WITH Mang Tani and Co. having limited success and recurrent problems with weather forecasting, I have decided to switch back to the old-fashioned way of making my own forecast - based on what my late grandfather told me when I was a young boy.

Mt. Arayat is always a perfect indicator, he said. The process of knowing which way the weather is going is short and simple. If there are heavy clouds of top of Mt. Arayat or around her middle like a cotton sash, it is going to rain. Otherwise, it's going to be a fine, sunny day.

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Yesterday morning, it was raining, and I wasn't aware of any weather disturbance after typhoon Santi exited with a great sense of humor in the South China Sea. Santi's last minute detour defied earlier predictions by Mang Tani. Some say the latter became incommunicado after the pious typhoon changed (his) mind.

The first thing I did was to look at Mt. Arayat from afar. My grandfather was right: Mt Arayat was wearing a crown of wisp clouds. The sky was heavy with rain clouds, and my daughter brought me up to speed on a weather disturbance. I didn't bother to ask her if Mang Tani was the source. Mt. Arayat's fashion sense was enough for me.

In his day, my grandfather loved to tell, there was another way to tell which way the weather was going. It was a huge deer with a hoarse voice, he said. If it was summer and the deer cried out with all its might on top of a hill at the foot of Mt. Arayat, it heralded the beginning of the rainy season. If was the rainy season, it meant summer was at hand.

The "seasons' deer never failed to do its job, until it suddenly disappeared. My grandfather blamed it on the illegal logging at Mt. Arayat that soon practically wiped out gigantic trees and exotic wildlife in the fabled mountain on the plains.

You could also tell if floods were imminent. If you see chickens roosting early, running up the trees like silly, the rains would be heavier and floods are likely not far behind, he said. I haven't validated this, for lack of chickens and time. Besides, Mang Tani has reportedly ordered a Doppler radar to measure rainfall but was delayed because of the recent typhoons.

When there were thunderstorms, my grandfather would excitedly advise me to prepare the biggest bamboo basket or crate in the house. There would be a bounty harvest of mushrooms in the morning, he promised. True enough, in the morning while the dew was fresh and cool on the virgin grass, you would discover gray carpets of mushrooms all over the hills nearby like manna from heaven.

Like old folks in his time, grandpa also believed in what they called "apakta" To this day, the term is Greek to me. It seems that you could tell if a particular month in a year would be wet or dry by observing if rains or not on any of the first 12 days of January. Global warming, ozone depletion and climate change have thrown a monkey wrench on this old reliable data gathering. Today, it's hard to tell.

My grandfather also used to tell me that another way to predict the weather was to observe the behavior of snails along the creek emanating from the mountain. I failed to heed him on this one. Because snails were part of the meal, we always threw them in a pot of boiling water mixed with ripe guavas and succulent kangkong and pako before these could warn us about a brewing tropical storm in another body of water somewhere.

Frogs, too, can tell you what the weather will be like, according to grandpa. That's by the way they sing (frogs do sing, in case you didn't know) or croak. In my youth in the barrio, when frog sang in the night, they lulled me to sleep and, paraphrasing Shaw, I dreamt of things that never were and said why not. The only time I heard them croak was when it was their last on the chopping board as mother applied ashes on their neck before neatly disconnecting the body from the head.

But frogs are fast vanishing today, except for a few who are now masquerading as politicians.

But the frogs, local snails, along with the hoarse deer and other wildlife in Mt. Arayat are going or have gone away. Now, every time Mang Tani goes on cam to report on a new typhoon, how I wish my grandfather is there to regale me with his old-fashioned way of weather forecasting, back when life was much simpler and Nature was much, much kinder and benign.