The Colstoun Pear

In the 13th century, Baron Hugo Gifford gave his daughter Margaret a wedding gift: an enchanted pear, sealed with a spell meant to guard her family’s future. As long as the pear was honored and protected, its blessing would endure.

For four hundred years, it did.

The pear passed quietly through generations, its meaning gradually thinned by time. And then, one fateful day, a descendant broke the spell; whether by neglect, or simple disbelief, no one could later agree.

Soon after that event came the river.

The Broun family was crossing in celebration when the waters rose without warning. The current took the carriage, the horses, and nearly everyone inside. Those watching from the banks said it happened too quickly for saving them.

Only a few survived.

They were the women, lifted and held above the water by the wide hoops of their skirts, buoyed by fashion. After that, the pear’s power was said to be gone for good.

From that day on, the story was no longer told as a blessing, but as a warning. . .

I researched this story after I discovered that Hugo Gifford, sometimes called “the Wizard of Yester,” may appear in my own family’s historical record many generations back.

I include this lineage (click on book pages below) not as a claim of ownership, of course, but as an invitation to inquiry (and as entertainment for my own grandchildren). When records thin and certainty disappears, stories often survive in altered forms through poetry, legend, and imagination. This book, while planting only a seed for a child’s future learning “connections,” explores how people in the past explained what they couldn’t understand, and how those explanations became stories that are still told today.