Today, I spotted this beauty on the 24 year anniversary of my mother transitioning from this world; she was always the queen of the four leaved clover, finding them, with ease, wherever she went. I never could…

Exactly 22 years ago today, I found my first ever four-leaved clover, like a nudge to the reason I was feeling melancholy that day (I had no recollection why until this thing happened to bring her, and the time of year, to mind…) and, for about the next 4 or 5 years, proceeded to find hundreds of them…fistfuls at times…like they jumped out at me on my walks. I still have so many of them, stuffed inside the pages of books; they tumble out when I move things…dry, fragile reminders (and I still have some of hers) yet the memory of her has no dryness; she only grows, somehow, more colourful, multifaceted, year-on-year.

More and more, she looks back at me when I catch my face sideways in a mirror or recall little things she did or said that are all the more powerful with the beauty of hindsight; all the many dots joined, back and forth, beyond space-time. In teaching me what she did, posthumously, I became the weaver of great webs; and those webs lead me back to my source in this life, which is her, then to my daughter, who she never met, yet she told me all about her before she left, and to far bigger patterns than any of us. Did I notice this degree of “knowingness” in her when she was here or was it lost against the wallpaper of “normality”? No matter; her passing made me sit up and pay attention to a newer landscape and different modes of communication; here was the first one.

Finding those first four-leaved “clues” was the beginning of me appreciating the little things, learning to work with synchronicities, noticing patterns in everything and coming to accept that not all meaningful communication occurs face-to-face or down a telephone wire (as it was then) nor does it have to cease. I also moved past all the fighting I once did, with my logic hands held up like boxing gloves…letting experiences in more softly, lest they be her. It was the very start of finding myself.

In leaving prematurely, she opened me up to a much bigger picture than I knew about before.

On my walk today, it was a three-leaved clover with a single dew drop balanced on its tip that first caught my eye and, right beneath it, this one, shining out; the first four-leaved one I had come across in quite…a…long…time (I don’t need to any more; I got the idea). Hello mum, thanks for everything you ever taught me, both before and after you moved on. By the way, I left this clover right where it was.