When she completed her poetry collection at Cope House, Awbury Arboretum, in 1978, Janet Randolph Grace McPhedran was 83 or 84 years old. She signed the unbound typescript "Jane McPhedran," the name by which she had been known for much of her adult life. She distributed photostatic copies to her children. This web-based reproduction attempts to preserve the appearance of the non-proportionally spaced typewriter font. I hope that a future version of the HTML will allow the poetry to be viewed in the horizontal orientation on smart phones, to minimize word wrapping; getting to this point has been a bit of trial and error for the large language model that is helping me write the code, courtesy of Microsoft Copilot. In writing these lines, I am reminded how much the world of reading and writing, in which she lived, has changed over the past 35 years.
Klemens Meyer
December 25, 2024