"Recipes for Four-Leaf Clovers", by James

When I made my plans to venture out of Copenhagen to take in the Danish countryside, I thought that I would spend my time exploring forests or riding horses. But as luck would have it I had caught a bit of a cold before leaving the city, and so my energy was low and I didn't want to do anything except sit and relax in the sunshine. The little cottage had a small, untidy garden. There were more weeds growing within it than planned plants, but in the Scandinavian springtime no living thing is ugly, and I was content to sit and drink in the sun alongside this emerging patch of life.

I wasn't looking for luck. That’s strange for me, really; usually I remember to keep my eyes open for some trifle, some silly small excuse to feel lucky. But at this moment I was enraptured by the feeling of the sun and breeze upon my bare arms, the sound of the birds in the nearby forest, the faint smell of roses in my one unclogged nostril. It was only a coincidence that my eyes fell to rest on a place that had something special to show me. Could it really be …? I bent close to investigate. Yes! Yes it is! It was a clover with four leaves.

I had never seen one before. Really I had always thought they were something made up, a piece of mythology, or perhaps an excuse for lovers to lie down side-by-side in a field. But here I held one in my fingers. I sat for a moment and stared at it in wonder. Three of the leaves were strong and broad; they held the classical heart-shape that one associates with clover leaves. The fourth was smaller, asymmetrical, slightly withered, as if it had hesitated before finally deciding to grow. But there were four leaves, unmistakably, and I felt like the crowned Queen of Luck.

I got up from my garden seat and took my treasure inside to the kitchen. There I heated some water and stirred in my charm along with a bit of honey and ginger, hoping this infusion would ease my cold. Then I went back into the garden sunshine to drink my tea.

I thought a bit about good luck charms and how they might work. I've found face-up pennies before, but I don’t remember any bringing me extraordinary luck. Face-up pennies are perhaps the most common of good-luck tokens, though, so maybe they don´t have such great power. I've seen plenty of horseshoes but I've never found one, and it is the finding of it that makes it lucky, I've been told. But a four-leaf clover … that must be something exceedingly rare. I wondered briefly if I had squandered my chance to win the lottery.

Maybe there are some rules for how a four-leaf clover should be handled in order to harvest as much luck from it as possible. Maybe eating the clover is less effective than, say, tucking it into one’s hat band or pressing it between the pages of one’s diary. But I've never read any instructions for a situation like this. I figured I was still carrying the clover with me, albeit inside of me, so I hitched a ride into town and went to a convenience store where lottery tickets were sold. I bought a scratcher and scratched it. And I won. As simple as that. I won twenty krone, which is about five bucks. I thought of buying another ticket so I could win some more, but I've heard that when one has luck one should not push it, so I just walked back toward the cottage, whistling to myself.

Along the way home I was thinking about what it means to be lucky. I knew that my winning lottery ticket was nothing momentous, and that someone might say that winning such a small amount was not luck, yet it still felt special to have experienced this and the four-leaf clover discovery alongside each other. I knew also that someone might say my win had nothing to do with the clover. But it seemed to me that the clover did make me lucky - by reminding me to be lucky. I wouldn't have tried the lottery without it. I wouldn't have found the lucky clover in the first place if I hadn't had a cold, and my countryside activities hadn't been derailed, so the cold was lucky too. But I began to wonder: was I lucky because I found the four-leaf clover, or did I find the four-leaf clover because I was already lucky? I thought that maybe being lucky and finding a symbol of luck caused each other at the same time, chicken-and-egg style.

I figured that if that were true then I’d be all the more likely to find another token of luck if I looked for one at that moment. So when I returned to the cottage I went back to the garden spot where I was sitting earlier. My eyes easily returned to the patch of grass where I found my four-leaf clover. It took only a moment of scanning the ground to find another one. Soon after that I found another one, and then another. It wasn't long before I had a tiny bouquet of clovers with four leaves pinched between my fingers.

My reaction to this bounty of four-leaf clovers was mixed. At first I was confused and I doubted that my eyes were telling the truth. Could all of them really have four leaves? I counted again, looking at each one carefully. Yes, there was no mistake. Then it occurred to me that they could have been planted there purposely, or that maybe some weird chemical had been dumped out in this spot, causing the things that grew here to mutate. I looked at the small plants in my hand and wondered if there was anything special about them at all.

A moment later I was back to smiling. Of course finding these little plants was something special! It was a beautiful and unexpected discovery; it colored my day and made me feel extraordinary; it gave me something curious to tell a story about and equally it gave me something wonderful to keep a secret; it carried with it an element of mystery; it was something I had wanted to experience since I was a little girl. For these reason I was lucky – there can be no question.

I’m lucky very often. By that I mean that very often I have moments of awareness of the abundance of beauty and kindness and health and security and enormous potential present throughout my life. Of course I also experience moments when I am more aware of ugliness, hatred, disease, fear, and limitation. But I choose to focus on what brings me up rather than what brings me down, and that makes me feel good. My word for that good feeling is lucky.

A glance at the clock pulled me back to reality. I had to get my things together and return to Copenhagen. I had an invitation for a dinner party that evening. I was assigned to bring a green salad and I still had to buy the ingredients and put it together. Buying fresh veggies in the early spring in a Nordic country is a bit of a splurge - just a head of lettuce costs over five dollars.

I didn't know what to do with the four leaf clovers in my hand. Before they even had a chance to wilt I had changed my ideas about what constitutes luck. They were no longer magical, although they remained something significant. I couldn't just throw them away, and yet I couldn't justify treating them as something exalted.

In the end I threw the four-leaf clovers into the salad. I figured it was a cheap way to beef it up a bit. Plus there was a cold going around; I figured everyone could use the extra luck.