Weather prognostication

Farmers have a large number of sayings that are used to foretell the weather and other unpredictable phenomena, such as their spouses.

One aphorism that springs to mind is “Early Easter, early spring.” That maxim seems to be holding up this year. Clouds of snow geese were seen honking their way northward over our farm in the last week of February, and I spotted my first robin during the first days of March.

This can only be bad news for the robins, because another farmer proverb goes, “There has to be three snows on the robin’s back before it can be spring.” We are overdue for our annual spring blizzard, so maybe the robins shouldn’t have listened to that old saw about early Easters and early springs.

I have seen Easters that were as sunny and pleasant as a greeting card’s artwork. We have also experienced Easters that were as cold and snowy as a Siberian winter, when the hunting part of Easter involved searching for your car beneath the billowing snowdrifts.

Our grandson, who will soon be four years old, had an outstandingly good time during last year's Easter egg hunt in his backyard. He had so much fun that he demanded that his mom and dad hide the eggs several more times so that he could find them again.

Like many people my age, I’ve had a few minor memory glitches. But I’m not yet to the point where I can hide Easter eggs from myself. I think. That is, if I’m recalling things correctly. I may have forgotten to take my memory pills this morning.

When I was a kid, my family would dye a dozen or so hard-boiled eggs that would be featured in an Easter egg hunt and, later, featured as part of our Easter dinner.  

The first part of this process was acquiring the eggs, which meant a trip to the henhouse. Most of the hens would squawk and flee amidst a flutter of feathers and dust when you stuck your hand into their nestbox. The hen would flap off to a safe distance then strut about the henhouse, cackling at top volume about the unfairness of it all, broadcasting to the world that a kidnapper was on the loose in the coop. 

There were a few hens who would sit calmly and quietly as your hand searched for eggs beneath their feathery bottoms. It always astonished me how warm it was under there; it made me realize why a feather bed felt so comfy.

My siblings and I all wanted to dye the eggs a striking emerald color. Not because they would be more challenging to find in the new spring grass, but mainly because we were fans of Dr. Seuss’s epic tome “Green Eggs and Ham.”        

More than once when I was a youngster, I would see a barn cat nibbling on tender shoots of grass. When I pointed this out to Dad, he said, “When a cat eats grass it means that it’s going to rain.”

I thought that the more obvious explanation was that the cat was trying to get the yucky taste of rodent out of its mouth. That’s certainly what I would be doing after munching on a mouse.

Mom told me that Grandpa Hammer would predict a year’s worth of weather with an onion. On New Year’s Day he would cut a homegrown onion in half from top to bottom. He would pop the layers apart, assigning the outermost layer of one half to January and the outermost layer of the other half to July, with layers representing the ensuing months arranged in descending order.

Each onion chunk was given a generous sprinkle of salt and left on a windowsill. The pieces of onion that manifested moisture were seen as predicting plentiful rains for their corresponding months while the dry chunks were harbingers of drought.

It’s a good thing I wasn’t around when Grandpa performed these predictions. I likely would have grabbed the onion chunks and tossed them into my chili.   

One old weather adage goes, “90 days from fog to rain.” I’m going to see if there is any truth to that.

Our farm experienced several days of uncommonly foggy weather this past winter. Just for fun, I counted 90 days ahead on the calendar and wrote “rain” in the corresponding dates.

Time will tell if there is any veracity to that particular predictor. If there is, maybe I can use it to figure out things that are really important such as where I left the TV remote.

I forget – what number is the Weather Channel?   

Jerry’s book, Dear County Agent Guy, is available at http://Workman.com and in bookstores nationwide.