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A Junction of Amends Sandra McPherson's Poetics of Adoption Jan VanStavern Wildflowers and Earthstars: Accounts of Home When she talks about meeting her birth parents, the first things Sandra McPherson mentions are the wildflowers. When the thirty-seven-year-old poet first approached her birth parents' northern California house, she saw wildflowers and mushrooms spilling across the lawn and began staring at their whorls and shapes, naming them in her head. For her whole life, not knowing her own birth name, Sandra McPherson had been mesmerized by naming things their right names-knowing the name and nature of California poppies, ceanothus, the rangy lupine, waxy-leafed oleander, poisonous to cats and children. Raised by a loving family, the pragmatic and religious McPhersons, she was nevertheless a born pagan, at worship in a field more comfortably than in a nave, and she had always sensed there must be people more like her in the world-the people who had created her and who shared her genes. Now, walking toward the house with her birth sister, Ellayn Evans, who had driven her from the airport, she studied the place she was about to enter and stared at the flowers she knew by heart. When asked now how she felt meeting her birth parents for the first time, she says, ''Attentive.'' When Joyce and John Todd came out ofthe house, McPherson immediately saw herself in their faces and their attention to the natural world: before taking her inside, they brushed aside leaves to show her rare mushrooms in the front yard. McPherson wrote a poem describing this meeting of birth-family naturalists , in which Joyce Todd's first act as a mother to her adult child is to introduce her to earthstar mushrooms. Geasters. She bent down At the dappled base of the tree, And among the brown leaves Geasters stood up. Oranges peel like these, She said. Rinds bent back. 151 152 Imagining Adoption When it rains, their legs swell up And walk. Stranger feet Than mine All these years Outside your dooLl McPherson felt as if she had come home-to natural parents, nature-lovers like herself, people who pay witness to life by naming it and studying it carefully.2 Her love of nature, jazz, and liberalism had made her feel different and sometimes alienated from the McPherson family, who had adopted and raised her; now she was meeting her birth family, whose own impulses toward knowing the land and learning matched her own-Joyce and John were both musicians, as was her sister, Ellayn, who had studied art in college. Long used to the sharp contrasts between her own style and that of her adoptive family and their conservative religious surrounds, McPherson stood outside her birth parents' home as a naturalist and natural daughter, studying what grew outside their door, and thought of her own feet, kept far away: "Stranger feet / Than mine / All these years / Outside your door." Like much of McPherson's writing about her adoption , the scene reveals no bitterness but does include a broad, intimate sense of need and wonder, as well as a faint ambivalence as she approaches the answer to many questions about her own identity. Her life experience with adoption, which is echoed and complicated by poetry she wrote before and after finding these birth parents, reveals a fascination with what the body and genetics gave her, an almost mystical sense of connection with her human roots. In an autobiographical essay, she recalls: Upon meeting my birth parents, I felt an immediate bond with them and identified with their personalities and quirks. Their house, for instance: it is nestled among wildflowers and wild mushrooms; the trees are full of birds they know all the names of-it seems one can be by heredity a birder.3 In this unusually positive birth-family reunion, McPherson located her own unusual hobbies in the family tree, finding that what had seemed her own affinity for naming birds came, as if genetically, from her first family. But this determination that nature rather than culture produced many of her talents is based, as all of McPherson's adoption stories are, in a fertile imagination rather than in scientific fact. Whatever the evidence may present, the most important parts of McPherson's adoption experience stem not from the cold light of science but from the many hued colors ofimagination. She was seemingly born, as she used [3.145.156.46] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 10:38...

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