AFEW WEEKS back, when a few snowfalls were followed by biting cold, I looked at the side of the road and thought about my grandmother.

It was probably 40 years ago on a Christmas visit to her home atop a hillside near Roanoke when I first heard her use a phrase that stuck with me ever since.

Snow was on the ground and the prolonged chill had kept it around for weeks. She shook her head and turned to me with a serious look that said some wisdom was about to be imparted.

"When snow lays around, it's waiting for more," she said with a toss of her head.

It was only years later, when I heard her say it a few more times, that I realized the common sense it implied.

If it snows once or twice, and stays cold enough to keep it around, there's a good chance that more snow will fall.

That old memory and her phrase that's been with me for so long made me think about the colloquial and regional words and phrases we get from family and friends growing up.

They may not always be grammatically correct, make perfect sense or even flow smoothly from the tongue.

But as I've gotten older and spent years talking to my own children, it has surprised me how often I hear myself repeating many of these words and phrases.

Weather seems to be a subject that brings many of them out.

When extreme weather hit, be it windy, freezing, hot or rainy, my stepfather had a favorite phrase for it.

"That wind'll knock your hat in the creek!" he'd say.

It also worked to say it was cold enough, hot enough, wet enough or just generally unpleasant enough to knock that same hat in the creek.

When he'd see a rainbow on a sunny day, he'd smile and say, "Look. The devil's beating his wife."

Breezes figured into a saying a young friend of mine picked up from his own father, a farmer in the Northern Neck.