My four-year-old, Elsa, runs through the garden, observing everything and nothing like all children do, filtering out the most glaring details and settling on the most obscure. She plays, she pretends, she laughs, she chases the dog. And then she bends down. She focuses on the ground, the quivering green carpet. She bends down, her hair tumbling around her face, and picks one clover from this homogenous green blob. She runs to the house, excited but not surprised.
"Mommy, can you put this in some water?"
It's a five-leaf clover. Five.
Then she's gone. Already there is something else. To me: a miracle. To her: a thing-to-be-noticed, like a crocus in bloom, or a hawk resting on a hay bale. Beautiful and obvious. What else am I not seeing?
When we were younger, Eric brought me four-leaf clovers all the time; figuring out what to do with them all became a kind of sentimental burden. For a while I pressed them into the pages of books, and they would fall crumbling onto the floor when I turned over the pages months or years later. Once he presented me with a sheet of wax paper into which he had pressed fully twenty.
Today I see him walking up the sidewalk after work, and he'll slow down, bend over, grab a clover, and keep walking. He'll hand it to me as he walks in the door.
"You might want to put that in some water."
The world spins. Icons stream fragrant myrrh. A seed goes about the miraculous business of turning sunlight and water into the giant, mysterious thing we call a tree. I turn a page in the night, and down come the magic clovers, dry and brittle to the ground, a reminder that all good things come and pass and come again, and again. We just have to see them.
