The Caterpillar, The Oracle?

To me, there is something oddly comforting about old, familiar sayings. I don't 'collect' them, per se, but anytime I hear them, I love to think about how they were started.

This time of year, all the old folks in my town are talking about the winter. Like walking Farmer's Almanacs, they all have different old faithful predictors of how bad the weather is going to be this year. One new one (well, new to me anyway) I heard recently was this: it was concerning to this particular gentleman that the weeds were so tall at this point in the year. Upon further exploration, I learned that the old man was concerned because, he said, 'Every fall, God leaves the weeds tall enough to stick out the tops of the snow drifts so the birds have something to eat through the winter.' Wow, if that's the case, we'd better start stocking the cupboards, 'cause it's gonna snow cats and dogs.

One winter weather predictor that I've heard about since I was little, was the Wooly Caterpillar - those kinda plain fuzzy worms that're black on both ends and brown in the middle. They're fun to pet, because they curl up into a ball like a rolly-poly bug. Anyway, the deal is that depending on the amount of brown or black you see on the creatures, that's how bad or good the winter is supposed to be. (I could NEVER seem to remember which was which, so I made up a saying: 'The bigger the brown, the better the weather.' It rolls off the tongue pretty well, if I do say so myself.)

So, the more brown one of the wooly un-mammoths have, the nicer the winter weather is said to be. And this year, in general, we've been seeing an unsettlingly large amount of mostly black on them. But then I saw this guy on the sidewalk of the homestead the other day! Looks like fair weather 'til spring!!



Of course ... it might be a bad sign that he was dead.