Pine cones opening and closing
Pine cones open and close with the humidity: dry air draws the scales back, and damp air pulls them shut. The movement still works in cones that fell from the tree years ago, because it needs no living cells.
What it may mean
A pine cone on a shelf is dead tissue, and it still answers the weather. Carry it into a dry, heated room and the scales draw back; leave it outside on a damp night and by morning it has closed. The movement needs no living cells at all. It is built into the scales themselves, two layers that swell by different amounts when they take up moisture, so each scale bends one way when wet and the other way when dry. That is a rather hopeful kind of design: something shaped well keeps doing its job long after leaving the place that made it. A cone tracks the air in your room far better than it forecasts tomorrow's weather.
Depending on how you saw it
Cones crowded at the top of the pine
A family with Cherokee roots held that a pine crowded with cones at the top foretells a really tough winter. Which signs of a hard season do you watch for in late summer?
The hand in the cone
In Sicily, people believed the hand of Jesus could be seen in the pine cone. Which ordinary object carries a sacred story where you come from?
A cone that opens indoors
Cones gathered damp in fall often open wide after a few days in a warm house, which surprises people who decorate with them. What has opened up in you since you came in out of the cold?
Why it happens in nature
Each cone scale has two layers of tissue whose fibers run in different directions. When the scale absorbs moisture, one layer swells more than the other and the scale bends closed; as it dries, it bends open again. A 1997 study in Nature showed that this works in cones long dead, which is why a fallen cone still responds to humidity.
What folk beliefs say
Cherokee family tradition
In a family with Cherokee ancestry, a grandmother passed down the saying that a pine with many cones at the top means a really tough winter is on the way.
Source: Ivan Kumamoto (collector), Some Cherokee beliefs about incoming storms (USC Digital Folklore Archive) (2015), folklore.usc.edu. View the page
Italy (Sicily)
In Sicily, Daniels and Stevans report, it is believed that the hand of Jesus can be seen in the pine cone.
Source: Cora Linn Daniels; C. M. Stevans (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World, vol. 2 (1903), vol. 2, p. 830. View the page
To reflect on
Which lesson still works for you long after you left the place where you learned it?