I grew up with a love of fantasy novels, nature, and animals. After my quest for red hair led to disaster, I doubled down on my passion for reading and experimentation, for nature and science, and set out on a journey to heal the damage and get the color I wanted, naturally. My herbal alchemy did the trick and, once the methods and products had proven successful, I launched NightBlooming–a virtual garden in which to grow my passion and share it with the world.

My husband is my lodestar, and we live together in a sweeping river valley with mutinous cats and garden dotted with honeybees.

A professional technical writer and interactive learning designer, I strive to blend clarity and purpose in my prose and emboss it with vivid description honed in my fiction writing. My nonfiction works include Rehabilitating Damaged Hair Naturally: A Guide and Coloring Hair Naturally with Henna & other Herbs: A Guide.

I wanted red hair from the moment I knew people could have red hair. While many little girls had legions of blonde dolls, mine, to a one, were gingers.

The first time I dyed my hair, its boring-seeming brown was transformed into something bright and fiery. I was in love, and hopelessly hooked. But, as I learned, nothing fades like red dye. By the time my roots needed touching up the length was faded, so I’d pull the dye through the length to refresh the patchy color.

Soon enough, the hair I had fallen in love with was no longer the hair attached to my head. After years of aggressive styling and dyeing, my hair broke off, inch by inch, from my hips all the way up to my shoulder blades. I developed a sensitivity to the chemical dyes, and each touch-up left my scalp red, irritated, and peeling. At its worst, my hair was a faded, patchy, straw-like broken mass of split ends, and my scalp was tender and red.

Distraught and despairing, I looked for a better way. Over the course of this journey I researched an immense amount about the structure of hair, how conventional treatments damage it, and how natural ingredients and unconventional care can offset that damage. I traded salon cuts for microtrimming, began to wear my hair up with sticks and forks, and began to experiment, not only with natural off-the-shelf products, but also with creating my own.

And I discovered henna. Over the next few years I consumed everything I could on the topic, learning how it worked and how to blend it with other herbs to alter the final color. Its strengthening properties held my horribly damaged hair together.

Slowly, joyfully, my hair returned to how I’d loved it best–long, healthy, and copper-orange.

We were so excited to get our Bengal kittens, Tsavo and Zerah, in early November of 2009. While Tsavo would chase a toy on the ground, if you picked it up he’d treat it as though he was invisible- we realized that he couldn’t see, and had been tracking the toy by sound alone.

After waiting two months to see a specialist, Tsavo was diagnosed with birth-defect cataracts. He had almost no vision in his left eye and only about 25% in his right eye. The good news was that he had a fantastic chance at gaining his vision back with surgery- a 96% success rate which would give him about 90% of his vision back.

The bad news, of course, was that the surgery was astronomically expensive. It was the same surgery as would be performed on a human being, to open up the eyes, removed the clouded lenses, insert new lenses and close him up, to say nothing of the staggering amount of aftercare that encompassed weeks of drops and pills that required their own spreadsheet just to keep track of.

Without any other way to pay for the surgery, I turned to Etsy and the outpouring of support was unexpected, in both the degree of caring and the sheer magnitude of compassion for one little blind kitten. We listed items whose entire purchase price went towards surgery (though to be honest the purchase price of every item went towards it).

The surgery was a complete success. Tsavo can see, (he’s a bit farsighted, but that’s normal for this type of surgery) and his quality of life has now is so above and beyond what he had before that I can’t even imagine him as blind.

He’s grown (and then grown some more) into a healthy, sweet cat who can fully enjoy the world. For those of you that donated and sent good thoughts, thank you. There are no words that can express the gratitude we have for those that reached out to help a cat they had never met. You changed Tsavo’s world for the better, and I know if he could thank you himself, he would.

You can read about the entirety of Tsavo’s surgery and recovery here.

My husband and I keep our own bees! Our bees are Minnesota Hygienic Italian bees living chemical-free and in top-bar apiaries made to the Golden Mean.

We’re proud to help bolster the bee population and only take what the bees themselves don’t use, harvesting only when they fill their hive and run out of room, or in the spring when they prefer fresh nectar to their leftover, overwintered honey. We allow our bees to swarm, sending much-needed bees out into the world to do their critical job of pollination.