There is a reason why I close my eyes, inhale slowly, and sigh whenever I’m in a field of clover. There’s a reason why I allow it to grow unhindered in my lawn, and why I still impulsively pick and sniff the first blooms without even thinking about it.

I am adopted. It was never a conscious trauma, as I was brought home by my wonderful forever-family at three weeks of age. But there is something in the human psyche that seeks the security and peace of belonging, and to an infant carried away from its mother at birth, the lifelong quest is more poignant, I believe.

Every relationship I formed in my first few years of life was made in the context of this search. Within the love of my great-grandparents, grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and neighbors I found complete and immovable security. And all around me during those most formative of years, grew the common white clover.

It grew along the street in front of our row house. It grew in the park along the river across the road. It grew in my Grandmom’s back yard, on my uncle’s baseball field, among my Nanny’s roses, around my Pop-pop’s vegetable garden, and the minister’s award-winning dahlia bed. Everyone whose love surrounded me in earliest childhood seems linked somehow to vague memories of clover.

The clover was simply there; always, everywhere; like a promise, a poem, and a prayer.

When I toddled down the front walk with my hand held tightly in my Nanny’s, the flower she helped me stoop to pick for my Mommy was a clover blossom. When my mother filled the plastic pool on the front walk, plopped me into it, and sat in a chair beside it with her feet inside, the scent of mown clover hung heavy in the summertime heat. When my Grandpop let me explore while he mowed his ‘postage stamp’ inner city yard with an antique, manual push-mower, bits of mown clover stuck to my little red tennis shoes. When my father scooped me up and took me across the street to swing in the park, the white blooms were everywhere, as far as I could see from the vantage point of my Daddy’s shoulders and my perch on the swing [“Higher, Daddy! Higher!”]. Family picnics, feeding the ducks, hide-and-seek with my cousins around Grandmom’s sheets billowing on the line – all of life’s best gifts involved clover underfoot.

But children grow up, loved ones move on, life becomes more complicated, and relationships more fraught. I’ve lived many places, loved many folks, and learned the hard way that not everyone is worthy of the trust I learned to give as I toddled through the clover as a child. My heart has been broken, my security removed time and again, my love rejected, my trust broken, my hopes dashed, my dreams postponed.

Through everything, there has always been the clover.

Every spring, no matter where I’ve lived, no matter what the circumstances, the sight and scent of common white clover has brought happy tears of hope, belonging, peace, and contentment to my eyes. My senses return me to memories as fresh as yesterday’s, and remind me that I am worthy, valuable, cared for, wanted, and upheld by the hopes, care, and prayer of those who have loved me dearest and best.

Right now, in this moment, I have the gift of a life that is more-or-less stable. I have a place, a peace, and a contented sense of belonging exactly where I am. And as I prepare my urban garden for another growing season, I find myself breathing deeply, sighing audibly, and anticipating the return of the scent that speaks to my deepest soul – the blooming clover.