Crimson Clover By: Daniel “Pendragon" © 2007 Chapter 1: Introductions Hi there… my name’s Daniel McLeod. Heh… no, not Daniel as in Dan… Dan-iel. As in Dani. I’m a girl… Anyways, you’re here to hear about my story, but to tell that story, we need to cover a little bit about my past, and for that matter, we need to cover a little bit about my lineage. Nearly a century ago, a potato famine in Ireland caused thousands of immigrants to move over the great Atlantic between Ireland and New York. This created a situation where there were more Irishmen and women in the city of New York than there were on the actual island of Ireland. During the great push west that began at approximately the same time as the great immigrations, a great deal of those Irishmen and women and their families moved to where they could work, functioning as lumberjacks, teamsters, seamstresses, cooks, and of course… farmers. After the State of Minnesota was successfully logged to the point where it was nothing but endless plains, all its pines clear cut and made into fertile farmland, a great deal of these Irish and Irish descendants settled the land as farmsteads and became the second largest ethnic concentration here short of those who were of Swedish decent. After a few generations, as Minnesota became more and more heavily populated thanks to the Iron Range, Fort Snelling and the Mississippi, with a central city of the combined Minneapolis and Saint Paul urban and sub-urban areas that were over a hundred miles across, the Irish steadily settled into more main stream jobs, while at the same time filtered their blood and heritage down through the lines till a great many Minnesotans can claim that they are at least a quarter Irish. Me, I’m about three-quarters Irish, or at least that’s what my mom told me. I have a grandmother who’s fully Irish still, but thanks to such a concentration of Irish descendants, I’d been born so Irish that I had red hair and green eyes, but I was English enough – as my grandmother called me – that I didn’t have the full- bodied freckles like she did. Essentially, what all this means is that I’m short, strong-boned, tough-skinned, red-headed and green-eyed young woman, with pert little boobs and barely any hips to be noticed due to my size. I was only five and a half feet tall, but that at least is an improvement on what my grandmother boasts, she being less than five feet tall. You just watch out when you upset her and she’s been cooking… that ladle comes out of nowhere! But nonetheless, she makes the best beef stew and corned beef and cabbage, and she can make a mean horseradish sauce that could put hair on anyone’s chest… even if they’re a woman. You must see me talking about my grandmother a lot… wondering why I’m speaking of her instead of my parents. That’s because I don’t know my parents. They both died in a car wreck a long time ago. Mom was pregnant with me at the time, and the doctors were able to save me, but not them. Dad died instantly; mom much later of internal bleeding that came about from the crash that killed them, and from internal hemorrhaging from having me. But that’s the past, and there's not much use dwelling on it. I do have pictures of them at least, so I’m happy… and Gran has been like a mother and father in one hardy little woman who looked like she gave birth to my mom while working in the potato fields in Ireland. She was an energetic little ball of energy that carried a Shillelagh instead of a cane. Being that she was so Irish, we had an Irish household, where the principal decorations were red and green, and when other kids are being regaled for bed time stories from mother goose, I was receiving bed time stories from Irish, Welsh and Gaelic Bards. Honestly… Bard stories are a lot cooler than Mother Goose anyways, because they were of heroes and heroines against great and mighty threats like dragons and invading Viking hordes. But there was one series of stories Gran told me that I always loved and asked for as a child, and those were the tales of a woman named "Crimson Clover." She was a woman like unto Sir William Wallace of the Welsh, and Gran made tale of her, dressed all in red, as tall as a giant, with breasts like mountains, and stronger than a thousand men! She fended off Ireland thanks to her Shillelagh and her own sheer strength and powers that were easily equal to those of the Fae; those mystical God-like Fairie folk of old stories like Shakespeare's "A Midsummer's Night's Dream." and the like. In comparison to her, Super Man was a sissy… Chapter 2: Crimson Clover I was rather independent for a nineteen-year-old; I thank my Gran for that. She made sure I was brought up just like her, which meant that I could cook and sew my own clothes and act like a lady should, but it also meant that I didn’t have to rely on a man for anything. I fixed my own car when I was able to, changed its oil and tires… I even changed a water pump and an alternator on it once. Not bad for a two-door blue hatch-back with a brown door with no heater or air conditioning that cost two hundred dollars, but at least it gets me from place to place. One of those places is near to where my mom and dad got in their untimely accident that robbed me of their presence in my life. Gran brought me here once a summer, but now that I was old enough to drive and I had my own car, I came here on my own from time to time. It was the only place on Highway Fifty-Two - a highway that ran between Saint Paul and Rochester - on the north bound side of the road where you would find a strangely growing fact. In fact, I'd wager that it was the only place in all of Minnesota that this plant grew wild... The name of that plant was the 'Crimson Clover.' It wasn’t hard to miss, with the big green leaves and the bright red tassels of flowers that grew on the end of them surrounding an ornate knee-high stone cross set in the ground baring the names and the dates of birth and death of both my mother and father. The DNR would probably be upset at Gran for planting a non-native European plant in the wild of Minnesota, but if she went to jail over it, I’d gladly go with her. Besides, the Crimson Clover didn’t grow anywhere else but around that cross. Pulling over to the side of the road, after doing a U-turn at the first available place that I could from coming from Saint Paul, which was about a mile south of it, I exited the vehicle wearing nothing but a pair of moccasins, ankle-length socks, a set of jeans that accented what feminine wiles I did have, and a simple white shirt. I didn’t wear a bra… I didn’t have a reason to with these little boobs I had… but boy did I have big nips, and when they erected, like they were now, then it drew the attention I wanted now and then with boys. Sadly, I was still a virgin, and I’d yet to have a boy between my legs despite how much I wanted to have sex at the moment, I just never thought that any of the young men I met were worthy enough to take my virginity from me. Coming to stand before the car with my long fingers sticking in my front pockets with the thumbs hooking on the outside, I looked down at the cross and the flowers. Not able to think of anything to say, I just stared at the epitaphs and their names. People might wonder why a lone girl like me might want at the side of the road, some might honk, some might even pull over, but when they saw what I was doing, they never really said anything and just quietly left. Every time I came here, I always brought a gift for them, and this time, after standing there for awhile, I took it out of my pocket, and placed it around the top spoke of the cross, leaving my first silver cross and its rosary of beads around it. “See ya later, mom and dad.” I said quietly, and bent like my grandmother showed me to do and kissed the top of the cross like I was kissing a Blarney Stone. After standing, I looked at the stone cross that marked the place of the accident and was on my way to my car when I heard something that I’d never heard there before. “Faith n’ begora!” I stopped dead in my tracks as I heard an Irish accent say that, and turning around on my heel, I had to blink and shake my head as I saw a little man, about twelve inches tall and dressed all in green except for a pair of brown shoes and a white shirt, hop from within the clover around the cross and sit on top of the stone cross before putting a pipe in his mouth.