Groundhogs Making Coffee

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Jacob Becraft.

I’m in Frankfort, Kentucky, and I had a question about a phrase that my mother would use when I was little.

Oh, yes, please.

All right, picture this.

Your child growing up in the mountains of eastern Kentucky. You get up in the morning, you go outside, and you look at the hillside across the road, and you see fog forming on the side of it. And the adult parent next to you turns over and says, looks like the groundhogs are making coffee.

I got it. I can picture that.

And Jacob, was that your experience?

My mother would tell me that, but really it was more her experience. She grew up in Houston, Kentucky, and her family would use it as a common saying. But I’ve only ever really heard it from her, so I kind of want to know where that originated.

Sure. I mean, what a lovely poetic phrase, right? I mean, just imagine these groundhogs getting up before you do and rubbing their eyes and boiling up a pot of water for coffee and that steam is rising.

Right.

It must be a very cute picture painted.

Well, yeah. And the way that they rise up over the mountains there. I love this expression, Jacob.

You know who wrote beautifully about this was the great Kentucky writer Jesse Stewart. Back in 1954, when he was Kentucky’s poet laureate, he published this essay about a train ride that he often took that ran from Washington, D.C., to Cincinnati, and it passed through the Appalachian Mountains. And he writes, look to the mountains above the high river walls, and you will never see so many small white clouds just sitting up there on props of bright morning wind.

Maybe you’ve never heard the old mountain superstition connected with these small white clouds. I was told by an old man once that under these little early morning clouds, the groundhogs are making their coffee. So he was writing about, nobody writes about that part of the country like Jesse Stewart does. And he was writing about this old mountain superstition that you don’t hear about a whole lot these days. But I think that’s such a lovely version of it, don’t you think?

It is. That’s very poetic.

Yeah, it’s not just your family, but it is common in Appalachia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, Ohio River Valley. Probably some other places, but those are the places where people have reported knowing it in their families or having heard it from others.

It makes sense that it would be probably localized to where you would actually have mountains and groundhogs.

And Jacob, do you use this expression yourself now? Did you pick it up and you’re carrying it on?

I’ve used it probably a couple times. I work outside a lot. I’m a biologist. And I think with some of my coworkers, I’ve said it. And I think that maybe the last time I did, some of them looked at me and were like, what? Who’s talking about? The groundhogs are making coffee.

Yeah, self-explanatory.

Thank you for sharing that saying with us, Jacob. We appreciate it. I’m sure we’ll hear from others who know it or have their own variants.

Well, thank you for telling me about it.

All right. Take care now.

All right. You too.

Bye-bye.

Bye, Jacob.

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