'Sign from the heavens': After mom's death, B.C. woman discovers 313 four-leaf clovers in backyard

LANGFORD, B.C. -

Julie Barr will never forget that day she was working in her backyard and found her first four-leaf clover.

“This is great!” Julie recalls thinking. “Then I found another one, and then another one.”

Julie was surprised. She hadn’t felt lucky for a long time.

Her mom, Carolyn, had spent the past five years succumbing to ALS.

“It was devastating,” Julie says. “It got to the point where she could only move her head, and used an eye recognition computer to communicate with us.”

Yet Carolyn strived to be positive, posing for her granddaughter’s joyful Snapchat photo filters and promising Julie she’d find a way to keep communicating after she passed away.

But that didn’t make the inevitable any less horrible.

“It was like an empty void,” Julie recalls of life after her mom’s death. “Something is missing.”

Until that day Julie kept finding those four-leaf clovers.

She decided to stop mowing over the clover patch and start cutting the lawn around it.

“I was going to see what happens,” Julie says.

As the circle of clover expanded, the quantity of four-leafed stems Julie discovered increased.

“I have now found 313 four-leaf clovers,” Julie smiles, before showing how she’s preserving each one by pressing them between the pages of books.

After filling dozens of pages with hundreds of four-leaf clovers from that one plant in her backyard over the past three years, Julie is feeling like this is more than luck.

“I’m just overjoyed (and) happy!” Julie says. “I know it‘s her. I know it’s from (my mom).”

Not only did her mom always carry around a keychain featuring a four-leaf clover, Julie found a similar clover patch growing on her mom’s grave after her celebration life.

“It’s a sign from the heavens,” Julie smiles.

That’s why Julie vowed to keep mowing around the plant no matter how big it grew, and placed a pair of chairs in her mom’s favourite colour of blue beside it.

“I like to think she’s sitting there in the other chair beside me,” Julie says. “And we’re looking for clover together.”

While some say luck is what you make it, Julie has found that if we keep our eyes open to the positive possibilities that surround us, grieving and eventually healing is, too.