Fear the Fog

Fear the fog.

Well, not the actual fog but what it portends.

For some time, I have known of the "old-timers" fog calendar--the idea of tracking the days you have fog after July 1, counting ahead 3 lunar cycles (approx. 80-84 days) and checking off that date during the winter months as one in which you can expect snow.  And for many years, I chuckled and scoffed because seriously-how could that ever be true?

Two years ago, on a whim, I decided to keep track.  We had an exceptionally foggy late summer and fall in 2015 and I started keeping track--paging ahead in the calendar to the appropriate date range and marking it down.  I didn't think much of it, it was just something to do and I am always up for testing random hypotheses.

And then the winter of 2015-2016 arrived...with a vengeance. I didn't actually note the calendar for those first few storm. It snowed, I was grumbly but I didn't see the correlation.  But then after a particularly miserable storm, I started checking...and it was dead on.

After that, winter became somewhat terrifying.  Every single time the fog calendar said we should have a snowstorm, we did.  It is one thing to have piles of snow hit your farm, it is wholly another to be able to know they are coming weeks in advance.  The dread grew with each passing fog date coming to fruition.  The dread was deep because we had SO MANY fog dates from that previous fall.

By the end of that winter, it was officially marked as the 5th snowiest on record for our county.  We had been trapped on the farm more days than I care to count and our collective exhaustion from moving snow and trudging had us seriously considering a move southward.

So here we are, two years later, and the fogs have begun.  Pretty sure I am going to be shaking in my boots if they keep coming.