Birthday money, half-magic moments, and (even more) lucky clovers!
When I was growing up in New Orleans, kids at school would pin a dollar to their shirts when it was their birthday (and over the course of the day, everyone they saw would add to it until they had a big ol’ fan of ones and fives pinned to their shirts).
Well, it’s my birthday today and I’m from New Orleans… but I’m not in New Orleans—so instead of pinning a dollar to my shirt, I pinned this new website to the internet!
I used to do a lot of web design for authors and publishers—I have a funny story about doing some graphic design for Jonathan Franzen . . . ask me about it next time I see you!—but I haven’t really done much of that since I started writing my own books and it’s been a while since I’ve updated my website, so this was a lot of fun!
I read an article a couple of years ago about how writing and programmers have a lot in common in terms of their creative use of different languages and grammars, and how writing and coding can activate a lot of the same parts of the brain… and that’s always been how I’ve felt about design: it’s all basically storytelling!
Anyway, I hope the site is a little easier to navigate now and that it makes school visits a lot easier to plan—I just started booking for the fall semester :)
How to Find a Four-Leaf Clover (and Other News You Can Use!)
Even more importantly: a few hours after I sent my last email, which was all about finding four-leaf clovers, I found my first five-leaf clover!
When I looked into the odds of finding a four-leaf clovers, they’re all pretty consistently in the 1 in 5,000-10,000 range… but there’s not as much consensus about the odds for finding a five-leaf clover (which are a lot rarer).
Some people say they’re 1 in 20,000.
Others say 1 in 50,000-100,000.
There are even few sources out there that say your chances of finding a five-leaf clover are one in a million. I’m not so sure about that, though, because yesterday I found twenty-two of them and I found another three today!
It was raining in the dog park when I found most of them.
I was too preoccupied to notice, though. Instead of pinning money to my shirt, my birthday tradition is to give myself yearly performance reviews and second-guess myself until I get the birthday blues… and I was halfway there before I saw the gathering clouds. It gets really muddy in the dog park so everyone else had already left at the first sign of rain, and I was rushing to join them when it started to pour.
That’s when I looked down and saw a four-leaf clover.
When I knelt to pick it, I saw another one—and another one, and another one…
When I found my first couple of four-leaf clovers in May, I put them between the pages of a book I was reading (Rachel’s old copy of Half Magic by Edward Eager).
After I started finding two to three clovers a day, I thought it would be cool to try to fill the entire book with them… so I started carrying it with me on walks and dog park visits, just in case. If I was talking with someone when I found a clover, I’d give it to them—but otherwise, I’d file it between the yellowed pages of Half Magic (which started to show some signs of wear after a couple of months getting stuffed into backpacks and pockets).
I didn’t think I’d ever actually finish.
But the other day—when a little black cloud was hovering over me in the dog park—I found so many clovers that I filled my hat with them twice, and now this copy of Half Magic has one or two lucky clovers pressed between every page!
My mom texted me while I was sitting at a picnic table beneath a wooden shelter, sorting the five-leaf clovers from the four-leaf clovers as I waited for the storm to pass. She was reminding me that it would have been my grandmother’s birthday that day.
My grandmother passed away when I was twelve or thirteen, but I still think about her all the time… and, listen, I know that four-leaf clovers are naturally-occurring mutations (and that if you find one, you’ll probably find some more in the same patch).
But the luck of a four-leaf clover isn’t in the clover itself.
I don’t really think luck is something you can hoard in the pages of a book.
There’s something special about taking the time to stop and look for it, though. In setting aside the drudgeries and to-do lists of adulthood (like birthday performance reviews—I know I’m not the only person who does that!) and making a little space for everyday magic and wonder.
And in that half-magic moment, pressing hatfuls of clovers in-between the pages of an old children’s novel on my grandmother’s birthday, I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was right there with me: smiling at my improbable pile of five-leaf clovers while lightning forked overhead and Chaely barked at the rain.
I just saw this picture posted the website of a school in Perth, Australia—where I celebrated Y2K, back when I was living in Indonesia (shout out to Jakarta Intercultural School)!—and the adventures of Storm Blown continue to amaze me. I had such a fun time in Perth and I love that a little part of me is still there . . . so if you’re a teacher or librarian at Christ Church Grammar School in Western Australia and you’re reading this: thank you for sharing my books with your students!
I have some fun news coming so you’ll probably hear from me again soon—I mostly just wanted to share my new website today—but until then, I hope you’re staying cool and finding lots of four-leaf clovers!
Your friend,
P.S. Twitter might be gone and forgotten, but I went ahead and archived our first year of Little Free Library Updates on the new site. If you’ve ever thought about building one yourself, I say go for it (also on the site: build instructions)!
