Bloom Where You Are Planted

Regina Guarino

I had long described myself as a daffodil bulb. I was all potential. I was underground, in the dark, and unseen; a solitary daffodil bulb, awaiting the conditions to blossom. That’s what happened to me in Spain. The sun was out, and this daffodil peeked above the soil.        

Until then, sunlight had never shone on me. I was a secret to myself, for I am sure that a daffodil bulb does not know what it will become. I had no idea what it meant to be planted, to grow roots, to send up shoots—to blossom.

I first saw these words on a bookmark my mother sent me in college: bloom where you are planted. The laminated bookmark was decorated with pressed pink and purple flowers. While running my fingers along its glossy surface, I thought, where else would you bloom? My secondary and real, maybe unacknowledged reaction, was, what does that even mean?

I was in the middle of nowhere at college in rural Western Pennsylvania, where construction at the library meant that I couldn’t rely on one of my favorite safe spaces and that a great dust hung over the campus. Even the green trees looked gray. I was living with a school-designated roommate, who propped family photographs on every horizontal surface in the dorm room. Even when reading my assigned novels on the bed, I couldn’t miss their curious looks. To escape, I burrowed into myself as the physical space became less and less my own. Outside the dorm, professors led discussions, or rather, pontificated on traditional classic novels like Heart of Darkness, which only plunged my heart into greater darkness. Blooming was something I didn’t know about.

When I received that bookmark in the mail, I tucked it into the bottom of the box that held my bookmark collection. I still have that collection which must have begun when I first started reading. Whenever I needed to mark my page in a book, I never used paper scraps like my sister or bent the books spine like my brother. Instead, I gathered bookmarks from library counters and gift shops, found them in my Christmas stocking, or received them in the mail—like this one. Wherever I picked up a book, I picked out a bookmark to go with it, matching the bookmark to my mood and to the book. I always found myself content with this process. But how many years did “the bloom where you are planted” bookmark remain untouched?

After college, I was still looking for an elusive something that I believed was out there for me. I was just afloat on a blue orb, moving from what seemed one gray workplace or living space to another. On the suburban campus where I worked, the administration moved my department to basement offices, so my path to the office took me down a flight of stairs to a leftover gray desk set in a room of gray-painted cinderblocks. I sat under a narrow window that abutted the low ceiling, where I had to stretch my neck for a view of the sky. Sunshine did not reach me and in that dim light, I languished.

After some years, at long last, I arrived in an endlessly sunny climate. I had no idea what to expect at Rota Naval Base, Spain, with a new husband assigned to this duty post. I knew that again this would be a temporary home for me—just three years—but somehow the ground felt firmer and the sky more open. The sun shone every day, and my greatest challenge turned out to be something I used to take for granted: finding books to read.

Naturally, the most important place on base for me was the library. I can still remember the naval base road to the library, where the bunker-like building squatted on a dusty plot—no plants, no grass. The crude signpost indicating the library pointed to a gray, flat-roofed square metal box without windows. Three weathered wooden steps led to a beige, heavy metal door. Inside there were circular spinning racks galore, crammed with western, romance, and mystery paperbacks. Books I never read. Then beyond those racks, gray metal shelving units stood shakily, sparsely populated with dusty hardbacks awaiting a reader.

The sun did not shine into the library. A houseplant drooped on the checkout counter, and I wondered if any shoots I sent forth in this new country would droop here, too. Everything was wrong. Books were shelved incorrectly. The selection was worn and dreadfully odd; no money was allocated for new book purchases. Dust hovered in the air in a gray pall. I could hardly find anything I wanted to read. I felt both sorry and enraged at once because the turnover and obvious lack of knowledge and experience created an unsatisfactory library. I argued constantly with the librarian until finally they said, “The base commander is happy with the library.”

That’s when I realized that I was the only one who cared what I read. My reading material, my fulfillment, wasn’t their concern. It could only be mine. I would not go without books, so I was forced to change. If I wanted to take root in this new life, I had to do something different. If I wanted to thrive under the sunshine, I had to choose books, my sustenance, in a new way so I wouldn’t wither.

The next day, I went back to the library, and I started at the top left shelf in the very back corner. I pulled out each book and reviewed them one by one, choosing which ones I wanted to check out. When I arrived at the end of a row, I moved to the next, until I had several books that I could take home. When it was time to return and choose new books, I picked up at the spot where I had left off and went, again, book by book. This is how I found enough outstanding books to keep me reading for three years. They were there; they were either miscataloged, or misspelled, or marked missing. Or, most often, they were books I would never have thought to read. These books were not best sellers, and they were not on my reading list. They were pleasant surprises, like finding a flower bud growing out of a crack in a wall, and they were perfect reading for any given sunny day.

That very first day when I went home with my first armload of books from the library, I sorted through my bookmark box. As always, I looked for the most appropriate one and realized the perfect one was one that I had never chosen before—the one my mother had given me about a decade earlier. At last, I understood what it meant to bloom where you are planted—I had finally done just that.

***                                              

Beyond the library, I pushed myself out of my past, too. I left behind those days when other people delineated my space, whether a dorm room, a classroom or an office. Like the perennial plants all around me in southern Spain, I put myself in charge of my growth. I stopped hoping that people and space around me would change so that I could be content. I did whatever I could for myself and not just when it came to reading.

During those three years, I had a job I didn’t like, so I left it for another; I found a flamenco dance teacher didn’t suit me, so I sought out another whom I loved. No longer would I waste the free sunshine of life by toiling isolated and underground. I emerged a brilliant yellow, with a sturdy stalk. Now, I blossom in the sun, and I flutter in the breeze.