Spring Snow

It comes every year...and yet, every year...it surprises me.  How can it be so grainy?  How can it be so thick?  How come I can't breathe??  It's yellow pollen season...our own southern version of yellow snow.  Usually, we luck out a bit as the yellow haze coincides with at least a little bit of rain. Not this year - no rain in the forecast until later in the week - and the news stations are already declaring this one of our worst yellow seasons in years.

If you live here, you can stop reading.

If you don't live here and are tired of me trying to explain this year after year - well, you're in luck...I took pictures this time.

Exhibit A:  The bane of my existence at the moment.  I have very, very few complaints about living in the south.  These things are on that very short list.  (They rate below anytime "Dook Won a Trophy" preempts my soaps, which also happened today).

So that's a tiny speck of what all our pine trees currently look like.  Driving to the beach last week, I noticed that all the pine trees had yellow dots on them - a sign of things to come.  Shortly after, the pollen starting blowing off these little pods...and up my nose.

My mother read an article Friday that said pollen doesn't 'blow' - that is just drops straight down.  My eyes beg to differ.  The author was evidently not from here. Nor has he ever been here during Pollengate.

Exhibit B: The lake behind my house.  See all that yellow in the water?  That's pollen.  Know what it's doing?  Making a break for my back door.  When I'm not looking, it will sneak through and coat my house with a dusting of yellow pollen. 

I will wonder why my eyes feel like sandpaper.

I will wonder why my throat feels like I took the sandpaper out of my eyes, chewed it up and swallowed it.

I will start living for the next Qtip.

I will keep a box of tissues everywhere.

I will hoard Zyrtec and Mucinex and Visine.

Exhibit C: Looking out my (or any) car window. 

There is no purpose in car washing at this point in the pollen game.
Because after an hour in the parking lot - this is what the cars look like.

All cars look like this right now - there is no vanity in having a super shiny, freshly waxed car...

as there are no clean cars on our roads this week. 

And there won't be.  We'll all wait until the worst of this is past (Sunday?) and make a dash to the carwash -

waiting in line as if Miley Cyrus tickets were on sale inside.

Okay, so what you are seeing on the left and below - that is the line where my garage door hits the driveway.  So, the brown/gray part is inside...and the yellow part is outside.  Typically, there is no color difference between the inside of my garage and the start of my driveway.  Only for this special week.  The left shot is in the shade - the below shot is in the sunshine.

So, this will be the drill for the rest of the week - a constant urge to jump in the shower to get the grit gone followed by a shot of some sort of allergy medicine, just to be safe.

An old high school buddy moved to Raleigh on the first...of April...just in time for Yellow Pollen Season.  My apologies....I didn't warn her at all...but there really is no way to understand what it's like until you experience it.  And by then, it's too late...you're already here.