Folklorists Donât Need Weatherman
Forget predictions of a mild winter by the National Weather Service and The Old Farmerâs Almanac.
Irene Thomas has stocked up on firewood because the telltale signs sheâs been watching for most of her 84 years indicate this winter will be a doozy.
The only woolly worm sheâs seen was black as night. The squirrels are bustling about her yard at a frenetic pace. And the first snow of the season came on Oct. 22.
âIf youâll keep track of your first snow of the year and what day that falls on, then thatâs how many snows youâre going to have,â Thomas explains.
âIt was the 22nd this winter. It doesnât look very good.â
Fellow folklorist Mary Scott Hair of Hurley agrees. The work of spiders also tells her to bundle up for this winter.
âThe cobwebs--theyâre tough as I donât know what,â says Hair, who turns 94 this month. âAnd we had them early.â
Another popular indicator of the upcoming winter is the inside of a persimmon pit.
Folklore has it that if the center of the pit is shaped like a knife, there will be biting cold. If itâs a fork, there will be little snow.
âIf you find a spoon or a spade, that means youâll have a lot of snow to shovel,â Thomas says.
Hair says friends brought her a couple of persimmon pits, but before opening them she knew what to expect.
âThey had opened the seed and found a spoon in it,â she says. âIâm sure there is.â
There are dozens of other folkloric indicators of the weather. For example, the thickness of corn husks or the thickness of animalsâ coats.
âYou know your animals shed during the summer. And then they begin to put on coats for the winter,â Thomas says. âIf theyâre going to have extra-heavy coats on, thatâs an indication itâs going to be a worse winter than usual.â
The most popular indicator is probably the woolly worm, whose color and coat supposedly indicate the severity of the coming season. The darker and thicker, the worse the winter.
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Neither Hair nor Thomas could remember when or where they first heard the folkloric weather tales.
âI just picked it up,â Hair says. âMy parents didnât pay any attention to it.â
âItâs just something that you hear,â Thomas says. âA lot of that is superstition and old wivesâ tales and that sort of thing.â
But it is cause for discussion.
After a local radio station interviewed Thomas recently on her amateur forecasting skills, her telephone rang off the hook.
âOne of my friends called up and said, âHey, I want to know what itâs going to do for the rest of the week.â I said, âSorry, as you know, Iâm not a weatherman.â â
Meteorologists enjoy a good-natured laugh at the folklore.
David Gaede, the science and operations officer with the National Weather Service, says the outlook for Missouri in January, February and March is for temperatures slightly above normal with normal rainfall. Those long-range predictions are made by the Climate Diagnostic Center of the National Weather Service.
âFolklore in general, Iâd say it probably doesnât have any accuracy,â he says.
And according to the Internet web site of The Old Farmerâs Almanac, the Central Great Plains region can expect a mild winter:
âTemperatures during the period from November through March are expected to average a bit above normal, especially in the central part of the region in February,â the almanac predicts.
Humbug, says Hair.
âI donât think [meteorologists] are more accurate than your folklore, whatever it is--persimmon seeds or walnut hulls or whatever.â
Thomas was less convinced of their accuracy, so in the end she goes with her feelings.
âWe have had so many nice winters, that itâs about time we had a bad one,â she says. âItâs kind of due, seems to me.â
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