Slow Clover

Gifts Past and Present

As soon as I brought in the mail today, I got distracted. Why? Because one of my pieces of good-old-fashioned snail mail, had a surprise in it. A four-leaf clover.

I stopped what I was doing and took a picture, because, you know, a four-leaf clover. Why wouldn’t I?

Four-leaf Clover Times Four by Laura Hansen

Next, I got to thinking about the kind of person who has an eye for finding four-leaf clovers. So, again, of course, I wrote a poem. Moments need saving in this way.

When You Get a Four-leaf Clover in the Mail
by Laura L. Hansen

You know someone somewhere
was walking with their head down
deep in thought and deep in green.

You know there was a moment their foot
could have crushed that emerald bit
of luck and moved on

but this person, your correspondent,
is the sort of person to write letters
and walk slow, to notice the incongruence

of three versus four, of an extra depth
of field, and stooped or bent 
or kneeled as if in prayer 

to gently pinch it off and lift it up,
it - this wish you now hold 
in your hand.

When you get a four-leaf clover 
in the mail, you get your friend's slow step,
the sun in their hair, their knees buckling

to the god of unexpected math,
you get the press of the heavy book
that held the clover flat until 

it was ready 
for you.

My sense of delighted distraction continued as I recalled a visit to an antique store where I had two happy coincidences take place. Antiquing is not one of my hobbies, but on a stop with a friend I found some lovely small vintage books that felt really good in my hand. (I am a tactile person.) I picked out three or four to buy and also some sepia photographs. The photographs I thought I could use as writing prompts. I picked ones where the subjects’ eyes and aspect seemed to tell a story.

When I got home, I opened my books and had two surprises. Though I had been at a shop over thirty miles north, I found that one of the books I had purchased, Select Essays and Addresses by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1928), had originally been owned by a woman named Eleanor whose address, as it was written in the cover, was not more than eight blocks from where I live now.

The second surprise was that the copy of Irving’s Sketch Book (1928), also a Macmillan Pocket Classic, had pressed four-leaf clovers scattered throughout its pages.

What a double delight!

Vintage Books, Photos, Clover

One more thing:

I can easily imagine one of my grandmothers or my friend Donna, all sadly gone now, pausing in the lawn or garden to pluck a bit of clover and looking for a suitably heavy book to preserve it in. My aunt Beatrice, a stamp collector, would definitely have been one to send a lucky clover off in the mail. And my aunt Bernice, I am sure, would have used it as a bookmark. But, the sender of today’s four-leaf clover was the owner of the Etsy shop ArtsyTreasuresForYou. (The clover had been preserved as a sticker and it came as a bonus gift with my order of pressed flower stickers.)

They are lovely, by the way.

Pressed Flower Stickers included in Party Favor Envelopes