Some weather sayings pack a punch with a minimum of words. Here are examples both easy to remember and very much to the point:
Clear moon, frost soon.
Cold night, stars bright.
Year of snow, fruit will grow.
April showers bring May flowers
Sunshiny showers last half an hour.
Rainbow at noon, more rain soon.
Rain before seven, quit by eleven.
Ring around the moon? Rain real soon.
Tipped moon wet: cupped moon dry.
Moss dry, sunny sky; moss wet, rain you'll get
Wind in the west, weather’s best.
No weather is ill if the wind is still.
News and weather – they travel together.
Sharper the blast, sooner ’tis past.
In the morning mountains, in the afternoon fountains.
This one stirs up a memory in me:
A March sun sticks like a lock of wool.
As a young boy in the early 1950s, I helped pack raw wool in the alleyway behind my uncle’s Red Owl grocery and dry goods store in a small town in northwestern Minnesota. He bought newly-shorn wool from farmers and packed it into 8-foot-long burlap shipping bags suspended on wooden frames for filling. When the sack was half full, I climbed up a ladder and jumped in to pack down the oily wool, repeating the process until the bag was full. When the job was done, a coating of oil (lanolin) covered my clothes and skin, usually with bits of wool stuck to me here and there.
So why does a March sun “stick like a lock of wool”? Maybe it means that the sun in March, passing higher in the sky than it does in the dead of winter, seems to warm a fellow more, and that good memory “sticks” with you!
