Bloom Where You Are Planted

A year or so after Annette and I got married (before we had children), my mom gave us a painted rock to put on our front porch. The rock has four frogs and the saying "Bloom Where You're Planted!" painted on it. She labeled one frog 'Annette" and another frog "`Jon".

Mom got the rock from the bed of either the Salt River or Snake River in the fall when the water was low. She cleaned the rock and handpainted it for our family.

After Mom gave us the rock, we kept it outside the front door of our apartment in Orem and Provo. When we moved to Florida, we took the rock with us and placed it outside of our apartment door there as well.

One day (about a year after we moved to Florida), we noticed that the rock was missing from outside our front door. We asked the neighbors who lived in the same building as us if they had moved the rock. (This neighbor also happened to be the manager of the apartment complex.) While they had seen the rock, they had not moved it.

We looked around our apartment building to see if someone had thrown it to the side. No Rock. We were sad to lose the painted rock gift from Mom.

About one year or so later, the manager of our apartment complex knocked on our apartment door. She had our rock in her hands. It had some scribbled crayon marks on the front but other than that, the rock was just as we remembered it.

The manager explained that the maintenance staff were cleaning out a recently vacated apartment in a different building in a different part of our complex and found the rock in the closet of the apartment. The maintenance staff brought the rock to the manager. She recognized the rock from when it had sat outside of our apartment door. And, it still had our name on it.

So, after some adventures out on its own at the hands of some of the neighborhood kids, our rock was returned to us.

By that time, Mom had passed away and we were glad to have this reminder of her artistic talent back in our possession.

We moved the rock with us to Oklahoma and subsequently to Texas. After 25+ years of sitting in the hot sun, the original paint faded on the rock and we moved it inside.

In August 2019, Annette repainted the rock and we placed it outside our front door once again.

rock painted by
Carolyn Jasperson (circa 1991)
sitting outside our home in College Station, Texas