Folklorists Don’t Need Weatherman

Forget predictions of a mild winter by the National Weather Service and The Old Farmer’s Almanac.

Irene Thomas has stocked up on firewood because the telltale signs she’s been watching for most of her 84 years indicate this winter will be a doozy.

The only woolly worm she’s 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.

“If you’ll keep track of your first snow of the year and what day that falls on, then that’s how many snows you’re going to have,” Thomas explains.

“It was the 22nd this winter. It doesn’t look very good.”

Fellow folklorist Mary Scott Hair of Hurley agrees. The work of spiders also tells her to bundle up for this winter.

“The cobwebs--they’re tough as I don’t know what,” says Hair, who turns 94 this month. “And we had them early.”

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 it’s a fork, there will be little snow.

“If you find a spoon or a spade, that means you’ll have a lot of snow to shovel,” Thomas says.

Hair says friends brought her a couple of persimmon pits, but before opening them she knew what to expect.

“They had opened the seed and found a spoon in it,” she says. “I’m sure there is.”

There are dozens of other folkloric indicators of the weather. For example, the thickness of corn husks or the thickness of animals’ coats.

“You know your animals shed during the summer. And then they begin to put on coats for the winter,” Thomas says. “If they’re going to have extra-heavy coats on, that’s an indication it’s going to be a worse winter than usual.”

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.

“I just picked it up,” Hair says. “My parents didn’t pay any attention to it.”

“It’s just something that you hear,” Thomas says. “A lot of that is superstition and old wives’ tales and that sort of thing.”

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.

“One of my friends called up and said, ‘Hey, I want to know what it’s going to do for the rest of the week.’ I said, ‘Sorry, as you know, I’m not a weatherman.’ ”

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.

“Folklore in general, I’d say it probably doesn’t have any accuracy,” he says.

And according to the Internet web site of The Old Farmer’s Almanac, the Central Great Plains region can expect a mild winter:

“Temperatures 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,” the almanac predicts.

Humbug, says Hair.

“I don’t think [meteorologists] are more accurate than your folklore, whatever it is--persimmon seeds or walnut hulls or whatever.”

Thomas was less convinced of their accuracy, so in the end she goes with her feelings.

“We have had so many nice winters, that it’s about time we had a bad one,” she says. “It’s kind of due, seems to me.”