One of the things I brought back from last week’s visit to North Carolina was apparently a snoot full of pollen. We hit peak pollen season in the Raleigh-Durham area and it was a sight to behold.
We get pollen in the spring here in LA, and I’ve seen it elsewhere. I don’t have allergies to any great extent so the appearance of pollen wasn’t a big deal for me.
Then I met central North Carolina in mid-April
Jeez la freakin’ Wheeze!! This yellow crap filling the air was like an act of retribution from an angry god!
It was everywhere, as these pictures of cars in the hotel parking lot show. Everything you touched outside, every place you sat, all was covered with it.
And it wasn’t just a thin film. There were places where it was starting to accumulate, like snow when it first starts to stick. You could see it swirling around with the wind, making patterns on the concrete and roads, piling up against the grass and any small depression.
At times when I was driving, I would see the road start to disappear ahead of me, like a cloud of thick smoke or fog was rolling across the road. But it was yellow fog! Turns out that when the wind blows through a big stand of trees, you can get enough pollen flying off to start to impair visibility.
Against this, my sinuses had no chance. I wasn’t dying and gasping for breath, but my eyes were burning like there had been sand dumped into them. I notice now that my baseball cap, normally red, still is more orange-ish from the coating it’s still carrying.
A friend told me that it would have been worse if we hadn’t gotten rain in the previous couple of days, since the rain cleared up a lot of it. Thanks, let’s take it as a given that i don’t need to come back when it’s really, REALLY bad. I’ll take your word for it.
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 