November Folk Wisdom: Thunder, Snow, and Parker’s Autumn Valentine

November 4, 2020

As the year deepens into November, the air hums with old weather wisdom—those bits of folklore collected from fields, hearths, and seashores over centuries.

November sits between plenty and hardship, between harvest and frost, and so it has always been watched closely. People read its skies, its trees, its ice, for signs of what the coming winter would bring.

Here are some of the best-known sayings and proverbs about this introspective month:

Thunder in November, a fertile year to come.

A heavy November snow will last till April.

Flowers in bloom late in autumn indicate a bad winter.

If there’s ice in November that will bear a duck,
There’ll be nothing after but sludge and muck.

November take flail; let ships no more sail.

If trees show buds in November, the winter will last until May.

There is no better month in the year to cut wood than November.

Ice in November brings mud in December.

These sayings blend practicality with poetry: farmers’ keen weather sense shaped into rhyme and rhythm that endure long after the fields have emptied.

November’s thunder or frost was never just noise or chill—it was a message, one read and remembered with reverence.

Each line feels like a small bond between human hands and the restless earth they worked.

Drawing deeper into that sense of memory and change, Dorothy Parker’s “Autumn Valentine” reminds us that November is not only a meteorological turning point but an emotional one.

Her few, perfect lines transform loss into a dialogue between past and present:

In May, my heart was breaking-
Oh, wide the wound, and deep!
And bitter it beat at waking,
And sore it split in sleep.
And when it came November,
I sought my heart and sighed,
"Poor thing, do you remember?"
"What heart was that?" it cried.
— Dorothy Parker, American poet, writer, critic, and satirist, Autumn Valentine

Parker’s verse captures the strange alchemy of November: grief fading into detachment, sorrow softened by time’s frost.

The heart forgets what once consumed it, just as fields forget the fervor of their own greenness. In her wry, exquisite way, Parker reminds us that even pain, like the seasons, moves on.

Together, these words of folklore and poetry paint November as a month of endings that prepare the way for beginnings—of cold hands carrying warm knowledge.

Whether forecasting snow or reflecting on love, each voice in this collection understands the same truth: November clears the ground so that life, in its time, may renew itself again.