Local wonders

In 2002, my mom and dad gave me a book. Inside the front cover, my dad wrote:

If you can 'bloom where you are planted,' then even Butler County Nebraska can be a wonder.

May you always love yourself, appreciate what you have, and grow where you are planted.

This was the year that I got married, moved farther away from home than I had ever lived (to New Orleans), and began graduate school in English. I didn't know it at the time, but this was the year that would begin the wanderings that eventually brought me to Ifrane, Morocco. At the time, although I was an adult, my feelings towards the place where I had grown up could be described as "ambivalent" at best. I grew up in a rural part of Nebraska known by locals as "the Bohemian Alps," and Butler County – location of the tiny village that I lived in from the time I was five until I left for college – was largely settled by Czech immigrants. My own lack of Czech heritage was just one of many ways in which I never quite fit into the community. I thought Butler County and the surrounding "Alps" lacked texture – whether of the cultural or geographical kind. When I left for New Orleans, I was sad in the general way in which one is sad when one moves away from friends and family, but I didn't have much of a sense of connection to place.

Therefore, when, in 2002, my parents gave me a book called Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps by local Ted Kooser (U.S. poet laureate at the time, as I remember my father proudly telling me), I politely accepted the book and then proceeded to drag it around the world with me for the next 10 years. But I didn't once open the cover.

Whether it was out of a sense of duty or because of a vague feeling that it was symbolic or poetic or meaningful somehow, I dragged the book all the way to Morocco with me. And it was only recently – just a few weeks ago – that I finally picked up the book and read it.

It wasn't what I thought it would be. It's essentially a published collection of short, reflective journal entries Ted Kooser wrote, but they are inspired by and centered around his land, his neighbors, and the culture of Seward County (Butler County's slightly more German next-door neighbor).

Maybe the book was just waiting for the right time to be read. I almost expected to recognize some of the people he wrote about (the community is that small), and while that didn't happen, I did find myself smiling at some of the things he wrote. For example:

People [in Seward County] don't lock the doors to their houses, and the only reason they lock their cars is, in August, to keep neighbors from putting zucchini in the backseat.

Reading the book didn't really change how I felt about Butler County. As an adult, I am much more tolerant and understanding of my parents' love for the place at the same time that I have trouble thinking of it as anything other than a childhood shoe my feet have long been too big to fit into. I admire the ability that Kooser and my parents have, to settle in like trees where they were planted, to slowly extend roots and branches, not afraid of being dug up or blown away by wind, not desiring a change of scenery.

I feel much more like a dandelion seed, and for me "growing where I am planted" means something very different from what it means for my parents. There is no deliberate and permanent planting, but rather I am frequently lifted, blown from one place to another. If I land, I will prepare to put down roots, but I also recognize that the wind may carry me up again before I can do so.

This is how I have come to understand my father's note in the front of the book he gave me. He is a tree, and I'm a dandelion seed. Someday, though, the wind will put me down in a place, and I will be there long enough to put down a small root. It won't be as long or deep or permanent as the roots my parents have put down, but I will try to grow where I am planted, and wherever that place might be, I will try to look at it and its people with an appreciative eye and a full heart.