How would you interpret this phrase “even a feather duster will lay an egg in April”? That was in April, a year and some past the hearing. A Monday or Thursday, for those were the afternoons I still came. A joyful month if there ever was one, you’d think. Even a feather duster will lay an egg in April. But such generous feeling had gone from the land. No real work remained for me at Mr. Shepherd’s after the hearing, and I’d commenced looking for another income, disliking to be any burden. I was floored to find the city wouldn’t hire me. Not at the clerk’s office, though I’d once kept that whole place afloat. Not at the library where I’d volunteered. I can’t be a government employee due to previous association with the wrong element, they told me, it is all in print, and nothing to be done about it. It was the same at the Teachers College. After some months of asking, a hateful thing in itself, an acquaintance from the Woman’s Club consented to recommend me as a bookkeeper at Raye’s Department Store.How would you interpret this phrase “even a feather duster will lay an egg in April”? Can I understand it literally? Is it some quote from some book, e.g. the Bible, one of the works by Shakespeare, etc.? Or is it an idiom? Thanks. And this excerpt is taken from The Lacuna by Kingsolver.