One for Sorrow (18 page)

Most proverbs from weather lore seem to suggest that an ideal farming year would see a long, cold winter, a bright, wet spring, a warm, clear summer and a mild autumn that stays dry until the last of the harvesting is over. Within that general picture though, are certain subtleties that it's hard to keep track of unless you're a farmer. This phrase was first recorded in
The Agreeable Companion
, an anthology of ‘wit and good humour' published in 1792, and is a shortened version of the full saying: ‘A dry May and a dripping June bringeth all things into tune.' In many ways it's self explanatory: rainy weather in the month of June gives corn crops, fruit trees and flowers the final watering they need to ripen or bloom over the summer. But the saying may also have referred to the influence of a wet June on the rest of the months in the year.
    While long-range weather forecasting was impossible before satellite technology, country people did believe, probably as a result of observing that things happened this way for enough years in a row to make it a rule, that if June was wet, August and September would be dry. Late summer and early autumn is harvest time and the most important time of year for the rain to stay away. Like many sayings relating to the timing of rainfall there is an unspoken element of superstition in the phrase. If you noted the rain in June and welcomed it as a sign that everything was being set in tune, it might influence fate to make it so.

As the associates of witches, cats appear often in folklore and those to whom magical powers were attached were usually black. Black was the colour of the devil and had been associated with mourning and death since the times of the Ancient Greeks; it was also the colour of animals that were really demons or witches who had taken animal form and a black cat crossing your path was said to be unlucky – or sometimes said to be lucky. In darkness though, as this proverb advocating equality points out, all cats look grey, which meant that black cats were treated no differently from cats of any other colour.
    The phrase first appeared in the 1549 edition of John Heywood's
Dialogue of Proverbs
:

When all candels be out, all cats be grey. All thyngs are then of one colour.

Thomas Fuller collected it in his
Gnomologia
(1732) as:

All Cats are alike grey in the Night.

The American statesman Benjamin Franklin put it to extraordinary use in a letter written in 1745 in which he explained the advantages of having an older woman as a lover. ‘And as in the dark all Cats are grey,' he wrote, ‘the Pleasure of corporal Enjoyment with an old Woman is at least equal, and frequently superior.'
    We still use the phrase to explain why we're not being particularly discerning about something, either because we've got no way of telling the options apart or because we don't really mind which option we pick. We sometimes use the version ‘All cats are grey after midnight' as an alternative to blaming an unlikely conquest on ‘beer goggles' if we're putting the phrase to Franklin's use.

If February gives much snow,

A fine summer it doth foreshow.

Ever hopeful of better times to come, rural weather watchers took the arrival of snowy conditions in February as a sign not so much that the summer would be warm and dry, but that it would be productive. In fact, this month was the subject of several pieces of weather lore.  
A handbook of weather folk-lore; being a collection of proverbial sayings in various languages relating to the weather, with explanatory and illustrative notes
, published in 1873, lists one from Wales that bears testament to the strength of feeling evoked by the month's climate:

The Welshman had rather see his dam on the bier Than see a fair Februeer.

Meaning that he'd rather see his mother dead than endure a fine February. An English proverb from the same publication says:

When gnats dance in February, the husbandman becomes a beggar.

Gnats breed best in warm, humid temperatures so this is further evidence of the disastrous consequences of mild weather early in the year for farmers, whose harvests could be ruined if crops came out too soon and were later killed by frost.
    Plenty of snow in February was infinitely preferable, keeping everything dormant and safely in the ground until spring. According to weather lore it also has a stabilizing impact on temperatures in other months, setting the tone for a year in which the weather would be appropriate to the season and thus produce a bumper harvest come autumn.
    Other, briefer versions of the saying exist:
‘
Frost year fruit year', ‘Year of snow, fruit will grow' and ‘A snow year, a rich year'.
    As a proverb any of these phrases might be used in an effort to encourage someone through a time of hardship by reminding them that a period that has its share of metaphorical snow is likely to turn out to be a good one once the difficult time has passed. (See also ‘
Better a wolf in the fold, than a fine February)

All biblical quotations are from the
King James Bible (Authorized Version)

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