The Leprechaun's Clovers
THE LEPRECHAUN’S CLOVERS
As you already know, four leaf clovers are incredibly lucky. If you find one, your chances double that all your honest wishes will come true. But more importantly, if you pick your four leaf clover and keep it safe, it can practically guarantee finding love.
Once upon a time, in the magical land of Magicalena, on the Emerald Isle where the Leprechaun lived, four leaf clovers were common. Because of that, it was a time of great luck and an abundance of love.
There are many kinds of love. The love of family. The love of friends. The love of neighbors and country, flowers blooming, and butterflies dancing in the summer wind. There's the love of animals that live in our homes, or nourish the soil, or sing the songs that compose the seasons.
But the best love of all is kissing a sweetheart. Whether it's the first time, when you can feel your heartbeat and you can't catch your breath, or when you've grown wise in age and lean into the sunset together, sharing the whisper of lips. The love between two people of singular honesty is sacrosanct. For that kind of love, a four leaf clover is an absolute necessity. In the Emerald Isle, it was everywhere.
The Emerald Isle was an isolated place with the Siren Sea on its easter border and the Halcyon Ocean to the west. As such, the flora and fauna also evolved in isolation and had become unique to the island. Giant elk, with antlers that never shed so that the old stags carried massive chandeliers on their heads, roamed the verdant hills. Sea tortoises as big as houses and as old as stories bobbed in the coastal waters, so patient that they grew plants and trees on their shells. The forests were mostly Bassoon Oaks and Spriteberry trees. The former wrote melodies with the wind in the bass and tenor range on the blooming clef, and the latter is a cousin of the Hackberry, producing a delicious fruit in its crown for many birds, little mammals, and winged faeries. Together, their canopy was so dense that very little grew on the forest floor except the colorful fruiting bodies of the mycelial web. Most of the island, however, was rolling hills of low growing fescue grasses, flowers of mostly purple and blue blossoms, and - of course - fields of four leaf clovers.
Amongst the many intelligent creatures on the island, the ones that talked in alphabets picked the clovers anytime they wanted a kiss. And because kissing is so great and the four leaf clovers so common, everyone was kissing everyone all the time. This was not a problem. There was plenty of love to go around.
The inhabitants of the Emerald Isle rarely traveled far, and almost never across the open water to the rest of Magicalena, with the exception of the Leprechaun. He was magical, practically immortal, and super fun to be around, so he had friends all over. Plus, his brother/shadow's doppelganger Roy G. Biv, superimposed into the Color Spectrum Sprite, had taught him how to ride rainbows around.
One morning after a gentle rain, the Leprechaun decided to visit one of his father's chimeras and play word games and answer riddles. He caught a rainbow over the sea to the Jagged Tooth Pass in the High Hara Mountains where the chimera dwelt and preyed upon wary travelers.
The chimera jumped out to surprise the Leprechaun with a riddle, hoping to eat him if he couldn't answer. "What is the end of everything?" asked the chimera without preamble.
This was a tough one. The Leprechaun had heard lots of legends. Was it Ragnarok or Armageddon? Or was it a trick? Riddles often hide the answer in the question.
"Oh!" said the Leprechaun as he thought of the answer. "It's the letter 'G'!"
"Nicely done," said the chimera, lazily nodding its giant lion head and hissing from its snake tail. "How about another one?"
"Definitely!" replied the Leprechaun.
"Two in a corner, one in a room, zero in a house, but one in a shelter. What am I?" asked the chimera, licking its chops because it was hungry.
"Hmmm," thought the Leprechaun. It took him a minute, but he was as clever as they come. "The letter 'R'!"
"Ha, ha, ha," laughed the Leprechaun, "you silly old beast, two letter riddles in a row!"
"One letter," said the chimera sardonically, bitter because he wasn't going to get to eat the Leprechaun this time.
"Since your mind is in the alphabet today, let's play Scrabble!" said the Leprechaun.
They did, and the Leprechaun won that too, hitting four of the triple word scores for a dominant performance.
The chimera was a little sad because of its rumbly tummy, but it had a pretty good time all things considered. The Leprechaun said goodbye and went on his merry way.
He figured he'd stop by the old Hook In the Eye Inn for a fisherman's pie before hopping over the sea for home. He wasn't in a hurry.
Because he wasn't in a hurry, and because he was in a particularly good mood - even for the Leprechaun - he started whistling a tune, which made him even happier. Feeling wonderful from the top of his crown to where his feet pushed at the ground, he wanted to share his joy with someone special and do some kissing. He skipped through the meadows on his way to the sea, picking mainland flowers and tucking them into his pocket universe beside his treasure hoard. After finding a full bouquet of appreciation, he had only to find the last and most necessary thing - a four leaf clover.
Near the coast, he came across a whole field of clovers. He bent to pick one, but upon closer inspection, it only had three leaves. "Poor clover lost a leaf," he thought to himself. He picked another, but it also had only three leaves. This was certainly strange. Must be a freak mutation or poor nitrogen in the soil or something. He took a couple steps and picked more. Three leaves on all of them! Darting around, he discovered that the whole field was three leaf clovers! Flummoxed, but intrigued, the Leprechaun decided to bring some plants home and share the odd discovery with his friends.
He was so excited that he skipped dinner - which you should never do - went home, and planted the clovers in his garden during an auspicious full moon.
Over the course of some years, the three leaf clovers escaped from the Leprechaun's garden and formed their own field. Eventually, they ran into a field of four leaf clovers. The four leaf clovers didn't think anything of it - if they ever thought at all - and the bees pollinated both of the species' flowers together. Due to the science of genetic drift and the dominant three petal gene - even though four is more and clearly superior at luck, love, and photosynthesis - four leaf clovers began to disappear.
(As an aside, this is exactly why you have to be very careful about introducing exotic biologicals to an environment. Both buckthorn and Japanese knotweed were introduced in America as garden plants, but now dominate the forest undergrowth and river banks respectively. The South American cane toad was introduced to Australia to eat the cane grubs devastating that continent's sugarcane crops, but they don't eat cane grubs and have instead, inadvertently, threatened the extinction of many local predators. Burdock was cultivated as a root crop in China and now invades the hedgerows where playful children get the plant's burrs so tangled in their long hair that they're forced to get silly hairstyles. I could go on and on. We have a really bad track record when it comes to this stuff, so be very, very careful.)
In the Emerald Isle, there was suddenly a shortage of luck, love, and kissing. However, the world likes to find a homeostatic silver lining.
Four leaf clovers didn't disappear entirely. Because of their recessive gene, they just show up less often, one in 5,000. As a result, love became even more special. And while it may be true that people kiss less than they used to, each kiss carries with it a field of four leaf clovers from once upon a time...