The Journal

Once you know what a cinquefoil looks like, you start seeing it everywhere. It's in the stone tracery above a church door. It's punched into the tin of an old pie safe. It's stitched into the corner of a sampler, cast into an iron gate, painted on a barn, pressed into the cover of a nineteenth-century hymnal. Five rounded petals, evenly spaced, meeting at a center. Once your eye learns the shape, it stops being background. You begin to wonder who put it there, and why so many