For a long time now, I have been thinking about luck, and what it is exactly. I can tell you how long for, actually. Since the very first time a bird flew into my very first proper home. It was a wren, the bird, and it was in the central bogland of Ireland, the house. It was in the first spring we spent in that wee home, an old stone railway cottage, and it was the first spring of a global pandemic. It was the end of spring — mid May— and the sun had been stronger, brighter, than I’d ever known it before.
We had decided, only just the week before (against a plethora of odds stacked against us) to begin to properly try to get pregnant. Nests were being built all around that small dwelling, and a kind of quiet had fallen on the world that felt ancient; wild in the way of things that we had forgotten how to speak of.
There was purple clover — seamaìr— all around. It felt like the very first year I had really properly noticed it before, somehow, and I felt both grateful for my safe surroundings— and lucky. Four-leafed clovers are one of the most common good luck symbols. The story of luck behind them originated here in Ireland. The four sides of the clover represent love, luck, hope, and faith. There is more to luck than meets the eye, of course. In myriad ways our experience of lockdown was much better than that of many others’; in myriad ways it was extremely and devastatingly harder. We were both lucky and unlucky — perhaps in equal measure — but back then the lucky part was the one that stuck inside my partner and I. Is that where gratitude is born; in that space in which we balance out the things in our lives over which we have little, or no, control? It is, of course, a manner of looking. Casting our eye—outside and inside — and letting it linger a little longer in a particular place. This place on which it lingers sets our outlook, it seems. The isolation, the fear, the loneliness, the loss of those times will likely always still linger in my memory but when I gaze back there, I remember clover, and green things; birds in the house, and moths pulled towards light; when I look back there I see luck the like of which I never thought could come amidst such harrowing outer reality.
That Spring became summer— the most golden I’d ever known— and I grew things I never dared dream I’d be lucky enough to grow.
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