Luck

The sidewalk squealed beneath the wheels of my little pink bike as I skidded to a stop, hopped off, and triumphantly plucked my prize out of the grass.

“How do you do that?” my friend asked longingly, gaping at the four-leaf clover in my hands over the sparkly handlebars of her bike.

I shrugged smugly. “I guess luck just finds me.” It was true. My knack for finding four-leaf clovers had made me the most envied elementary schooler in the neighborhood.

It’s always been easy for me to find four-leaf clovers. I can walk down the street, glance at the ground, and spot one immediately without even looking for one on purpose. I’ve been known to find multiple four-, five-, six-, and even seven-leaf clovers a day, while most of my friends can’t even find one.

I found so many that by the time I was in sixth grade, I had started laminating them in tape and putting them in a journal: My Four-Leaf Clover Book. I wrote pretentious-sounding notes about them in my elevated sixth-grader vocabulary: “I believe this clover was the first I found today, because I precisely remember plucking a generous amount of stem out of the ground when I found the first clover.” “I may venture on further clover-hunts tonight, but currently it is 7:37 and almost time for dinner.” “A five-leaf clover—a rare phenomenon in the typical garden.”

The last entry in my journal contains no clover. Instead, there’s a clumsy note in smeared green ink. “you know what? when my mom got worse, i stopped finding 4-leaf clovers. it’s not so much that i miss finding them—it’s the feeling that my luck’s run out that scares me.” And that’s it. The rest of the journal is blank.

My mom was diagnosed with a brain tumor when I was in middle school. At first, she could function normally despite impaired vision and frequent headaches. But as the tumor got worse and treatment increased, she became unable to walk, talk coherently, or feed herself. We got adjustable hospital beds so that she could sit up while people fed her. I remember cleaning pee off the bathroom floor where she’d fallen and lost control of her bladder.

Those last few months were unforgiving. Hospice nurses started frequenting our house. I knew she was going to die—it was only a matter of when. I stared into the clover patch in my lawn and realized with self-pity that I hadn’t found a four-leaf clover in months, and all the luck I thought I’d had from before had worn off. Poor unlucky me.

My mom died, the hospice nurses left, and my eighth-grade world fell apart. I’d always thought things like parents dying only happened to other people or characters in books--not to me. 

It was hard. I was broken. But the world wasn’t over. And slowly but surely, I started finding four-leaf clovers again. I found six in the garden just yesterday and realized that I had never really run out of luck at all. The four-leaf clovers were there all along. I had just stopped looking.