Still Coming Home: An Adoptee Looks Back at a Decade in Reunion with Birth Father
*Note, July 2023 would have marked 12 years in reunion. I wrote and posted this story just four months before my birth father passed away on my blog at www.myadoptedlife.com.
I wake to the sun climbing the crimson wall of the upstairs bedroom at Camelot, the aroma of fresh coffee calling me out of bed. I descend the second-floor stairs to see Pop’s oxygen cord spiraling toward the kitchen. This means he’s beat me to the pot and is already seated to Nanny’s left in his stalwart post, rocking to the hum of a Rio Frio morning on the front porch. I will find them both there sipping coffee and considering the day. Today is a work day for me, and it is 8:30 a.m. I am already late. But I will make time to hold coffee court and contemplate the day before us. After all, how many of these bleary-eyed congregations may we have left to share together?
The customary two-week stay following the Fourth of July festivities does little to ease the pain of knowing 50 odd weeks a year I miss these morning porch coffees, watching the skittish white tail deer graze in yonder pasture, noting the slow tug of clouds threatening to thunder away a darn good day in the river, debating who or what might show up at the dinner table later.
Coffee in hand, birds chirping, sun-warmed cement under our feet, and all is right with the blooming day before us. I suck in the sweetness like one of the insatiable hummingbirds buzzing sugar from the flowering vines crawling up the water well just to the ditch side of the oasis I call the front porch, but which Nanny always reminds me is technically the side porch.
This morning’s porch talk is about an upcoming journey to Houston to visit Pop’s heart doctor, and the future quest Nanny will soon undertake to conquer her shot knees — the battle of the total knee replacement looms on the horizon, but we are fortified and prepared for the inevitable.
Draining my second cup, I peel my thighs off the metal chair I have claimed as my spot, which sits in its princess position to the right of Pop’s wobbly throne. I will pull the battered porch door closed behind me, careful not to crush Pop’s oxygen cord in the crack of it, shuffle through the tiled living room, enter a small foyer, and climb the wooden stairs Pop built more than a decade before I showed up. There I will toil in the drudgery of my computer work for the majority of the day, holed up like Rapunzel chained to a task desk in the bedroom tower of the second floor. It is in this way that this lucky-to-be-able-to-work-from-home princess can take extended visits to Camelot, earn her day’s wage, take a dip in the river, and still serve court when the dinner bell rings.
I finish my day’s work at five sharp and am headed to the river, which conveniently curls along a portion of our property line skirting the back pasture. I begin with a well-rehearsed gearing up to gear down, which I have mastered since my arrival to this little piece of Texas paradise. Beer check, limes check, cooler and ice check, snack check, towel check, camping chair check, phone check, earbuds check. And from there I sully forth to sit and soak, to think like The Thinker, to ponder today, tomorrow, and yesteryear, as Pop advises I should do. He tells me I need to be alone with my thoughts. The good daughter can’t argue this logic.
Today, as the cool Frio tumbles her smooth stones so fast no little minnows can even try to nibble my legs, I sit and sip and ponder as Pop instructs. First, when a hooked-up pair of dragonflies make my knee their own passion pad, I consider how one tells the difference between the male and the female? Is it the male sticking his thing in the back of her neck, or is she the one dragging him around with her thing in his? The submissive desperation in the posterior one’s googly black eyes convinces me she is a she and must be the one being lurched here and there by her lover. She appears relieved he’s stopped to rest. But before long, he pulls them both away, and she gives in to the lurch again. I return my gaze to the sparkling diamonds of sunshine bouncing off the gurgling waters. I wiggle my butt down a bit and dig my toes into the rocky bottom. I’ll be damned if the current thinks it can drag me wherever it gosh darn pleases.
Steadying the feet of my camping chair deeper into the stones, I sink in and press my face to the sun. I take a long sip of a Dos Equis and toast the fact that tomorrow makes a decade since I first pulled up the drive at Camelot, ten years since meeting my birth father, since finding my way to a home I’d never laid a foot on, but somehow always knew was out there waiting for my return. Gazing up into a powder-blue sky framed by swaying cypress trees, rooted there long before I was conceived, I float freely atop the current of the cool Frio as a decade of memories washes over me.
Ten years post-reunion, and I am happy to report that our separate families have merged into just “our family,” the whole mess of us, and we’ve bonded in ways none of us could have imagined. For me, the reunion brings, in addition to Pop and Nanny, an aunt with my own name, cousins, a brother and sister-in-law, and a niece and nephew. For Pop, he gets a granddaughter, two great-grandsons, and bonds with my adoptive family and friends I long-ago fused into that treasured bunch.
For both of us, a decade in reunion delivers an endless all-you-can-eat buffet of Fourth of July’s, Christmases and Thanksgivings, Easters, fishing trips, birthday parties, bonfires and road trips, our previous nine reunion anniversaries, and that fateful New Year’s night at the Buckhorn, when at 12:01 they called “Happy New Year” and then told everyone to leave. In protest, I stole an unattended bottle of Tito’s vodka right off a patron’s table. I regretted my adolescent act instantly, and within the hour told Pop bad karma was sure to find me in the New Year. Sure enough, three months later, my little writer’s cabin Pop built burnt to the ground. “Yeah, Karma’s a bitch,” he reminded me.
This afternoon, I watch the little fish fight the current to nibble at my unshaven legs and sigh nostalgically when the mating dragonflies, this time, light on my arm. They balance there, flicking their little black legs, closed wings jutting like a delicate fin down each twiggy purple spine. They remind me of a river float down the Guadalupe, just hours from Pop and Nanny, and a full decade before we’d meet. That day, my bestie used her fancy high-res camera to capture such a pair of winged lovers on a lingering log, and she mailed me a glossy poster of their coitus a few weeks later. It was so zoomed in you could see the water’s reflection in their beady black helicopter eyeballs.
“When will I ever frame that dragonfly porn?” I wonder — though almost three decades later it still sits curled safely in its tube. Yes, life has kept me busy. I choose not to think about the bitter divorce that left me caterwauling into my pillow for months, the rip in what seemed like the tight tapestry of my life coming just two years into reunion with Pop. Instead, I focus on the day that man I loved so much back then steadied me, coached me, and delivered me that warm July afternoon to the top of the country lane where stood the man I would soon call “Pop” — my biological father.
The rest is history, as they say.
Tomorrow’s celebration is remarkable in that Pop never believed he would live long enough to see us a decade in reunion, but he did. And he is not as bad off as he or I imagined he might have been by now. Having watched my mother and grandmother battle heart disease and COPD, I know the serious fight Pop will face one day. Today, I am glad to say that challenger in the ring, though slinging some hard punches, has yet to press Pop fully against the ropes. But I would be remiss not to admit that we are facing the last few rounds, and the years have taken their toll on us both, but certainly more so on Pop.
The Pop I met a decade ago sprung boots to the ground from the back of his truck bed, drove tractors, hauled furniture, launched boats, pulled in 40-pound catfish with his daughter attached, ran pool tables almost as fast as he ran his mouth, dealt cards till dawn, and could still muster enough breath to scoot across a dusty Texas dance floor till the last note played at the end of the one song he’d waited all night for so he could dance the one dance he had in him with his “favorite daughter.” I don’t have COPD, but neither can I do anything like I could a decade ago.
These days, we don’t spend our hours trying to learn everything there is to know about each other. That phase passed around year five. Today, we are content to sit and hold each precious moment as it ticks by us. As cut from the same cloth as we are, we both like to sink our teeth into something our brains can chew on. Lately, that is a joint passion project focused on renovating the monster of the 1948 Spartanette trailer whose claim to fame is that she is the home place of my conception.
Pop and I agree this story is not done until that Sparanette is as pretty and polished as the day I was made under the dark polished paneling that once walled her big broad aluminum womb. And to take the dream a tad further, I vision board that one day I will offer the fully-restored trailer as a writing residency to anyone in the adoption constellation working on an adoption-related creative project. In short, it’s my way to bring the story full circle, to thank those in the community who helped me find my voice, by creating space for others to find and share their own.
Tonight, I shuffle in from the river, slide open the back door hoping to smell dinner on the stove, and am met with downhome wafts of Nanny’s hamburger gravy and mashed potatoes. “Almost, but just not quite ready yet,” she says. I encourage Pop and Nanny to join me on the porch, and together we convene to watch the wind sway tree limbs to and fro, we listen to the high buzz of night critters tuning up for their sunset symphony, and we share one more pink-hour of the thousands Nanny and Pop have witnessed on this sacred little spot of Texas hill country; and that is when Nanny says, “I can’t believe it’s just been ten years. It feels so much longer, like you have always been here, always with us.”
The adopted child in me unravels in a glorious way, does cartwheels across the lawn, flies high into the golden sunset, swings on the billowy terra cotta clouds, and skips across the rolling purple hilltops. Though it feels like we just got started, and there will never be enough time to make up for forty-odd lost years, Nanny’s words reach into the marrow of my bones. I am as home as I have ever felt or ever been. As home as I was at five sitting between my Mommy and Daddy in bed smacking saltines and watching Mash. Through my adult bond with Nanny and Pop, I can better imagine what porch sitting with Mommy and Daddy might have been like at this time in my life, now that I am old enough to know a good porch talk entails more listening than blabbing on. Today I have come full circle, a place so many adoptees never get to visit, let alone call their own, and I thank God for it.
Tomorrow makes ten years since I pulled up that drive and yet it feels like yesterday. The evening will be another quaint night. We will cook steaks like we did the night we met. I will pull out a nice bottle of hill country wine, a favorite from the time early in reunion when Pop and I visited the vineyards in Fredericksburg. At my most prior visit to Pop’s, I broke the last of those special wine glasses we bought at the vineyard back on one of those special days. Tomorrow I will replace those glasses, and we will drink the same wine, but we won’t be the same people. We will be stronger, tougher, wiser, as present and real and honest as the day we met, and yet perhaps a tad more pragmatic about the future as well. We both solemnly understand there are fewer days ahead of us than are behind us at this point.
This night, we will watch the memorial video that my daughter Victoria and I made to celebrate this significant milestone, which we premiered on the porch this past Fourth of July. We may go out and say Happy 10th birthday to Patricia Longlegs, the cow born at Camelot the day I arrived, but in truth, our celebration will be as simple and sweet and easy as the day we met. I recall Nanny once saying “Well, what took you so long?” And I agree it did take way too long, but never has the cliché rang truer when I say “Better late than never.”
Pop’s Toast to 10 Years in Reunion, Followed by Our Attempt to Recreate the Day We Met
About the Spartanette Renovation Project
Learn more about my project renovating the 1948 Spartanette trailer in which I was conceived, with the goal of offering it as a writing residency for adoption-related creative projects in the future.
