Thursday Thirteen

1. The other morning, my husband asked Alexa the temperature. She said it was 13 degrees. He argued with her that she was wrong, but she insisted that the temperature was right for this time of year. I asked her if she was using Celsius or Fahrenheit; she said Celsius. I told her to use Fahrenheit from now on. This morning, at 6 a.m., when we asked her the temperature, she said it was 56 degrees and sunny. The sun had not yet risen, and it was quite dark outside with a bit of a breeze. We are blaming the government shutdown, but I don't know.

2. In the late 1970s, I think about 1979, actually, we had snow on October 10. I remember it vividly because that's the earliest snow in my lifetime. It was actually thunder snow. A great big rumble of thunder shook my parents' house, and then it poured snow. Pretty amazing, actually.

3. Another big weather event in my lifetime was the Flood of 1985. This will be the 40th anniversary of that flood, which wiped out not only parts of Roanoke but also communities here in my county, Eagle Rock and Buchanan, both of which lie along the mighty James River. It also flooded anything along Tinker Creek, including an area of the county known as Cloverdale. Here's a video about it:

4. We have had other floods that I remember because they wiped out my grandparents' house. It was located along the Roanoke River. It flooded in 1969, 1972, and 1985, I know, and there were probably minor floods that I don't recall. It was always a stinking, soppy mess. The water never got up into the living area, but it sure wrecked the basement.

5. In 1993 (I think), we had a "dusting" of snow that dumped about 2 feet on us in March of that year. We were without power for 10 days. When the roads finally cleared, about 6 days into this snow dump, I drove to my grandmother's house in Salem to take a shower. That was such a relief after days of heating water on the woodstove.

6. Virginia has all four seasons, distinctly so. I woke up Monday morning to find that Autumn had arrived for sure. But one can tell as spring approaches by the greening of grass, the wisps of green on the willows, and the movement of the animals. Spring seems to be the season that we are getting shortchanged on in recent years; it comes and goes rather more quickly than I recall as a child. Maybe it's just my perception.

7. We have a freeze and frost advisory out for tomorrow morning. That means the persimmons should be ripe this weekend. Persimmons need a frost in order to ripen properly. An unripe persimmon will turn your mouth inside out, but a ripe persimmon doesn't taste too bad.

8.The folktales about weather around here include: the devil is beating his wife (when the sun shines and its raining), snow before 7, stop after 11 (or maybe I have that backwards), and the usual "red sky at night, sailor's delight. Red sky in morning, sailors take warning."

9. We also predict the weather around here by looking at wooly buggers. They are worms that are brown and black, and the amount of brown and black indicates how bad the winter is going to be.

10. My husband predicts the winter based on the number of acorns, hickory nuts, and persimmons on the trees. "Mother Nature takes care of her own," is his comment about that.

11. I say the weather will be bad when there is a ring around the moon.

12. There is also a tale that the number of fogs in August forecast the number of snows we will have. If that's the case, we will be inundated with snow because I remember a lot of fogs this past August. However, the weather service has us in drought conditions now and through the end of the year.

13. As a farmer, my husband stays very interested in the weather. We watch the news at lunch and at dinner so he can see the weather forecast, and I do not ask questions or talk while the weather is on, even if it's a repeat forecast. 

How about you? How's your weather these days?

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Thursday Thirteen is played by lots of people; there is a list here if you want to read other Thursday Thirteens and/or play along. I've been playing for a while, and this is my 929th time to do a list of 13 on a Thursday. Or so sayth the Blogger counter, anyway.