Our Story

Building Something Together

A mother. A daughter. A small, slow dream taking root.

We are a mother and daughter team, and honestly, Sherwood and Sage was born on an ordinary afternoon that turned into something we didn’t expect.

I’m Melissa. For a while, I was running on empty. Burnout had quietly taken hold, and my mind and body were both asking me, loudly, to slow down. The silver linings I’ve always looked for each day were getting harder to find, and I knew something needed to change.

Delphine, my daughter, has Down syndrome. She’s getting older, and one of the things I wanted most was to help her grow in her independence, to show her that she is capable of building something real. She has big dreams. One of them is running her own diner someday. We believe her.

One afternoon we were just hanging out, playing with craft supplies. Delphine was working on a polka dot drawing. One of her favorite things is filling an entire page with the same pattern, and this one was full of dots in every size and every bright color she could find. I was working on wood block collages nearby. It was quiet and easy and good. I felt that happy feeling come back, the one I’d been missing. And I could tell she felt it too, that particular kind of contentment that comes from making something alongside someone you love.

That was the moment I saw it. What we were creating together could become something, paper goods, journals, little handmade surprises made from clay and wood and care. A place where my love of journaling and her love of color and pattern could live side by side.

So Sherwood and Sage was born. Slowly, intentionally, one small thing at a time.

Her Story

She Called Herself a Healer

In 1706, on the banks of the Lynnhaven River in colonial Virginia, a woman named Grace Sherwood was tried and convicted of witchcraft. Her real crimes were growing her own herbs, healing her neighbors, knowing the names of plants and what they could do, and refusing to be less than she was.

Before they bound her and put her in the water she looked at them and said: I be not a witch. I be a healer. She floated. They called it proof of witchcraft. She called it surviving.

Grace lived to 80. Tended her farm. Kept her land. Raised her children. Never remarried. Never stopped knowing things. And 300 years later, on July 10, 2006, exactly three centuries to the day after her trial, Virginia Governor Tim Kaine officially pardoned her and restored her good name.

Her statue stands today in Virginia Beach, a raccoon at her side, rosemary and garlic in her basket. Curious. Knowing. Unbothered. Exactly as she was.

We carry her name because she carried herself with exactly the kind of quiet, rooted, unbothered knowing that we are trying to cultivate here. She tended her garden. She helped her neighbors. She refused to shrink. That feels like the right kind of ancestor to have.