Open Doors

I searched my email for the keyword "door" this afternoon. I know. It seems odd, but we're having a door poster contest at school, and I wanted to review the "rules" to make sure the creation of my homeroom students was regulation, since they chose to focus on one book each with a quilt motif, instead of one for the group. As pleased as the kids were with their labor, I'd heard a little pushback from a couple of adults.

My query returned 31 results from September 2011 until yesterday, ranging in topics from albinism to wrestling to adolescent development, the main entrance to our school, and the contest in question. There were also a couple of messages from poets.org. Whenever I subscribe to their poem-a-day, there are always so many that are too good to delete, and eventually I have to unsubscribe so my mailbox won't overflow.

One of those poems I treasured was To the Thawing Wind by Robert Frost, but I had no recollection of it and so clicked on it today to refresh my memory. It started like this:

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;

Astonished, I looked up from my monitor and out the window at the rain melting the snow. How could a poem published 100 years ago be so fresh and relevant?

How could it not?

In the end, I needn't have bothered with the mail search at all– the colleague running this friendly competition complimented our poster this afternoon and shrugged off my question about qualifications with, "Yeah... They're pretty loose."– but I was glad I did.