank you!

Subscribe now

Peace and Love,

Please allow me ~
In this Tale of Identity Magic, the main character is Stella, an half-fae adoptee whose journey is marked by her changing names.

Names are thresholds, marking stages, or based on family or tradition. For Stella, it is her adoption that is honored by the star symbol. Her birth name is erased. She is briefly called Seeker, a hint of her third name: Questa.

In our Garden’s magic, you’ll have seen that what is foretold may not have been spoken aloud. And what is spoken aloud is not always fully claimed.

Like many adopted persons, Ruth Ann’s story is complex. The Returning of Stella to her full, integrated self begins now.

Boundaries blur, like the best hybrids, in the Silverton Estate’s Medieval Monastery Garden. In this liminal space, growth needs both structure and wildness. Roots connect the past to the present.

I offer this fantasy as an exploration of identity fracture, the myth and ethics around adoption, the right to one’s true story, and the tension between scientific observation and magical thinking.

Through cedar groves that serve as anchors, black roses that mark thresholds, and morning glories that bloom between worlds, I’ve penned a fairy story in botanical language to enrich its emotional landscape and shift like the Cedar Dryad character between narrative clarity and poetic lyricism, between ancient cedar forest and the manicured medieval monastery garden. Between literary fiction and magical realism.

Stella, whose half-fae nature is revealed at age thirteen, narrates from an omniscient-transcendent perspective, allowing young adult readers access to themes of self-discovery and identity formation. As Stella’s metaphysical abilities emerge, so does her longing and confusion about her place within her extended family and community. Her need to integrate her dual heritage rather than choose between worlds appeals to the fantasy of possible, unlocked potential.

© Mary Ellen Gambutti
All Rights Reserved

Start the Series Here:

Subscribe now

Through the Yew Hedge: A Tale of Identity Magic. Today is the start of Part Three: Questa - The Returning.

All posts in this series are free.

Episode Seven Recap: The petals of Ruth Ann’s infancy unfurled as Stella, like the Morning Glories that had entwined her baby basket on an icy Winter Solstice dawn. In The Growing Seasons, Stella thrives in the shelter of early childhood on the Silverton Estate under the watchful care of her adoptive mother. Sarah hopes to shape her by scientific observation, even scrutiny. Grandmother Helen nurtures her with stories and the deeper meaning. Through age twelve, The Garden quietly instructs Stella by a design meant for more than beauty.

You’ve seen Sarah record and question, the Garden respond with persistence in shifting paths and black roses, and the Manor in troubled mirrors and forgotten hallways. You’ve witnessed Stella’s powers awakening in patterns of inheritance. Her questions are no longer content with observations once the urgent Blue Book surfaces.

In Part Three, Cedra steps forward to demonstrate the need for new skills, instructing in what can no longer remain unspoken.

Cedar Training
It was early autumn, and I’d soon celebrate my thirteenth birthday.

Adolescent intensity steered my emotions since Winston’s discovery in The Yew Hedge, and tensions with my adoptive mother added intermittent fuel to my volatility.

I waited at the edge of The Cedar Grove for my Dryad Guardian. It would be a routine lesson in mirror safety. Golden light streamed toward me down the rooted path, between the ancient trees. Cedra emerged in true form: long hair, the deep red brown of cedar heartwood, skin like smooth patterns of bark. and honest green eyes.

You’re changing; your sight is strengthening faster than we expected.

I knew this was true, since my mirror episodes occurred daily. Instead of fragments, reflective surfaces showed scenes of The Estate’s past.

Changing the subject to an immediate concern, I reported to Cedra, “Sarah’s been monitoring me again.” I settled cross-legged on the cushion of cedar needles. “She takes notes about everything I do, it seems.”

Cedra: Sarah’s analytical mind seeks patterns. Mortals can be uneasy with the unfamiliar when they feel they have lost control. Today, we will begin formal training. No more games, no more gentle practice. You need to learn control before the sight overwhelms you.

Cedra redirected me to a cedar frost mirror that had formed despite the mild weather, and obedient, I untwined my long legs and stood from the soft floor. The frost mirrors showed me a steady, complete picture. My eyes seemed older and wiser. I was viewing a future self, looking back in time.

Place your hand here. This tree holds memories. Do you feel them? Cedar grows and remembers every storm and season. Everyone who has sought shade and shelter beneath its branches.

Cedra pointed to the tree trunk, so I pressed my palm against the rough bark and sensed the flow in our connection. I saw an image of a vast forest. I saw Elizabeth Silverton as a young woman walking these paths and finding comfort and tranquility here.

The cedars offer an anchor. When reflections threaten to pull you too deep, the trees will hold you steady. This is why your training must happen here, in this space between cultivated and wild spaces.

Cedra produced a hand-mirror from a pocket in her bark-like clothing. The mirror’s silver backing held a profound depth, extending beyond the frame’s edges.

Look into this, but keep in contact with the tree that grounds you. Remember your time and your place.

I forced a deep focus into the mirror while pushing my hand against the cedar tree. The scene within held startling clarity: a copper-haired woman sitting by a window, her hands working delicate floral embroidery. I knew her but had no conscious memory of her.

“Who is she?” I whispered.

You’ll meet her when the time is right. Now you’ll practice dual awareness and the Cedar’s strength: one foot in each world.

The mirror image shifted, like a slide. The woman held a bracelet woven through with tiny blue flowers with yellow centers. I recognized Myosotis sylvestris—forget-me-nots—the bracelet I’d seen in my dreams. At the sight of the bracelet, my hand slipped from the cedar, and the reflection began to pull me, blurring the boundaries between reflection and reality.

Anchor!

Cedra’s command was sharp, and I scrambled to press my palm back on the tree. Its steadiness held me, grounded me. At last, the mirror returned to my reflection; The Cedar Grove was behind me.

That is what can happen when your tether loosens. The sight grew strong and threatened to draw you in and through it. Without anchoring, you could be lost between worlds.

My heartbeat was the panic of how close I’d come to harm. “The woman in the mirror; she’s important, isn’t she?”

Very important. But you’re not yet equipped to receive her story. First, you must master control. Tethering.

For the next hour, we practiced a new set of demanding techniques. Cedra taught me to regulate mirror-sight and manipulate dual realities. We’d tested this visual game years earlier.

In the future, I would see the importance of anchoring in Cedar memory; how it steadied me when both my fae and mortal essences collided. I’d then realize that Sarah’s dual documentation, her journal-keeping from two perspectives, served a similar purpose to balance her when she faced what appeared to be impossible.

We have guided your bloodline for generations, but the Fae cannot protect you from unwise choices. How you advance through our sessions will determine the richness of your abilities, whether they’ll be expressions of your gift or a liability to you. Do you understand me, Little Seeker?

Wordless, I nodded. Was that a nickname? Seeker. In the Blue Book.

As we started for the edge of the Grove, I noticed Cedra’s bark-like brow furrowed.

Soon you’ll be tested. Soon it will be time when The Council teaches you your heritage.

“The Council?” I might have heard those words in my dreams.

Guidance. They guide threshold crossers like you. When you’re ready, The Three will introduce themselves.

As I passed The Yew Hedge and the perennial borders, Cedra was gone. The pungent fragrance of mixed fall herbs and flowers made me glad to be between worlds.

I heard Cedra somewhere behind me, above me:
Be patient with Sarah: her love expresses itself through worry.

The protected simplicity of childhood was coming to an end, soon to be replaced by the complexity of adult choices. I trusted that those around me would continue to keep me safe.

Discoveries, Complexities
The Estate’s basement Archives held a century of files and secrets. At Sarah’s request, James was searching for the person whose name was in the book that Winston had uncovered in The Yew Hedge a few days earlier. A methodical researcher, James had worked through Silverton’s historical records, property ledgers, and social-service directories until he found himself at home in his own archival system.

He headed to the furthest range of green file cabinets, which held obsolete records in drawers where he might find mystery files. He took a chance on the last cabinet in the row, labeled Estate Operations 1950-1975, and forced open the jammed top drawer.

“What a mess,” he said out loud to no one. “It’s a wild-goose chase! We don’t know who this person, Ellen, is. We need a better lead.”

James had an instinct for the misplaced and mistakenly filed, but his meticulous system had spared this back-file room from scrutiny. His hands alighted on an elastic-bound paper portfolio that looked newer than its neighbors, labeled Medieval Herbal Remedies. The writing looked to be Sarah’s, but it made no sense that she would have filed her research with mid-century administrative records. Balancing its bulk on his left arm, trying to unloop the elastic, the folder slipped, spilling its contents onto the tile floor. “Drat!”

On his knees, forced to fumble with the disarray, he picked up a piece of archaic cardboard with what seemed to be notes to “future curators” scratched by Elizabeth Silverton.

I’ll mention it to Sarah... What’s this now? Legal documents?

Police and medical reports. County Court records: Ruth Ann, Petitioner through Guardian ad Litem, for Adoption by Respondent Sarah Jane Caldwell. Nothing about the child’s natural mother, but several pages torn from Sarah’s journal.

Did Sarah hide these where there is the least archival traffic?

James’s first inclination was to return the folder with its documents to the jumble in the file drawer. After all, these official records were none of his business. He tried to put himself in Sarah’s position. The official record couldn’t capture her otherworldly witness—finding an alert child in the snow on a Winter Solstice dawn. He considered my urgent queries. He slid the papers back in place—this secret was consequential—and returned the discolored fragment like a bookmark in the gap left by Sarah’s folder. The file drawer screeched. He latched it.

James was resolute. Sarah needed to know he’d found what she had concealed in The Archives, and he carried the folder up two flights to Sarah’s study. He couldn’t be complicit in keeping Stella from her truth once it was in his hands.

“We need to talk,” he said when Sarah looked up from her desk.

He placed the folder before her, watching recognition and then resignation cross her face.

“I found these while researching Ellen Fairchild.”

Sarah closed her eyes briefly. “I should have told her years ago.”

“Yes,” James agreed, more firmly than he intended. “She has a right to know her history, Sarah. Not just the parts you’ve deemed safe or appropriate.”

“I was protecting her,” Sarah said, defensive despite her guilt.

“Were you?” James asked, his voice now subdued. “Or were you protecting your role?”

The words struck home. Sarah’s hand was heavy. She opened the culprit folder.

“I’ve justified it a thousand different ways,” she admitted. “That she wasn’t ready. That the truth was too complicated. That I needed to understand it myself before explaining it to her.” She looked at James.

In her voice, there was a plea for understanding. “The reality is hard to face. I was afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“That Stella finding Ellen would force a choice between us. If she finds out her unusual origins, she’ll feel she doesn’t truly belong here.

That if she knew the full truth, she’d reject me.”

“She’ll be thirteen tomorrow and has been asking for years about her origins, Sarah. Don’t you think she’s able to handle complex truths?

Don’t you think she already senses the secrets and wants to learn the missing pieces of herself?” He tapped the folder. “Identity isn’t something we can curate for others, Sarah. It’s their fundamental right.”

“And if she chooses Ellen over me?” Sarah’s voice was unsteady.

“Then you trust that thirteen years of love and care have created bonds stronger than blood,” James replied.

James considered how Sarah’s secrets had snowballed.

“She has a right to be angry about the concealment, but continuing the deception only compounds the betrayal.”

He thought of his own work as an archivist, the sacred responsibility of preserving others’ histories. “Documents like these are pieces of someone’s soul. Keeping them from their rightful owner is like a theft of self.”

Sarah winced. “You’re right. I’ll give them to her tomorrow, on her birthday. It’s time.”

I was standing in the hallway outside Sarah’s study door and heard it all. I’d come to her to ask what had become of the book of herbs and names Winston had unearthed. When I heard them, I stopped cold.

It was too much! I ran to my room, shutting the door with force, and flung myself across the bed. It wasn’t only James’s discovery of Sarah’s hidden papers. It was that she had been recording what might have helped me to talk about with her. My sense of disconnect. My feelings of otherness. She might have answered my questions.

The mirror that was my borderline had shattered, leaving me with broken truths and beliefs. Fragments. Sadness and dread pressed on me. My fear of the unknown. I ignored Helen’s gentle tap with her offer of dinner.

I didn’t yet have the words to express what I would write in my diary years later:
Adopted people must rely on morsels from parents and kin. The secrecy and distortion around Adoption pacts must stop. Barriers to our truths will be broken.

Otherness
I recalled an upsetting incident about a year earlier. I went to Sarah’s study, as I often did, for a ballpoint pen from the narrow top drawer of her desk. As I stood selecting one, I noticed paper protruding from the lower edge of the desk blotter, and I lifted the mat for a peek; a wide sheet of blueprint, a map of the Medieval Garden showing weather conditions, temperatures, bloom times, and other phenological data. A key with colored dots and dates was aligned on the left margin.

Interesting. Mom made a chart for our botany homeschool class.

Until, with a sick feeling, I recognized locations and times of my “episodes” and “anomalous botanical responses.”

• Black Rose and Morning Glory blooms: spontaneous growth of cedar saplings.

• Unusual bird sightings –

• Reflective surfaces – frost mirrors, greenhouse windows, fountain reflection pool—seeing rippling surfaces or other places

This was tracking. I’d never felt worse about myself. She was studying me like a specimen. Attempting to figure out my nature.

I sensed Mom’s presence by the desk. “Stella, I can explain...”

I was sitting cross-legged like a bewildered pixie, engulfed by the wooden antique swivel chair. I stared trance-like at the blueprint. The blotter had slid to the floor.

“You’ve been experimenting on me.”

“No, Honey, I have not. I’ve been trying to understand, so I can help you.”

Sarah’s margin notes smacked of curiosity and fascination rather than protection and caring.

“I’m not a specimen. I’m your daughter. Why don’t you understand that about me?”

Decree and Do-Over
The party of the first part hereby gives and grants the party of the second part the complete custody, management, care, and control during its minority, together with the complete right and power as one in loco parentis to provide for and consummate the adoption of the said child by such person or persons as in the sole discretion of the party of the second part it may deem proper for the best interests and welfare of the said child.

The child petitioner is Ruth Ann. In Hebrew, the name Ruth means friend. Ruth, a Moabite, great-grandmother of King David. Ann is from the Latin for Anna, which, in turn, comes from the Hebrew Hannah, or Channah, grace or favor. The Guardian ad Litem speaks for the child. The child’s rights have been subsumed and sworn over. Under the official seal, one child’s life is replaced, substituted for another. The adoptive parent is Sarah. The birth mother’s name is omitted and deleted from the process; Ruth Ann becomes Stella, and “Ruth Ann” as a legal entity is effaced. Vital Statistics locks away the original birth certificate. What does Ruth Ann lose besides her name? Her mother, her family, her heritage, her medical history, her true place of birth, her origins: her identity, because she has been remade, rebirthed, rebranded, fictionalized, and exchanged in a do-over. In one fell swoop, Ruth Ann became Stella. A Child of the Silver Stars.

Wound of Betrayal
Despite my dark mood and the darkness outside my window, I knew the Black Rose bloomed, and I knew my questions were validated, if not answered. The severance of adoption had kept me from my truth, from myself.

Early the next morning, Sarah tapped and looked around my bedroom door with “Happy Birthday!”

I thanked her, though far from cheerful.

“I have the folder for you. I’ll put it here, if you’d like to see it.” She placed it on my desk and glanced at my open diary. “You know how much I love you, I hope.”

I answered, yes, I knew she loved me.
Of course, I want it. I’ve wanted it for a few years!

She offered a reprieve: “Would you like to go with me to The Archives after breakfast? James got a start on your search for Ellen.”

My eyes were red from tears and lingering resentment.

After breakfast, we met James downstairs. On the research table, he showed me a DNA registry kit: a test tube to collect my saliva sample, and a genetic genealogy website open on the desktop computer.

“We can look at what I’ve found so far.” The Cedar Grove stirred in approval.
I processed Sarah’s betrayal. I didn’t have the words yet, but knew intuitively that by her secrecy, she colluded with the System that blocked me from knowing myself.

The DNA-testing kit was James’s birthday present to me, and he later mailed it off for processing. He promised he’d help me set up a family-heritage tree when the results came back, and chromosome matches to other testers began to arrive at my DNA account. I wanted to be hopeful, and I did appreciate how James looked out for my interests.

I just wasn’t in the mood to celebrate. Helen had packed my rucksack with fruit and her homemade cookies, reminded me to be home for tea and birthday cake, and kissed me goodbye. I planned to take a walk in Cedra’s neighborhood.

My thirteenth birthday had dawned with a continued need to be alone with my thoughts, and I’d spent the afternoon in the Cedar Groves. At twilight, I knocked and opened the potting-shed door.

Since childhood, I’d visited Charles in the same way I spent time with Margaret on her cottage-garden bench, talking about important and unimportant things. This time, I found myself alone. There would be tea and cake at home later, but I wondered who the person Mom and Grandma Helen wanted to celebrate. In the deepening evening, I sulked and tended to my sensitivity.

I should have brought my sleeping bag. It will be chilly later.

In jeans and a sweatshirt, I sank to the floor among clay pots and garden tools. Every year, Charles harvested and hung certain flowers, like yarrow, to dry from the beams; their pungent fragrance, like transition, was between fresh and finished; maturity and beyond; between ripened and crumbly. I couldn’t yet express why that meant anything to me, only that Charles’s weathered wooden sanctuary was where I needed to be just then.

Autumnal Equinox energy thrummed through the estate; the boundaries between worlds were gossamer thin.

A sudden streak of light spilled through the grimy windows, and the air hummed with a charge that lifted the hair on my arms. Shadows in the corners began to shift and move.

A scent like cedar filled the shed—earthy yet ethereal. Three figures materialized, appearing through some invisible threshold. I didn’t recognize them: the fairy folk who appeared to Ellen in The Silverton Bus Depot when I was a baby.

Impossibly tall, their forms shifted between solidity and translucence as they moved toward me. I sprang up and pressed my back against the potting bench.

The first bowed slightly. I knew my Mentor’s voice, like wind in the cedars:
Greetings, daughter of Ellen, daughter of Sarah. I am Cedra.

Then:
I am Selwyn. Your bloodline is well known to us.
I am Eleris. We are the Guardians of thresholds, the Keepers of passages between worlds. The time has come to tell you why you are here and why we intervened.

“You’re all from the Fairy Book!”

Selwyn read the inscription aloud:
From the Fae Who Know You Well.

“Winston found it in the Yew Hedge, I said, and the last time I saw it was that night on Sarah’s desk. How did you get it? Did Sarah give it to you?”

The answer came from Selwyn:
Yes, it was Ellen’s record of her sister’s herbal remedies to quiet the mirror-sight when it grew too strong. It was Ann’s attempt to manage Ellen’s mirror-sight that now awakens in you.

Mirror-sight! I finally heard the name of what had troubled me all my life.

Eleris:
Yes, the ability to see beyond mirrors. To perceive thresholds between worlds—and eventually, to cross them.

Cedra:
Dangerous when untrained.

Selwyn:
Sarah wants to protect you. She’s an observant scientist. A critical thinker. She documents even what she cannot fully explain, like your closeness with plants and out-of-season blooms.

“Why did Ellen give me up?” I asked, still raw from the recent discovery.

Selwyn:
She surrendered you to protection, because she saw what happens when the sight is untrained. She sought to give you what she never had—guidance, safe boundaries.

Eleris:
We guided Ellen to allow us to bring you where Sarah would find you. Elizabeth Silverton’s garden is right for mirror-walkers, with its iron boundaries, reflective elements, symbolism, and its position between cultivated design and wild growth.

Cedra:
The truth you seek lies not in choosing between worlds, but in understanding how both have shaped you. I will help you.

I drew a shaky breath. This would be hard, trying to make sense of my heritage.

Selwyn:
In recognition of your right to know your full story, we offer gifts to help you navigate between worlds. A pendant of light. A silver disk etched with spirals shimmered in her hands. It will help you tell the difference between true and false reflections, between doorways and mirrors.

Cedar-scented air surrounded me, steadying me.
This is a carved fragment of the Sentinel tree. Place it beside any mirror you wish to stabilize. It will prevent unwanted passages and anchor your journeys.

The wood felt warm in my palm, vibrating softly.

Eleris:
I return the Forget-me-not bracelet to you, as it appeared on your wrist one morning. Each tiny flower holds a different light: dawn glow for Ruth Ann’s beginning, midday for Stella’s growth, and twilight for what is yet to be learned. Ellen made it, and she wore it while carrying you. The flowers are alive and never wither. I kept it safe for you until you were ready to know all of who you are. Until you were ready for it.

Eleris slipped it on my wrist, and I touched the bracelet, feeling its connection to the mother I’d never known.

“I need to understand all of who I am.”

Then it struck me: I was a child in their eyes. Those who knew me had the power over what I could know. To reveal answers only when I was ready to bear them. It didn’t seem fair that what I knew must come from outside myself. Cedra with her ancient wisdom, Eleris with her fluid grace, and Selwyn with her nurturing calm, had the authority to withhold my truth. Whether to control me or for my own good, they would share my identity when the season was right.

Cedra:
The three fairy wishes written in Ellen’s book were her hopes for you.

“What were they?”

Cedra’s voice rustled like branches in the wind:
Safety, Understanding, Reunion. You are acquiring each. We provided you with the first. The third remains to be fulfilled.

“Wait!” I called as they began to fade. “How do I find her?”

Cedra continued:
The Archivist has begun to search. We will help you find her. Your reunion will strengthen both your abilities. We will teach you what Ellen could not learn in time: how to see through reflections safely, how to return to your anchor point. But know that meeting Ellen will bring both healing and pain. Are you prepared?

“I need to know myself!”

Use our gifts wisely, Stella – Ruth Ann – Seeker. You are neither one thing nor the other. You are both mortal and fae, and that is your strength.

Outside, nightfall welcomed me. The moon was glowing, and the stars seemed brighter than I’d ever seen them; the spaces between them were less empty, as if I were seeing not just pinpoints of light but the pathways that connected them: my constellation, Virgo, and her bright binary, Spica.

Sarah met me on the way home. “I’m sorry I kept the truth from you,” she said quietly; her face seemed pale in the moonlight.

“Which truth?” I asked, looking over my shoulder. My Guardians still stood in the doorway. Sarah didn’t suspect I had been to a magical event in The Potting Shed.

“All of them, I suppose. The ones I knew about, the ones I couldn’t see, and those I refused to believe.”

I touched the Forget-me-not bracelet, its flowers glowing faintly in the starlight.

“Where did you find it?” Sarah asked, surprised.

I held back -- some revelations follow their own timing; I had just learned that from the Fae.

“We’ll find her together,” Sarah said. “I won’t let you struggle alone. We’ll find out everything we can.”

Above us, the equinox stars wheeled in perfect balance between summer and winter, light and dark, ending and beginning. Just as I now stood balanced between two worlds, my first step was taken toward understanding myself.

Helen waited in the kitchen with tea and birthday cake, ordinary comforts bridging extraordinary revelations.

“…the spaces between them were less empty, as if I were seeing not just pinpoints of light but the pathways that connected them: my constellation, Virgo, and her bright binary, Spica.”

Reconciliation
The Forget-me-not bracelet glowed softly on my wrist as I stood outside Sarah’s study door that evening. I knocked and entered to find her surrounded by her journals: sixteen years of documentation spread across her desk.

“These belong to you now.” Mom seemed exhausted. “Every observation, every question, every moment I tried to understand what was happening without having the right framework.”

I touched the nearest journal, opened to an entry from my fourth birthday:

S. spoke to the roses today. They turned to face her as if listening. Must research if medieval accounts of plant communication have a scientific basis.

“You were trying to make sense of it,” I said, with not quite forgiveness, but perhaps a willingness to understand Sarah’s motives.

“I was trying to protect you the only way I knew how: through objective science.” Her eyes met mine. “But I was wrong to hide your birth information from you. Everyone deserves to know their full story.”

My Forget-me-not bracelet warmed at her words.

The Garden Smiles
I dreamed of a garden unlike my mother’s practical plots of herbs and vegetables. This Garden grew wild and impossible, with flowers that chimed like bells, vines that wrote poetry on the walls, and trees that danced when no one was looking. I awoke to impossibly blue Morning Glories sprouting from my bedroom ceiling, and Black Rose petals on the floor trailing to my bedroom door. Windows caught light from impossible angles, showing scenes of other seasons. Mirrors reflected rooms that might exist tomorrow, while stairs might climb to never-before spaces.

Sarah merged her two journals as though to assert her new perspective. She noted my developing abilities alongside her botanical studies, not in separate entries, but as she observed them. The new journal detailed the Manor House’s shifts, referencing her late father’s architecture books. Most important to me was her openness about her recordkeeping. She asked my opinions and my permissions, making no assumptions. She ceased her surveillance, acknowledging my need and right to privacy.

Everything was changing: The Manor, The Garden, and my self-understanding.

Neither Here nor There
The Cedar Forest held a strong lure for me for as long as I could remember, though Sarah had warned me not to venture alone too deeply among the towering trees. Their massive trunks and whispering branches pulled me more strongly since James discovered my adoption papers.

I found Cedra waiting at the Grove’s edge. She had shifted from Elf to Cedar Phyto Dryad since the Council meeting. Not quite human, not quite a plant; she was a being at the portal between worlds. And there I was, at the threshold, accepting my dual nature.

You’ve been troubled lately.
Her voice was like the roughened rustling of forest ferns. Like breezes through branches.

“I still have questions,” I admitted.

Cedra motioned to me, and I sat on the mossy fallen log.
Some answers come only when we recognize patterns.

I couldn’t be sure what she was telling me. We sat in the stillness of birdsong, as sunlight filtered through feathered boughs. I wanted to talk about a memory fragment: Sarah carried me out under the starlit sky. Terrified of tumbling into the blackness, into depth and distance. She returned me to my crib.

Into the solace of moonglow, I float among the wallpaper flowers, chasing a dream that returns and repeats, and I rise above the highest branches.

Cedra: What you felt that night was the clash of your dual nature. Human children fear separation, openness, and the void. They seek containment, walls, and boundaries. But fairy children fear confinement, and are drawn to open spaces, to the stars and sky.

“Was I afraid and not afraid?” I asked.

Yes. Your human self was fearful of the vastness of the night. Your fairy blood recognized it as home.

Cedra reached toward me, her fingers elongating like cedar twigs to touch my temple.

Pattern floating was your first try at mirror-walking; using repetition to toggle between realms, you could say.

“Then my fear wasn’t about being adopted?”

It was about being divided, with one foot in each world, not comfortable in either. You felt the severance from not only Ellen, but from half your fae nature. This is much like Ellen would feel as half-fae, being separated from you – her natural child.

A cedar branch above us swayed without wind, dappling light across the lines on my palms, forming patterns similar to Cedra’s bark-like skin. It was an exciting sensation, but I didn’t tell my Mentor.

“Is that why I’ve always been drawn to this place?”

Cedars are boundary trees. They grow where worlds meet. Like you, they belong to multiple realms at the same time.

At dusk, walking home under a vast sky just beginning to reveal its stars, I didn’t look away.

End of Episode Eight Through The Yew Hedge: A Tale of Identity Magic

Next Wednesday Episode #9 Reunion and Reconciliation
Coming Soon
Behind the Hedge ~ glimpses around the Cedar Gate about the novella and the Sequel in progress.
Through the Iron Gate:

Leave a comment

We’d love to hear from you! Have you enjoyed the series? New here? We welcome you!
Thank you, and have a magical week!

Mel and Islay

I’m so glad you’re here for another episode of our magical realism novella, “Through the Yew Hedge: A Tale of Identity Magic.” It’s a long post this week, friends, and it’s free, as will be the rest of the series.

The Garden has always responded to Stella’s attention, but her adoptive mother, Sarah Caldwell, botanist and resident plant curator of The Silverton Estate Garden, must learn new ways of wondering when she witnesses the impossible. Part Two draws to a close when a mysterious blue book reveals truths that have been waiting beneath the yew hedge all along...

Sarah’s Garden Wonder

The late afternoon light slants golden through The Garden, creating long shadows across the lawn. Stella moves through The Garden with confidence that belies her ten years. She pauses to caress a leaf, to touch a blossom, or converse with the natural world. Flickering catches her eye. An iridescent blue butterfly alights on her pointed finger. Her face is lit with wonder; her smile is like a blooming rose.

Now, a monarch butterfly circles her twice and settles on her forehead. She converses with delicate creatures. They stay on her finger and head as she walks to a wilting Echinacea. I’d noted this morning that it is weak despite the conditions.

She lowers herself to the plant, the butterflies still balancing, and the drooping purple petals straighten in time-lapse; its soft green stem, nearly bent to the soil, rises to its proper stature. The plant now appears to have recovered its health. Stella is a child of mystery, a living bridge between the realms of possible and impossible.

When the butterflies took flight, disappearing over The Yew Hedge, I noticed the black rose appeared among the herbs. It was a variety I’ve not been able to identify. It seems to bloom when Stella is near—astonishing!

Helen once told me, watching me struggle to document the Garden’s responses to Stella’s presence, that what happens, even though you can’t explain it, may be real in another realm. My knowledge of soil and microclimates can’t always account for the wonder I witness. When there is magic, I can let the documentation rest...

“Mom? Is dinner ready?”

“Almost, Grandma will call us soon.” She looked at the echinacea and said, “I see it’s doing better. Did you... do something to help it?”

“It was thirsty, but not for water. It needed attention. Plants are like that sometimes. They just need to be seen. Like people,” I continued with the straightforward wisdom of childhood. “You can give someone food and clothes, but they still need to be seen to grow properly.”

How many times have I measured and documented Stella’s development, height, weight, and verbal milestones, while missing what an essential quality?

As we walked toward the house, Sarah noticed how The Garden responded to me. The morning glory vines extended beyond their support. The roses turned like faces following the sunlight. Herbs seemed to release their fragrances more strongly in my wake. I was a nurturing presence in her life, as she was in mine. I needed her for physical care, it’s true, but her love and affection were life-affirming.

The black rose is in the herb bed, its petals absorbing rather than reflecting the evening light. Might this oddity deserve a new category? Perhaps what is out of the ordinary isn’t always an error to be corrected or changed, but a path to understanding.

“Mom? Are you coming?” I called. “Right behind you,” she replied.

Adoption Matters
At the edge of the herb garden, Sarah watched me transplant seedlings, placing each tiny plant into prepared soil. The afternoon light caught my copper hair, highlighting that I was a child from another woman’s body.

“You have good hands for this,” she said, “you have dexterity and patience.”

“The plants like me handling them. They like my touch. Plants tell me what they need.”

Sarah nodded, struck by the parallels between our task and our relationship.

“You know, gardening has taught me as much or more about raising you than parenting books have.”

“How? I’m not a plant, Mom.”

“Of course not, you’re a human child, Sweetheart. The designer must choose the right plant for the soil and light conditions to give the plant a good start. For plants to grow and thrive, the gardener’s routine must include nourishment in the form of food, water, and a healthy environment. Some plants require the sun, and some need shade. And yes, Stella, touch. That is love.”

Sarah touched the tiny thyme plant. “When I adopted you, I had ideas about who you would become. Now I understand that your nature is your own. Raising a child not born to you means that when you arrived in the world, you were another woman’s natural child.”

“You’re saying I’m like a garden you didn’t plant?” I asked, amused.

Sarah replied, “Gardeners and parents participate in something larger than ourselves.”

I had an answer: “Something like, Elizabeth designed these gardens, but they keep changing and becoming something new?”

“Exactly!” Sarah said with a surge of pride at my insight. “The Garden stays part of its original design while it responds to its caretakers. I may never know everything about you, Stella, but I try to learn how to respond to your unique needs, and care for you with love.”

She brushed soil from her hands, a scientist finding words for what her heart had known for years. “That’s not a limitation of our relationship. It’s what makes it beautiful.”

Need for Truth
Sarah had always been honest about my adoption, although not always straightforward.

“I was happy to find you,” she would say, pressing her forehead to mine.

“Out of all the babies in the world, I chose you.”

But she never disclosed how she found me, or why she didn’t show me my birth certificate. I wouldn’t learn the limits to adoptees’ access to their truthful origin stories until much later. “A closed adoption,” I overheard her say to Helen.

“What else do you know about me? Are there papers about me?”

“Yes,” Sarah answered in that careful way. “There are papers that are kept safe until you need them. Until you’re older.”

“Where? Where are the papers?” The questions lingered like the pain of separation.

Buried Secrets
Sarah’s protective instincts had heightened after my first major mirror incident. She told herself I wasn’t ready for the facts of my original circumstances, yet she questioned her objectivity.

Are my emotions overriding my good judgment? What would Helen say?

Her mother would argue that children deserve the truth when it’s presented appropriately.

I know secrets can be unhealthy. Can reveal themselves at inopportune moments.

She buried her fears. No one had witnessed the impossible blooms surrounding the infant in the Ring. Except Charles! She recalled that he drove us to the house in the one-horse sleigh that Winter Solstice morning. The legal documents couldn’t possibly capture the magic of how the black rose appeared as if it were announcing my arrival. Some truths require context to be properly understood.

Sarah’s ambivalence churned her thoughts until she concluded that the adoption decree and related papers, with their sterile language and the conspicuous absence of birth parents’ names, revealed nothing of importance to me. At eleven years old, there was nothing in them that I needed to know. I sensed she was holding back an important part of my story; the story that was vital to me, not to her.

My questions about documentation and origins had become precise. More pointed. More difficult to deflect with comforting generalities. It was no longer enough that I be told “You were chosen” and “You were loved above all the others.” Perhaps it was a maternal angst that triggered her impulse to hide my vital papers. Perhaps it was her self-righteousness: “I’m in control. I make the choices about what is best for my daughter.”

Concealment
One night, Sarah waited until my bedroom door was closed for over an hour before unlocking the file drawer in her study to remove a thick, elastic-bound manila folder. She took the back stairway down two flights to the basement Archives’ back room, to the least-used range of six-foot-tall steel file cabinets; the farthest cabinet, and slid the steel step stool over so she could reach the top drawer. She clutched the chrome handle and yanked. Force needed to open the old metal drawer. She winced at its protesting screech. In the process, while wedging my records in among file folders of out-of-date receipts, catalogues, and antique inventories, a loose piece of backer board slid to the floor.

Sarah stepped off the footstool and bent to pick it up. She knew it was the material used to mount pressed flowers and other botanical specimens, but it wasn’t a finished herbarium floral plate; it was a blotchy note scrawled in ink on water-stained backing, in what appeared to be Elizabeth Silverton’s handwriting. A draft of enumerated items, ideas, some underlined, some crossed out.

This is how she sees and wants to present the medieval monastery-style garden’s structure and function. Why does my heart jump? Was this fragment intentionally filed in this remote cabinet? Picked up by someone who thought it was important enough to save, but didn’t know the Archives? Was it found on the grounds or under the potting bench, Elizabeth having dropped it while she worked? Was it stashed here like I stashed the papers?

1. Garden as a sanctuary. Not only plants → adults? children?
2. Cedar Groves: choice to build a garden near; fragrance holds spirit memory clarity.
3. Black Rose: threshold marker. Thorns = protection, not ornament.
4. Herbal rings: outer = strength - protection / middle = focus / inner = calm. (All beneficial aromas - not edible).
5. Thresholds: water emerging / disappearing. Solstice markers?
6. Stress the need for guidance! Future guardians—who will understand?
7. Protect innocence until ready. Not for all eyes. Need for secrecy? Discretion is required.

This list rings a bell. Maybe Elizabeth was aligning her thoughts, preparing to write the personal note I uncovered in her private Herbarium a while ago, softened for others’ view.

It was the coarse, card-like material Elizabeth would have had on hand while pressing flowers, perhaps left behind in haste, picked up by a gardener, former curator, or groundskeeper; it was tucked away aimlessly. Memorabilia of the Foundress. Once confidential, it had become public. Hidden among mundane, antique files. Uncovered in Sarah’s act of concealment.

Elizabeth wouldn’t have anticipated that a trusted future curator might struggle with similar decisions about disclosure. That’s crazy, Sarah. Snap out of it!

She cast a worried glance at the open file drawer where she had just buried my personal records, where Elizabeth’s jumbled, misfiled fragment of truth was hidden for fear of controversy; academia masking her lack of convention. For a female scientist of the Victorian era, credibility meant conformity.

Sarah was also constrained by convention and how she appeared to her peers, and she documented my unusual responses to plants as botanical anomalies. Her choice, now that her concealment mission had become more complex, was whether to trust that the truth might serve me better than her protective secrecy.

I should give it to James...

Briefly, she considered that the note should be kept with its polished counterpart in the Archives. But she chose to replace it in the drawer from whence it had flown when my thick folder jostled it.

Sarah, now morose, retreated to her bedroom, leaving my adoption decree, the police report, and evidence of my birth mother’s name in the top file drawer.

To protect my daughter.

In the end, Sarah’s sympathy and respect for Elizabeth’s work, and for her own role as curator, were deepened by all that she’d learned. She resolved to keep her commitment to her unmet mentor.

She rationalized that her documentation of my unusual responses honored Elizabeth’s work. She, too, researched and recorded phenomena that her contemporaries wouldn’t condone nor couldn’t explain. A capable, single woman whose academic work masked her private projects.

Elizabeth’s note demonstrated her courage to trust that curators would one day validate her observations, with or without explanation. Sarah tortured herself with the notion that she could be limiting a child, not hers by birth. Yet she stood in the way of my learning about myself.

Regardless of Stella’s origins, doesn’t she have a right to know?

Sarah had a plan for my future, sure. But did it align with my inherent needs? Perhaps my adoptive mother was faced with a moral dilemma.

Under the Microscope
Once again, Sarah’s approach to me became intrusive, as she moved from casual notes to structured experiments. We had traveled this route several years earlier after my first strange mirror perception.

Always reserved, I became more self-conscious, sneaking around the edges of The Estate, seeking interactions with plant life, hiding my moments of quiet joy. The black roses ceased to be my magical companions. To Sarah, our connections were “anomalous botanical responses.”

When I returned from an afternoon’s wander in the Cedar Grove, she confronted me:

“You documented a half-hour with the trees. Did you notice any changes in reflections or in the breeze? Bark patterns?”

Her questions weren’t merely social. She scrutinized me. She was judgmental. Critical. She disrupted my thoughts. My privacy. I avoided her when she worked in The Garden. I saved my deepest connections for moments of solitude.

My bedroom mirror, the one reflective refuge Sarah rarely monitored, was where I could practice the techniques Cedra gave me without Sarah analyzing each ripple and fluctuation.

“Your mirror-sight seems to be intensifying,” Sarah observed one morning, noting how the hallway mirror rippled as I passed.

Sarah’s surveillance added to my fractured identity.

I asked myself, was I, Stella, Sarah’s daughter, a scientific subject? Was I Ruth Ann, the abandoned child with unexplained abilities? Was I someone else entirely? My heightened awareness of adoption made for a perfect storm of identity confusion. If Sarah, who had raised me from infancy, needed to document me like a rare botanical specimen, how weird and different must I be, I wondered. Unanswered questions about my origins were pressing. Bewildering.

Helen noticed my withdrawal. “Your mother loves you,” she said one afternoon in the Hidden Library. “She’s trying to understand in the only way she knows how.”

“By treating me like an experiment?” I asked, more bitterness in my voice than I intended.

“By creating structure around what frightens her,” Helen corrected.

“The unknown terrifies a scientific mind—naming and categorizing is how Sarah creates safety.”

But understanding Sarah’s motivation didn’t diminish its effect on me.

The constant scrutiny reinforced my sense of “otherness.” I was neither human in the way Sarah was, nor was I something else.

In the weeks following Sarah’s discovery of Elizabeth’s note, a subtle shift occurred in the rhythms of our daily life. Sarah’s documentation continued, but with less urgency. Her casual observations now felt like loving attention rather than scientific scrutiny. She didn’t startle when I paused to listen to conversations that only I could hear.

“The Garden has its wisdom,” became her explanation when Helen questioned the unusual botanical responses around me. “Elizabeth designed it that way.”

Sarah focused on what felt manageable: teaching me the practical applications of the herbs Elizabeth had so carefully positioned, sharing Helen’s Celtic stories that provided context for my experiences without frightening explanations, and documenting my development with the patient care of a gardener tending something precious.

The basement Archives held their secrets—both Elizabeth’s letter about therapeutic garden design and my adoption papers with their mysterious circumstances—while upstairs, life settled into patterns that felt almost normal. Almost.

I practiced early mirrorwork with Cedra in The Cedar Grove, learning to anchor my sight without losing myself in reflections. Helen told stories that matched my experiences, as if she somehow knew exactly which Celtic tales would help me understand my nature.

Sarah brewed tea from The Garden’s inner circles when my abilities felt overwhelming; her choices guided by Elizabeth’s wisdom, even if she couldn’t yet share that knowledge directly. We were a family learning to accommodate magic in our everyday life, with homework, garden chores, botanical research, and fairy sight.

Mine was an ordinary childhood punctuated by extraordinary moments when the boundaries between worlds grew thin. Looking back, this was the last period of pure wonder before questions of identity and belonging began to complicate the magic. The last time being different felt like a gift rather than a burden.

Reverie
My questions would change and evolve with the seasons, and I sensed that answers waited just beyond my reach:

Why did certain plants respond to my touch? Why did reflective surfaces sometimes show more than they should? Why did I feel drawn to the cedar forest when others found it forbidding?

As summer waned, I worked beside Sarah in The Garden. We cut back and divided perennials, trimmed herbs for drying. Charlie’s crew did heavy work, like stone replenishment, wall repair, mulching, and fall pruning.

The Estate was like an extension of the campus, as close as it was to the college, an educational environment itself. Sarah, Helen, James, Margaret, and Charles each had their special talents and education. I learned Science, History, Research, Math, Horticulture, and Ecology. My questions flourished. Sarah couldn’t keep my story hidden forever.

Sapphire Morning Glories opened one glorious fall day, weeks before my thirteenth birthday. From being outgoing and chatty in childhood, I’d grown introspective as an adolescent. What I’d accepted as a younger child, like why certain plants responded to my touch, why reflective surfaces showed more than they should, and why I felt drawn to The Cedar Grove and Cedra’s advice, now demanded deeper consideration. Questions that had sprouted in childhood, growing beneath others like roots deep in the soil, had surfaced and become urgent:

What is her name? Names are important. When you’re adopted, you lose your name. When Sarah calls my name, I go to her. But she is not my first mother. Who else knows my name? I should find out who they are. What is my first mother’s name?

The Morning Glory vine sprawled along the top of the Iron Bench where I sat mulling over these questions. I was meeting Sarah for breakfast before starting in The Garden. We enjoyed those relaxed moments, our backs to the Yew Hedge. Sarah had given me the name Stella, Star, a beautiful name that felt like me. But somewhere, someone gave me my first name. What made me think that?

The Blue Book
My Fox Terrier, Winston, came bounding toward the Yew Hedge. Sarah carried down a market basket that held a flask of tea, two mugs, Helen’s freshly baked scones, and a jam jar. It was such a cheery sight that I didn’t mind that my reverie was interrupted.

Only, where would my answers come from?

As we finished breakfast, Winston, who had been nosing around at the roots of one of the hedge yews, stood stock still and stared at me for a signal. “What is it, Boy? What have you got there?” Winston clasped his find between his teeth and trotted toward us. Instead of dropping his discovery at my feet, like he usually did, he turned to Sarah, wagged his tail, and placed the object in her open hands.

The compact book had a gold-stitched binding and an ancient-looking blue cloth cover with gold lettering that glowed. “Thank you, Winston.”

Sarah said. “What is this?” I pressed against her arm. My impulse was to touch it—both warm and cool, and damp.

“I wonder how long it’s been under the hedge in all weather,” Sarah asked. “We should treat it carefully. It could be valuable.” Her archaeological mind had gotten to work. “We should show it to Helen and James.”

Sarah opened the book on her lap, and we both read:

From The Fae Who Know You Well
For the daughter of Ellen,
Named for her grandmother,
Ruth, who saw the truth,
and for her Aunt Ann
whose garden healed.
Ruth Ann, first in love,
Stella, Starlight, and Seeker,
Thirdly, she is named
by those who watch her.

“It’s me! It’s my book!”

What followed was just as surprising:

“It’s a list of medieval physic garden herbs, with antispasmodic properties,” noted Sarah. The old names whispered through the ages as she read aloud from the elegant handwriting:

Ann’s garden remedies for those whose sight is too difficult
Valerian root, for easing the sight. Its tiny white flowers glow like starlight, reaching deeply into long-remembered soil.
Lobelia, for peaceful thoughts, the blue-flowered Indian Tobacco.
Skullcap stems bend in graceful acceptance, growing in quiet corners.
Sweet Melissa, the Lemon Balm, releases an air of breezy calm.
Passiflora, Passionflower vines weave patterns of protection.
Chamomile, its blooming tiny suns, ground and calm.

And on the following page:

Between two worlds,
I stand divided,
Half in shadow, half in light.
In gardens fair, my heart is guided,
Through dark mirrors,
I claim my sight.
Blood of Earth and blood of Star
With three names, I am complete.
Near yet far, known yet hidden,
Morning sun and moonlight meet.

“This is fascinating from a botanical history perspective,” Sarah said. “These are folkloric medicinal herbal properties. Helen and Margaret will be fascinated by this find.”

Sarah did not comment on the name embedded in gold, Ellen, the name I had longed to learn. Ellen must be my birth mother, and Sarah did not say her name. Has she known all along?

Sarah praised Winston for his discovery, and he settled at my feet; his eyes were fixed on the book as if he understood its significance—and my heavy heart.

“I’d like to hold it. To keep looking through it.”

Sarah didn’t look up from the page; her curiosity was engaged. “Of course,” she said absently. “This could provide valuable insights into The Estate’s herbal history. I wonder how old it is...”

My heart sank. Sarah was examining the book as a botanical artifact, rather than my first major clue: my birth mother’s name in gold lettering, only herbal history, and academic value. It was a chance finding she needed to protect and would take the Blue Fairy Book to her study. I carried the market basket to Helen in the kitchen, Winston at my side.

That night, Sarah was engrossed in her references to medieval herbal remedies. The mysterious book on her desk cross-checked the herbal list against her garden notes and didn’t notice me in the doorway.

“Vervain for stabilizing sight,” she murmured. “Morning Glory seeds to induce controllable visions. Cedar bark to anchor wandering perception.”

Her fingers traced the page to “Ellen.” Sarah had been recording anomalies that someone named “Aunt Ann” had treated.

She hadn’t seen me in the doorway. When she looked up, her expression held both revelation and regret. “Stella,” she said softly, “I want to tell you more about the morning I found you—soon.”

My nod had a weight of disappointment as we said goodnight.

But would it be a true story?

I opened my bedroom window, breathing the cedar-scented night air.

Sarah’s willingness was meaningful, but was I ready to hear her truth?

I was more confused than ever about my identity and the paths that were opening between separate worlds.

My dresser mirror ripples my reflection and possibilities, caught between something and something I can’t name. Between whom I have been and who I am becoming. I close my eyes and dream of a copper-haired woman tending a garden, of mirrors that are new doorways, of morning glories that bloom in every season, and the paths they mark. Ruth Ann. Stella. Seeker. Past. Present. Future.

© All rights reserved
Mary Ellen Gambutti

Sarah’s Research
Mom seemed distracted from her routine tasks. I noticed her furrowed brow. She didn’t smile as she used to. I wanted to make her feel better, but she was less playful, spending more time in her office.

Sarah was authorized to access the full Archives, yet had misgivings about unlocking the “specialty” cabinet that held the most perishable and fragile documents and specimens when James wasn’t working there.

Late one evening, she decided to open that particular cabinet to review Elizabeth’s original Garden plans. Their watercolors and drawn details, preserved for a century, now benefited from up-to-date climate control and acid-free storage paper and boxes.

Sarah smoothed the first architectural drawing on the viewing table, and her eyes went right to the features she’d looked at time and again. But had she seen them? There was, of course, the concentricity of circles—the Fairy Ring. She mused: In the Fairy Ring, start with gentle constitutional strengtheners in the outer ring, progress to the focusing herbs in the middle circle, and retreat to the calming plants in the inner sanctuary when needed...

She now conceded that the herbs might have been arranged in a therapeutic progression. Moreover, she now could concur with Helen that the astronomical alignments that honored medieval tradition might optimize aromatic release in daily and seasonal cycles. Then why, she wondered, had she not internalized Elizabeth’s intentions after years of following her work?

Elizabeth’s Annotations

Matricaria chamomilla: Thought to benefit visitors who suffer from nervous overstimulation. Particularly effective when positioned to catch morning sun, releasing therapeutic compounds during hours when such distress appears most acute.

Lavandula angustifolia: Remarkable calming properties observed in individuals whose perceptions seem to exceed ordinary ranges. Garden placement allows evening fragrance release to coincide with periods of heightened sensitivity.

Valeriana officinalis: Root preparations show promise in treating episodes of overwhelming awareness. Medieval manuscripts suggest similar applications for what they termed ‘seeing sickness.’

Sarah’s breath caught. These weren’t general horticultural observations. Elizabeth seems to have been treating visitors who were troubled by uncomfortable or unusual perceptions, or intense reactions to environmental stimuli. On page after page, she read entries that could have described me:

Individuals who perceive patterns others cannot detect often benefit from grounding aromatics. Rosmarinus officinalis, when properly positioned, appears to stabilize excessive perceptual activity. Those prone to episodes of heightened visual phenomena respond well to carefully regulated exposure to Melissa officinalis. Observed reduction in distressing episodes when subjects spend extended periods within the herb’s natural fragrance range.

Sarah’s Journal Entry: Margaret brews chamomile tea when Stella has difficult episodes. She encourages Stella to linger in the Rosemary beds when mirrors overwhelm her. The scent of Lavender calms her on restless nights. Are Margaret’s choices intuitive? Herbal lore? Or are they guided by Elizabeth’s planting design; had she positioned herbs for optimal potency? For their remedial effects? Does Margaret understand this about Elizabeth’s Garden?

Startled, Sarah straightened. Has The Garden been teaching me how to help Stella right from the start?

Below, like a postscript, or a disclaimer, undated, and penned in a different ink by Elizabeth:

Ongoing study is recommended. The design is a framework and proper use and treatment requires the guidance of one more knowledgeable than I. I entrust this Garden with all its challenges and opportunities, and benefits to future caretakers who may be more enlightened than those of my generation. E.S.

And there was more; another lead, a clue, a breadcrumb, perhaps: A folded sheet of stationery monogrammed with “E.S.”

To Future Curators Spring Equinox, 1892
Dear Friends,

You have known me for some time, so you understand that this Garden is more than a strict arrangement of plants. It is a sanctuary.

I have chosen these herbs as one might choose companions; by nature, each may offer a degree of kindness and comfort. I’ve kept careful records. The lists, plants, and The Garden as a whole shall be in your safekeeping, for your gentle, guided use.

Fondly,
Elizabeth S.

Sarah sank into Elizabeth’s Victorian armchair, suddenly exhausted.
How could I, Elizabeth’s intellectual protégée, not have grasped that The Garden wasn’t designed to impress donors or simply to echo the past, but to fill the human need to comfort and be comforted in return? It was designed to research, treat, and heal, to support the special abilities she might not have fully understood. I must have known this! Why haven’t I made the relevant connection to my child?

Sarah pondered until her head grew heavy, and her bed called. Had Elizabeth known? Had she somehow foreseen that a child with unusual sight would one day require sanctuary here? Impossible! She gathered Elizabeth’s materials and locked them away. Like a spell, waiting to be released, was a promise of help, the potential for good. But could it harm? Have I reached beyond convention to something taboo?

Before she slept, Sarah wrote:
Where have I seen these words? “What seems like mere historical curiosity today may prove essential understanding tomorrow.” Perhaps it’s time to stop hiding knowledge and start sharing it. To trust, as Elizabeth trusted, that some truths are worth preserving even when they challenge what we believe, what we understand about the world.

Sarah’s Soil Analysis, Silverton Estate—September

As curator, Sarah collected soil samples periodically to test the acid and alkaline balance and determine the availability of critical nutrients. Following her research in the Archives the night before, she felt the need to confirm the soil condition, especially in the apothecary beds, and in locations where Black Roses sprouted. Morning Glories grew virtually everywhere, so she decided it was less critical to trace their requirements.

Samples collected from perennial borders and quadrant beds.

*Mineral composition consistent; trace elements not typical of regional geology.

*Moisture retention good despite recent drought.

*Mycorrhizal networks denser than control plots.

*Recommend long-term storage and comparison.

“The Garden has wisdom,” she murmured as she capped and labelled the vials. She would do the pH tests and send the rest to the University Horticulture lab. She wrote the next morning: I dreamed of roots twining underground, carrying memory like blood.

The Mirrors Misbehave (Age 10)
Sarah’s recent foray into the Archives shifted her feelings about my mirror episodes. She wasn’t covering the hall mirror. She seemed to think about my reactions to reflections as harmless hereditary traits. She seemed less controlling and more understanding, and objective. She had been redirecting my attention from mirrors that “misbehaved,” and now was documenting mirror “incidents” in detail.

“The bathroom mirror clouded again this morning,” I reported over breakfast, no longer hiding these occurrences but not yet understanding their significance.

“For how long?” Sarah asked, her tone curious rather than concerned.

“Just a few seconds. It showed the Garden, but it was covered in snow.” I paused, considering. “It felt like a memory, but not mine.”

Sarah made margin notes like she was witnessing something important.

Elizabeth’s letter had come as a warning to her to pay attention to patterns rather than dismissing them or worse, raising alarm.

“The house has a long history,” she said thoughtfully. “Perhaps you’re seeing glimpses of its past.”

Her acceptance permitted me to report other incidents without fear: reflections that showed different seasons, glimpses of people in period clothing, waters that rippled without wind. Each occurrence became a small exploration rather than a worry, building my confidence while teaching me to observe rather than merely react. How Sarah responded helped me to accept that being different wasn’t wrong.

Memory Tricks
I tried to explain memories to Cedra, like fragments of light through leaves, or sounds like singing when no one was around, and she would say, Memory plays tricks.

One early morning, around my tenth birthday, I sat upright in bed, awakened from a vivid dream. Bluebells and morning glories surrounded a familiar-looking woman who sat humming softly while she wove a bracelet of blue Forget-me-nots.

In my mirror—it might be a trick of the light—lifting my right hand; my reflection lifts its left. When I blink, it smiles. Is the slight point to my ears my imagination? And the woman’s Forget-me-not bracelet is on my wrist!

Below my bedroom window I saw Sarah walking out to The Garden, wearing her favorite cardigan and the cargo pants with large pockets for seeds and plant snips. She had left her garden notebook on my dresser. I grabbed it and ran downstairs in my bare feet, Winston my fox terrier, right behind me, his tail wagging all the way. We caught up with her.

“Mom, you left your notebook...” Breathless, I held it up.

She thanked me; her brow furrowed to see me in pajamas and bare feet on a chilly fall morning.

“Sleep well?”

My reply wasn’t what I expected:

“The mirrors are getting clearer!”

She paused. The Garden leaned in, and the breeze stirred through the Yew Hedge. I saw Mom the way the fae must have: a scholar open to wonder, a gardener who understood the nature of plants; that they sometimes grew unexpectedly.

“Clearer? How?” She asked with only slight concern in her voice. I sat on the Iron Bench, and she sat, too, giving me her full attention.

The Black Roses brightened; their late-season blooms catching the morning light like dark garnets. Winston panted, pressing against my legs.

“I saw my face as a baby, my usual face, and my face...a little different," I explained. “And this pretty flower bracelet was on my wrist...” But the bracelet was gone, leaving only a trace of perfume. Winston moaned. I sighed.

Sarah studied my face, weighing my words against what she was learning from The Garden’s mysteries. Like me, she was trying to put puzzle pieces in their right places.

She stood up and placed her hands on my shoulders, gently, but firmly, directing me, “Come. I want to show you something.” I stood with her and we entered the Monastery Garden through the open gate in the Yew Hedge. Winston trotted cheerfully alongside us.

“These herbs don’t just grow randomly,” she said, gesturing to the rows in the raised beds. “They were planted with intention. They protect, they strengthen, they remember.” She pointed to the rosemary, thyme, and lavender, the plants I’d helped tend since I could walk. “Elizabeth Silverton chose each one for specific properties.”

“And The Ring,” I whispered, the words rising unbidden from a deep place of certainty.

“Yes, and The Fairy Ring, too,” Sarah nodded. “This Garden has been waiting for us both to recognize it properly. To see what it is.” I remembered how, as a toddler, I liked to curl up in the center of the concentric circular Fairy Ring for comfort.

“Momma, why don’t my eyes see things the same as other people?” I asked in a small voice.

“Because you’re learning to see all that truly is—what could become,” Sarah said, reaching into one of her many pockets. It was a tender way of telling me that I was sorting facts from fiction, using discretion, and powers of reason. She withdrew a small iron key pendant on a silver chain. “I’ve been saving this for when you are ready. I found it in a drawer in my study when we first moved in. We can call it a talisman for protection and clarity.”

She fastened the chain around my neck, and the pendant was both cool and warm against my skin. I knew it was important, but not why.

“What do you know about me, Mom? How did I get here?”

Sarah said what she thought she could. “I know that this Garden recognized you the moment I found you. I know that Morning Glories bloomed in the snow to welcome you, and that Black Roses appeared to announce that you are someone special. And I know that you belong here, with us, growing into whatever you’re meant to become.” It was a kind, motherly, albeit myth-laden response, and it satisfied me in that moment.

We saw the herbs lean toward us, and the rising golden sunlight spilled across the quadrants as she spoke, “The Garden isn’t ordinary, Stella. And neither are you. But that’s not something to fear; it’s something to celebrate.”

I felt a deep sense of rightness, of being exactly where I belonged.

“We’ll figure it out together,” Sarah promised. “You, me, Grandma Helen, and everyone who cares about you. That’s what families do; they help each other grow.”

On the way back to the house for breakfast with Helen, I was buoyant and bouncy, like Winston. I noticed I was still in my pajamas.

Heart-to-Heart
In the weeks that followed, I was drawn to reflective surfaces rather than avoiding them. The mirrors were showing me something about myself that explained so much: why certain plants responded to my touch, why I could hear whispers in the Cedar Grove that others couldn’t, why I sometimes glimpsed movements at the corners of my vision that disappeared when I turned to look directly.

I wasn’t broken or strange. I was something else; something the mirrors recognized even when I didn’t fully understand it myself.

One afternoon, I sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the antique mirror in the upstairs hallway, the one Sarah had nearly removed several times because of my complicated relationship with reflective surfaces.

Today felt different, though. Not a moment of fear but one deliberate connection.

“Everything all right?” Sarah asked, pausing in the doorway.

I didn’t turn immediately. “I was asking it questions.”

“The mirror?” Her tone remained neutral, but I recognized the scientific skepticism she was trying to hide.

I turned to reply, “Mirrors remember things ordinary glass forgets.”

Sarah sat beside me on the hall runner, careful not to position herself within the mirror’s reflection. “What sort of things do they remember?”

“People who stood where we were sitting. Words were spoken in this house before we came. Sometimes...” I hesitated, studying Sarah’s face for signs of disbelief, “Sometimes places that exist somewhere else.”

The conversation had entered territory where Sarah would likely redirect toward more rational explanations. Perhaps it was her collection of documented anomalies in her research journals that caused her to pause instead of dismissing my perspective and listen to what resisted conventional explanation. Perhaps it was Helen’s gentle reminder that the world contained more knowledge systems than those recognized by Western science.

“That must be... challenging,” Sarah said tactfully, “seeing things others don’t.”

Her words, though unexpected, relaxed me, and I replied, “It’s not always scary. Sometimes it’s like having extra windows in a room where other people only see walls.”

My words surprised me and Mom. “And these windows—they show you different places?”

“Or the same place differently,” I said, “like how you see The Garden as plants and weather patterns, and growth cycles. I see that too, but... more.”

Sarah felt a familiar tension between science and her instinct to validate my experience. “Does it bother you that I don’t see what you see?”

“Not really,” I said, with a child’s innocence and forthrightness.

“People see things in different ways. Charles sees which plants need attention before they wilt. Margaret knows when it will rain without checking the forecasts. James finds patterns in old books that tell stories other people miss.”

Sarah was struck by the wisdom of my observation. Each person I named, indeed, did approach the world through separate ways of understanding; frameworks no less valid for being different from her method.

“Besides,” I continued, “you’re starting to see more than you used to.”

“Am I?” Sarah asked, surprised.

“You didn’t pull me away from the mirror this time, like you have been doing. When the black rose popped up in the herb garden yesterday, you watched it instead of writing in your notebook.”

Sarah laughed, “You noticed that did you?”

“The roses noticed, too. That’s why more of them are blooming now.”

In a matter-of-fact tone, I had made an ordinary observation, the way Charles often did.

Sarah sighed. She realized she was up against a reality she’d been gradually accepting in her research journals but had hesitated to fully articulate: that The Garden was unpredictable, and her training hadn’t equipped her to fully comprehend how that could be true.

“I don’t always understand what happens in this Garden,” Sarah admitted, the confession both difficult and freeing for her, and possibly for me, as well. “Or why certain things happen around you.”

“That’s okay.” I placed my hand over Mom’s. “Understanding isn’t the same as accepting. You can accept things first and understand them later. That’s what Charles says about difficult plants—you nurture them before you fully understand their needs.”

“When did you get so wise?” Sarah asked with a smile that contained both pride and wistfulness.

“Maybe I remember things from before, like the mirrors do,” I said.

Once again, I surprised myself with my growing awareness of the mystery around my origins. The statement wasn’t meant to challenge Sarah’s role, but to acknowledge what neither of us understood. Sarah, once again, didn’t feel the need to redirect toward more rational explanations.

“Perhaps you do,” she said. “And perhaps those memories are as much a part of you as the ones we’ve made together.”

I leaned against Sarah’s shoulder, and my gaze returned to the mirror, where both our reflections, mother and daughter with different genetic heritages, but an undeniable connection, shared a loving silence.

“The Garden helped you find me,” I said after a moment. “That’s what the morning glories told me.”

Sarah considered the unlikely sequence of events that had led her to The Ring that winter solstice morning—her uncharacteristic decision to walk The Garden before sunrise, the impossible blooms that had caught her attention, the path that seemed to open before her.

“Perhaps it did,” she acknowledged, putting her arm around my shoulders. “In which case, I owe it a debt I can never fully repay.”

Looking back on that moment, a door had been opened to possibilities with Sarah’s acknowledgment that some bonds were formed through unlikely and impossible circumstances. When we’re lucky, it is a bond formed by love.

Thanks for being here! Next Wednesday, when we continue Part Two: Stella,
Sarah witnesses something impossible in the Garden, and Stella asks the question that’s been waiting since the beginning: “Where are the papers?”

---

Share

Hello friends, Welcome back to Roots & Branches

I’m glad you’re here! My sincere wishes for a lighter, brighter 2026.

Thank you for listening to an adoptee’s voice in my piece about magical thinking and memory.

SOME MAGIC: WISHES AND DREAMS
by Mary Ellen Gambutti
The “primal wound” theory suggests that a newborn is imprinted with her mother’s scent, her touch, her heartbeat, and her voice, and that their separation at birth causes harm to both. Each carries the loss, and the longing to reunite, to love someone they cannot know.
I suppose the sisters at St. Francis Hospital, and foundling home offered what gentle comfort they could. Severance was the sensation. Adoption was the whisper. You are safe. Someone will come for you and bring you home. The murmur may have broken through the confusion, the noise of want.

When language began to bloom, I knew the word ‘adoption,’ but not what it would reveal or conceal. That would come much later. Until then, all was magic. Quiet play. Nursery rhymes and post-war tunes. I learned to guide the needle into the groove, releasing endless hours of music pressed into yellow plastic. I was surrounded by books with golden bindings, both soft and vivid illustrations, intact memories of The Cat and the Fiddle, Old Mother Hubbard, There Was a Crooked Man, My Book House, Richard Scarry, Grimm, Aesop, Andersen, and Disney. Fairy tales depicted good and evil, although the fairy folk wielded an amoral magic. Princes and witches, stepmothers and godmothers, danger and rescue coexisted in Enchanted Forests. Stars were summoned for wishing. “Makes no difference who you are,” love and happiness will come. Time teaches otherwise.

Transfers and transitions began at two months when they found her, and she signed the papers. They transported me across the state, where I lived three months in a crowded foundling home nursery. I met the military couple, and the adoption was finalized at the end of one year. Trains, planes, and cars. An often-absent military father. A highly strung, anxious adoptive mother. His Air Force career meant uprooting an already uprooted infant. Friends were temporary. Places dissolved. Wishing no longer worked. Disappointment set in.

I was six when the story came from my parents. Adoption. Now the word was solid. Had edges and corners. It was a puzzle of questions I didn’t know how to ask. Where are they, the missing ones? The lost ones? Who do I look like? Would my Air Force father come back this time? Some important people had left me, and my body learned fear early. I countered with magical thinking, with wishing and willfulness. Belief offered agency, trust frayed to anger, when I realized I had no control, that there were things unknown. Unsaid. Secrets.

By adolescence, magical thinking had faded as a useful survival tool. Fantasy had offered control. An irrational belief in immunity convinced me of native luck, masked risky behavior, and untreated distress. Longing did not disappear. It sharpened. My struggle went unnamed until at forty, a diagnosis gave shape to anxiety, depression, panic, dissociation, and collapse. I was urged to search. And I did.

Adoption was still a whisper in 1993, when my first mother, then in her seventies, and I laid eyes on each other, perhaps for the first time. I traveled to Greenville many times to be with her during the last year of her life. “Momma” had lived in hard places for decades; she endured thirty-seven years in Texas with abuse and the loss by drowning of her sixteen-year-old daughter. Sad years and several brief marriages in South Carolina. My maternal half-sister had rushed to her aid in Texas and brought her home to Greenville.

That was the moment I found the phone number. For two years, I’d written and called from my Pennsylvania home, pre-internet and DNA testing, with my Selectric and landline phone. Catholic Charities, as required by my birth state, released only “non-identifying information,” height, weight, age, and the general vicinity of my mother’s parents’ rural home, a cabin on a field they didn’t own at the time of my surrender in 1951; the home where my half sister was left as a toddler. The grandparents weren’t able to take another infant.

A lifelong wish came true two years into my search, when an adoptee advocate slipped my mother’s name and the name she gave me at relinquishment. A local historian combed congregations and ancestral churchyards, and I found someone I trusted to be my second cousin. It seemed neither my mother nor I was entitled to the full truth. Adoption records were falsified to protect all parties. My birth and adoption records were sealed by the State until 2023. She told me she had always wondered. I know she had wandered. So had I, but the State seal on adoptee birth records made reunion unlikely. It took some magic.

Leave a comment

Share

Some early ways of wishing found another voice in my fiction. Memory enters myth and fairy tale for my debut magical realism novella, Through the Yew Hedge: A Tale of Identity Magic.
Series installments most Wednesdays. Number Six is next. Start at the Prologue or anywhere in the Garden …

Friends, Subscribers to this newsletter, you are subscribed by default to Through The Yew Hedge and Seasons. If you prefer not to read my fiction and image poems, please cancel just that Section. Thank you for assistance and your loyal readership.

Read the full unabridged novella-in-series free on Substack. Hope to see you there!
Print and e-book coming soon.

Thank you for your support of indie authors!

The bus ticket vibrates in the Ellen’s coat pocket, her choice like the weight of lead: an escape, a remedy, but not a salvation. She trembles as she sets the baby basket behind the farthest bench, out of the cold gusts of wind that rush across the concrete platform.

Accepting she is flawed and cannot properly mother, Ellen turns to board the waiting bus.