Reviewed for Edwards Book Club
I was so excited to have the opportunity to read and review this little book. Besides the wonderful old sayings our grandparents and great-grandparents had about the weather, Cindy Day is a 25-year veteran of meteorology most recently seen on CTV.
Many of us have heard the saying "Red sky at night, Sailors delight; Red sky at morning, Sailors take warning" but the one my Grandma used to say, especially if we were on a car trip, was "If there's enough blue sky to mend a pair of Dutchman's breeches, the weather will be fine." Now, please take no offence to this, in Grandma's day the men and boys in Holland wore very wide-legged pants that came in at the ankle, hence if there were clouds in the sky but a big blue patch among them, the day would turn out fine. I was happy about seeing this one because I'd never heard anyone other than Grandma (and myself) say it!
This little treasure, divided by seasonal weather sayings, gives us the sayings of the past, but the added bonus is the meteorological science connecting the dots. We are given the how and why these sayings would come about and how true or not they were. I enjoyed this book tremendously, and now I know how so many of these weather 'wisdoms' came about, Groundhog's spring predictions aside, many are much more realistic. This is a remarkable opportunity to learn why these sayings were so often on the mark and what science tells us how they worked. For me, this was a happy trip down memory lane, but put it all together and it's a cohesive book of lore and science, which don't clash at all. A Globe and Mail year-end top 20 Bestseller. Recommended for any age.
