Rain

Baby Bertie in the rain, 2011

 

The rain is raining all around,

It falls on field and tree,

It rains on the umbrellas here,

And on the ships at sea.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 – 1894)

It has rained excessively, bringing misery and chaos to travel and business. So many areas have been severely flooded and many people face a difficult beginning to a new year.

It is dreary, on a dull, rainy day, to put away the bright ornaments of Christmas.  Were the sun to shine, the task would feel less glum as the angels, the glass baubles, the silver bells, the ropes of red beads are packed away. My pretty tree has stood for a month or more, but now it must be undressed and stored until needed once again, many months from now. The strings of lights which have shone so gaily, giving colour on cold, dark mornings are now extinguished. They were a source of pleasure and hope during Christmas week as we succumbed to Covid, a feast for the eyes even as we lacked appetite for food.

Now we look forward as the days lengthen, new ventures beckoning to cheer our jaded souls and prove, once more, that the earth keeps spinning, that life goes on. The pyracantha berries are all gone, thousands of them, stripped by hungry birds, and already and for some time, spring shoots reach up to the sky. Nothing deters these fragile plants. They may be battered by rain and wind, frozen with frost and snow, but they survive, brave harbingers of Spring.

Among the trees, the blue tits dash from branch to branch, stopping to pick small insects from the undersides of leaves and crevices in the bark, joined by others of their kin, the great tits and the coal tits. A small flock of long-tailed tits darts here and there and blackbirds and robins, dunnocks and elusive wrens make their preparations for nesting and breeding.

As Percy Bysshe Shelley expressed it, in the last line of the last stanza of ‘Ode to the West Wind’, ‘If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’