In 1995 i went to the Goodwill to scout for bargains. I found a 1935 gospel song book with a dramatic art deco cover to send to Garrison Keillor as a gift, and as i was paying the 25 cent price for this little gem, the clerk, a big, blowsy blonde in her late 30s, noticed the four-leaf clover in my open wallet, in the plastic-covered window where people who drive display their driver's licences.
"Oh, wow!" she gushed. "Look at that! Is that real?"
I smiled and told her that it was.
That's when i realized that for folks who live in town, four-leaf clovers are a real rarity, rare beyond what they are for the rest of us. I have a couple of patches on my "lawn" (well, it's a green area, so i call it a lawn) where four-leaf clovers occur with much higher frequency than elsewhere. It's gotta be a genetic variation, like multi-toed cats and six-fingered humans.
When little kids visit, they like to search for four-leaf clovers. A few grown-ups do too. They've got to have sharp eyes to find them. Sharper than mine, anyway. Personally, i have only found one four-leaf clover on this property, and one a long time ago, in Santa Monica, when i was about eight years old. Sometimes the kids find so many four-leaf clovers on my place that they give me one or two. I press them in books and carry them around with me until they wear out. The one in my wallet was found and presented to me by a visiting friend. Second hand luck.
The four-leaf clover is among the commonest of North American lucky emblems and is an especially frequent image on good luck coins, and good luck postcards. Here are some other LUCKY W pages on which four-leaf clovers appear.
Do you carry four-leaf clovers or press them in books? If so, why? Do you attribute any specific type of luckiness (like health, money, or love) to them?
Do you remember when four-leaf clovers used to be encased in plastic and sold as key chain fobs? I haven't seen one of those in years. In 1996, i bought this laminated four-leaf clover wallet card at an occult supply store called Anicent Ways, but what with the badly kerned Souvenir type font and the clash between the actual clover-leaf and the artwork, it doesn't do too much for me. The clover is a lot smaller than the ones growing on my lawn, too.
Where do all the four-leaf clovers used in commerce come from, anyway? Does someone grow big patches of the mutant plants in Iowa, selecting and improving the strain until every branch bears a four-leaf sport? Or are the plants now being cloned from one venerable mother-plant in Florida whose root-crown is carefully divided every few years to increase the stock?
Did the same company that made four-leaf clover key chain fobs also make those mustard seed key chain fobs for Christians? Are mustard seed key chain fobs still manufactured? Do Christians still carry them? Do they do so for luck...or for religion?
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OTHER SITES OF INTEREST
Yronwode Family:
www.yronwode.com, the home page for the Yronwode family
Garden of Joy Blues:
www.gardenofjoyblues.com, former hippie commune in the Missouri Ozarks
Satan Service:
www.satanservice.org, theory, practice, and history of Satanism and Satanists