Fourth Leaf Luck

June 16, 2013

This happened yesterday, but I'd already written a post, so I saved it for today. It's raining today, so even luckier that yesterday had an adventure in it.

The old wood path is disappearing.

Brambles gain impressive ground and girth. The ferns are most prolific and big enough to eat me up.

Smugly, all my skin is covered. Once or twice I must stop to get my ankles back, but I walk the path bold enough.

Bluebells in ebb; foxgloves and campions surge. There's a clover flood in progress. I never had much patience for searching out the four-leaved lucky stem.

'I don't need your fourth leaf,' I say, 'just a bit of fourth leaf luck please!'

All through the woods, past the troll caves, the trees all mossed, down through the leaf mulch, me and Dog: at ease. At the path junction, a decision: we will go to the river before striking homeward. At the river, meet the retired farmer and his retired farm dog, and they are on their way back from a different route. We haven't met in a while and stop to chat: always we talk of this place, and our dogs, and the weather. His dog likes the river; he points down the different route; just along, where the bank is a gentle slope, near the island. The wind is loud he has to shout. He saw a salmon leap there once, he says, then is off home for lunchtime.

An island, he said.

I am over the gate; running through grasses, eyeing all the slipways to the river, finding ladders and rocks, and then, a gentle slope.

The island is tiny, curved and spiky. I laugh, call it a hedgehog. There'll be no pirate treasure there my hearties, but I swear on the fourth leaf of a lucky clover: there is a dragon in the water.

The wind drops, maybe in shock, and the sun beats like a heart.