It was recently my late mother’s birthday. I didn’t post about it on that that day since it might become a security question some day. In any case, it was a somber day for me. It’d been raining on and off for several days straight and I was wanting a picture of her for my bulletin board. I remembered that I had inherited one of her photo albums. This was the old kind with black paper onto which you had to lick and stick corners to hold the pictures. Many of the photos had fallen out even back when she asked me to hold onto it, but there were some still there of her as a young woman. As I was looking through them, something inside the front cover caught my attention—the crumbly brown remains of three four-leaf clovers that she’d glued there.
Since this isn’t likely to be a security question, I can say that her home life wasn’t ideal. The page with the young photos of her were obviously from a day that she and my father were taking pictures of each other as young lovers. They were outside a house on a summery-looking day. Smiling and looking for a better future. Four-leaf clovers. My father was an alcoholic, and my mother knew that, but hoped that she might change him. I don’t know the dates of the photos so I’m not sure if they yet knew they’d be parents. One of the oddities of life is that about the time the questions occur to you, your parents might already be gone. I wanted to ask about that happy day. Those clover leaves. The sunshine.
Rain and gray clouds persisted. That particular day I had little human interaction, and I felt her presence with me. I’m not a minister, as she always hoped I would be. I could never find a job closer to home, as she wished time and again. I didn’t even get to see her before she died. Instead I had a photo album on my lap and rain falling. And work for the day looming. Her birthday is an engrained date in my mind. Those last years we tried to find appropriate gifts for a woman who always said, “I don’t need anything.” A few of those gifts are scattered around our house now. One that gives me hope is a vase with flowers made from colorful paper that we purchased at a craft show for her. I look at it and think of crumbled four-leaf clovers.
