Reflections From a Month of Beans in the Jar

By Sarah Melotte

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in Keep It Rural, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Like what you see? Join the mailing list for more rural news, thoughts, and analysis in your inbox each week.

Appalachian folklore says that the number of snows in the year can be predicted by the number of foggy mornings in August. To keep track of the fogs, you drop a dried bean in a jar every time you wake up in a cloud, moisture stretched like cotton balls deep in a valley.

I learned this piece of folklore where I learned most of what I know about Appalachia, working on a farm in Western North Carolina. I was living in Boone, about two hours north of my hometown in South Carolina, studying agroecology at Appalachian State University. And those two hours down the mountain made a lot of difference, at least in terms of the climate. We didn’t get much snow in my hometown of Spartanburg, and one of the things I was looking forward to the most about going to college was experiencing real winters.

My partner Hannah-Marie and I didn’t have any dried beans on the first of August this year, so we dropped a popcorn kernel in a glass jar that we keep on a shelf above the sink. But that’s easier said than done. Because what even counts as snow to begin with? Some old timers say if you can track a rabbit in it, that counts as a light snow and one fewer bean in the jar. But we’ve agreed to also consider flurries bean-worthy snows.

I imagine that when this tradition began only accumulative snows earned bean rights, but southern Appalachia has warmed by about two degrees Fahrenheit since we started reliably recording temperatures at the turn of the 19th century. Temperatures increased by two degrees Fahrenheit in Mitchell County since 1950 alone, while the annual minimum recorded temperature increased by almost four degrees. Hannah-Marie and I are adapting the tradition to our current climate, but it makes me wonder how long even our version will be relevant.

In a meeting with an editor from Climate Central, a nonprofit environmental news organization, a colleague and I discussed the challenges of predicting floods in the age of global climate change. I was helping my colleague analyze a dataset from FEMA that was supposed to categorize areas in need of flood protection and mitigation programs. But we realized that the dataset was woefully inadequate for many reasons.

One of the reasons for its inadequacy was that it’s getting harder and harder to use the past to predict the future. Climate change creates variability so quickly that it becomes less and less helpful to assume ‘all things equal’ in statistical climate modeling. When all of the variables change so frequently, it increases the frequency of unprecedented climate events, like the disastrous 1,000 year flood that decimated Eastern Kentucky in 2022. It gets harder to use historic flood records to predict future flood risk, in other words. In the same way, it gets harder to use an old method to predict future snows.

All month I’ve been imagining what it will be like for our children. Will there be snows for our grandchildren to count? Or will leftover beans in a jar just be a reminder of what used to be? It makes me wonder what other traditions will need to be adapted to accommodate our changing climate.

A part of me is bitter that traditions have to change to accommodate these anomalies. But the truth is that traditions change whether climate has anything to do with them or not. Shifting, changing, and adapting is a fundamental aspect of human culture. Anything that we’ve considered immutable tradition emerged out of somewhere, and has been adapting to a shifting culture since. Marriage, child rearing, religion, family makeup – all of life’s major components have always evolved and adjusted. And that’s a good thing.

For now, we consider flurries real snow. And we’ll adapt again later if need be.

This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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Previously Published on dailyyonder.com with Creative Commons License

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Photo credit: Snow covers a bald near Roan Mountain, Tennessee. (Photo: Sarah Melotte).