The world was exceedingly wet. In many places there was water where usually there was something else. Although it meant getting his tail feathers uncomfortably damp, Algy could not resist perching in a clump of reeds at the edge of an impromptu lochan, so that he could study the lovely reflections of the sky in a place where normally there would only be soggy grass. He knew that soon the water – and the reflections – would be gone again.

As he sat there looking at the sky on the ground, Algy thought of his friends in northern America who had been shut indoors for weeks on end during an exceptionally cold winter, but were now on the verge of a spring thaw. He hopes that very soon Robert Frost’s well-known poem will be fulflled for you, and you will be able to get out and about in a world transformed by the coming of spring:

          Come with rain, O loud Southwester!
          Bring the singer, bring the nester;
          Give the buried flower a dream;
          Make the settled snowbank steam;
          Find the brown beneath the white;
          But whate’er you do tonight,
          Bathe my window, make it flow,
          Melt it as the ice will go;
          Melt the glass and leave the sticks
          Like a hermit’s crucifix;
          Burst into my narrow stall;
          Swing the picture on the wall;
          Run the rattling pages o’er;
          Scatter poems on the floor;
          Turn the poet out of door.

[Algy is quoting the poem To the Thawing Wind by Robert Frost.]

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