Senior Connections Senior Connections May 2019

An old-time weather rhyme BRIAN M. HAINES McLeod County Historical Society executive director soon.” The ring around the moon means that high, sound of highline wires buzzing, but did you know thin clouds were moving into the atmosphere. As that it’s not the highline making that sound? the clouds began to drop and thicken, the crystals inside them would cast a halo around the moon, The high-pitched, electric-sounding buzz during the meaning that moisture is building in the atmosphere height of summer is actually caused by an insect called the cicada. The cicada sits high in the trees and making the clouds heavy with rain. A storm was also predicted by how smoke and vibrates its tymbals (organs on their abdomens). acted as it left a chimney. The saying went that if The vibration of the tymbals is ampliﬁed and can chimney smoke descends, the nice weather ends. be heard for long distances. This is the buzzing sound you hear during the The science behind chimney smoke and weather is debatable, as there are many factors other than dog days of summer. The old saying is that when an approaching storm that can make chimney the cicadas start “singing,” you can expect the ﬁrst smoke descend; however that may be, the pioneers hard frost six weeks from then. The old weather rhymes are not always correct. believed that smoke from a ﬁre descending rather than rising meant that a storm would soon be in There have been many times when my campﬁre smoke falls and the weather stays sunny, or when the vicinity. One thing that has always been on the mind of the ﬁsh still bite in a strong east wind (“when farmers, and still is to this day, is the ﬁrst frost. the wind’s from the east, the ﬁsh bite the least”); Even in today’s modern weather forecasting, it can however that may be, it’s always fun to see people be difﬁcult to tell when the ﬁrst frost is coming. A react when you correctly forecast the weather with century ago, people claimed they would know when an old-time weather rhyme. the ﬁrst frost would be, six weeks in advance. There are many things that describe the dog days of summer: dry grass, oppressive heat, and your retriever lying lazily on the lawn with his/her �� tongue hanging out. One thing that almost �� everyone relates those lazy dog days to is the There’s an old phrase I once heard about weather, “Everyone complains about the weather, but nobody ever does anything about it.” Now, I know complaining about the weather is folly, yet, I ﬁnd myself doing it a lot lately. One thing we can take comfort in, however, is that the light at the end of the tunnel is ﬁnally in view. Being a historian, I’m always trying to equate our modern times with those of the past, especially when it comes to dealing with the obstacles we share with our counterparts of the past – obstacles like the weather. Today, we have modern technology that tells us whether or not to bring an umbrella, yet those who came before us had a number of interesting ways to tell what Mother Nature had in store for them. They couldn’t simply turn on the news or pick up a paper to see what the weather would bring; instead, people had to be tuned in to the world around them to forecast the elements. For something a little different, I decided to do some research and ﬁnd out just how our not-so- distant ancestors forecast the weather. A storm on the frontier could be disastrous for settlers – prairie ﬁres, mudslides, or massive snowstorms could be a matter of life or death. Since the settlers couldn’t just tune into the evening news, they forecast a coming storm by looking to the horizon at night and in the morning. One of the most time-tested and accurate ways to determine if a storm is coming is the old phrase, “Red in the morning is a sailor’s warning, red at night is a sailor’s delight.” Predicting the weather with this phrase is as �� simple as it sounds. �� Since weather generally moves west to east, a �� storm system moving in from the west will cast a reddish glow to the sky while the sun rises in the morning; on the contrary, a storm system that has passed through an area will cast a reddish glow when the sun is setting at night. Another way that the old-timers predicted a storm was by the moon. The rhyme went �� something like this, “A ring around the moon �� means rain will be here �� Located in the friendly river city of Watertown 2 Senior Connections May 2019 �� Senior Connections HJ.COM

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