The Journey BeginsGrowing up outside Philadelphia, I was the girl making "huckleberry finn water" and "honeysuckle dew elixir" for my dolls. I didn't know it then, but I was following in footsteps laid down generations before I was born.In the 1980s, while living in Alaska, I learned to infuse the yellow buds of cottonwood trees in olive oil to create Balm of Gilead—a powerful natural pain reliever still beloved by our customers today. As a trained forager, gardener, and backpacker, I spent years learning to harvest and use wild plants for food, beauty, and healing.But I was just beginning to understand why this work called to me so deeply.

The Discovery That Changed Everything In 1993, I traveled to a small village in eastern Slovakia searching for my great-grandparents' gravestones. Instead, I found something far more precious: a living family I never knew existed.An elderly woman in the cemetery sensed what I was looking for and rushed me to a local ceramics studio. There, a woman named Edita examined my great-grandfather's baptismal certificates, looked closely at my face, wrapped her arms around me and cried, "You are my family!"Edita was my cousin—descended from my great-grandfather's sister.What happened next was nothing short of miraculous.

Lives Lived in ParallelAs we got to know each other, we discovered we weren't just related by blood—we were living parallel lives:Edita and I were both working ceramistsHer daughter and I were both lifelong art teachers creating remarkably similar workHer granddaughter Denisa and my father both worked in journalismWe both grew abundant gardens and made botanical products from them But the most profound discovery came during my 2002 visit.