Rainy Day Horses

Today - Sunday, it was a very wet day. It was so wet that there were big puddles everywhere and some ducks came and thought about making a nest in the garden. In April all the sparrows, blackbirds, wrens and robins are making nests, but when it rains, that's when the ducks come to stay.

It was good that it was raining because I had planted out some chard and some chervil and the water would help it to grow. But it wasn't good to go out in the rain because Rufus and I got very muddy very quickly and the wind made us cold. So we decided to make something indoors.

This is what we made

We made this horse from a cork that was in Brother Barnabas' collection of stoppers he uses for mead. We made four holes at the bottom and pushed in some little sticks. We made his head out of  a very thin piece of bark cut into the right shape. And we made his mane and tail out of strands of wool. Then we painted him. 

(You could make something like this using thin card and cocktail sticks cut in half.)

Then I said to Rufus, 'Shall we make up a story about the horse?' 

Rufus was half asleep but he thumped his tail on the floor to show he thought it was a good idea. First of all we needed a name for the horse, so we decided to call him Willow.

Willow lived in a field in a valley. Usually his field was full of lush green grass, but because it had been raining and raining, all the grass had gone underwater and he couldn't eat it. This made him very sad because he was hungry. He was also sad because his feet were always wet. But when Willow looked up to the high ground on either side of him, he saw that there was fresh green grass up there. So he splashed and squished and sploshed his feet until he got over to a place where the fence was a bit broken and he kicked it and kicked it with his hooves until he could get through and then he gave a great leap and climbed up on to the higher ground. And there he found there was no end of lovely green grass and not only that but there were small trees covered in tender leaves that he could eat as well. Willow stayed up on the high ground until the water his drained away from his field at the bottom of the valley and when he made his way back there, he found that the grass there tasted better than ever.

After I had told Rufus this story, the sun came out and we went into the garden and all the birds were singing because they were so happy the rain had stopped.