A natural spring

From the preface of Chelsea Granger's Rills, Runnels and Rivulets:

In early spring, when the snow was granular, dirty, and patchily melted, a little licking leaf of water flickered out of the grass at the far end of the field below our elementary school, “a natural spring,” my friend called it, and while I knew she was mistaken, and that the little twisting jet was just the out-spout of some stream of melt-water led through whatever unseen system of ice lanes beneath the snow, I envied the ease and confidence with which she named this basic feature of the world and wished to be able to use such expressions, even falsely.