Strange Luck

All summer I found thousands of four-leaf clovers. I had been living at a firehouse since COVID-19 broke out, volunteering as a paramedic. One slow shift, my EMT partner Sam and I found a couch on a grassy hill overlooking a leveled construction site. It faced west, so we sat and watched the sun sink. All year I visited that couch—parks and cemeteries too—looking for a place to grasp what was happening in the world. There was no nearby mountaintop.

Virginia summers are generously alive, green swirling, churning, twisting over itself, seeping from the ground. Picking blackberries at night, the darkness that conceals the berries equally disguises the thorns. I froze gallons of wild berries for February—the most difficult month—when I am often overcome with an unmoving restlessness. "I wish I knew more about your hopes and dreams, and perceptions of everything around you," my mom wrote in a letter. My sister harvested parsley one lazy Saturday. "Other than the parsley," she wrote, "I don't have plans."

Under garish midday light, I visited a grave too young for a stone. The Hillsboro Cemetery is fenced and full of family names in clusters: Stone, Potts, Tribby; James, Lemon, Webb. A man alive in 1786; a baby boy born and in thirty days dead. Annie L. Camp's grave said simply her name, 1861–1932 and in the lower right corner: rest. I knelt to the grass and saw seven four-leaf clovers growing from a grave.

Like my patients, Kathy M. Hagenbuch is a stranger. She died July 15 at age fifty-three, and has a husband and teenage son. In 2017, she posted a photograph on social media of a green sign in a gray, snowy landscape that said: you are now crossing the 45th parallel, halfway between the equator and north pole. A line so important she took a picture but so invisible she needed to be told. I sat near her grave on a thin, living layer of dirt between me and the underground. I thought about many fine lines: living/healthy/death, suffocation/holding our breath. The cemetery is locked after sundown—as if we could keep out the living, as if we could keep in the dead.