Luck And The Four-Leaf Clover

One woman’s knack for finding good fortune

- Teva Harrison

WHEN I WAS in the third grade, we had a scavenger hunt at school. We gathered up chalk, pencils, stones, and poorly hidden tchotchkes, rapidly filling our checklists. It was a very close race. I was out of breath when I reached the clover patch in search of the last, most hard-to-find item: a four-leaf clover.

I was pretty sure that I was going to win. I had a trump card. The thing is, I have always been able to find four-leaf clovers. I just see them.

I spent my childhood collecting and pressing four-leaf clovers into books at my mother’s house. I started with big cloth- and leather-bound books. Joyce’s Ulysses, the complete works of Shakespeare, my great-grandmother’s copy of Les Misérables. When I ran out of romantically bound volumes, I began to slip my treasures into anything I could find: well-thumbed fiction paperbacks, cookbooks. The same is true in my house today. Shake a book, and a papery treasure just might fall into your hand.

A few years ago, in Nova Scotia, my husband and I pulled off the road for a picnic. The ground was thick with clover. Some shoots had four, five, even six leaves. I lined them up on the picnic table to admire as my husband, never yet having found one four-leaf clover, looked on with awe. To me, it was simple. The differences in their shapes popped out, breaking the pretty pattern of the conventional clovers with their three perfect leaves.