I took a quick run on the trail this morning after dropping my son at preschool. The Abingdon trailhead parking lot at the Light Milling company was fairly packed and I saw lots of people throughout the length of my run. It's no wonder since the temperature was a very comfortable 70ish and the sun was out in a clear sky. It was just the right conditions to be out enjoying the trail. I ran from the trailhead to just beyond where the subdivision road crosses at the Glenrochie golf course.
My grandfather was a farmer in Tennessee, a couple of hours west of Nashville. Being a farmer and growing up in the days before the study of meteorology, he could recount some of the folk methods of predicting the weather. One well known method that he shared with me is to gauge the severity of the upcoming winter by observing how hairy the "woolly worm" is in the fall. Sorry, I'm no biologist so I don't know the scientific name. Woolly worms are little caterpiller-like creatures with dark red/brown/black hair. Most are no longer than an inch or two (the worms, not their hair). Anyway, as I ran, I saw several of these on the trail and, remembering my grandfather, stopped to have a look. I'm no Poor Richard's Almanac but they looked pretty mildly insulated to me, at least compared to some that I've seen in past years. Maybe that means we'll get away with a relatively mild winter this year.
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