Pollen- palooza

It was a Saturday like any other as Gene and I cruised down the interstate, heading south toward Atlanta to meet his sister for lunch at Ted’s Montana Grill. The forecast had promised clear skies, but as we rounded a curve, an unusual sight caught our eyes. A thick, golden haze hung in the air ahead, and on the opposite side of the highway, every car had its headlights blazing like spotlights despite it being mid-afternoon. My first thought was that we were about to drive into an unexpected spring shower, but as we got closer, the truth became apparent. This wasn’t a rain event. This was pollen — so much pollen that it had darkened the sky enough to trigger everyone’s automatic headlights to come on! This year’s pollen season has been the worst I can remember in all my 59 years, and what we experienced that day was just the beginning of what would become a recordbreaking pollen week. By the end of March, Northwest Georgia hit the highest pollen count in 35 years — a staggering 14,801. To put that in perspective, the previous record from 2012 was 9,369, and we blew past that like it was nothing. Nothing!

The daily pollen count represents the number of pollen grains in a cubic meter of air. Tree pollen was the primary culprit this time around, with oak, pine, sycamore, sweet gum, and birch trees all conspiring to turn our world yellow. Mission accomplished! There was simply no escaping it. My social media feeds exploded with photos of cars, porches and streets blanketed in a thick layer of yellow powder. The little creek that winds through the woods behind our house developed a thin yellow film floating on its surface, like someone had dusted it with gold leaf. Our porch and deck, which I’d swept clean just days before, was layered with what looked like yellow-green velvet. After our morning walk, our dog came back with paws stained yellow, as if she’d dipped her toes into a pan of lemony paint. My white tennis shoes turned the color of sunshine after one trip to the mailbox and back.

And of course, we tracked it all into our house, because there was simply no avoiding it. I dusted and pushed the Swiffer over the flooring, but the pollen was everywhere. I was just moving it around.

Allergies have never bothered me much, but during the peak of this year’s pollen-palooza, even I wasn’t immune. My eyes turned red and irritated, and my nose ran like I was continued from page

fighting a stubborn cold.

During the heaviest of this yellow siege, I looked out the window and noticed Gene squatting down in our driveway, studying something on the surface. He was fascinated by a line of ants creating a clear path through the pollen as they marched to their destination, carrying little morsels of this and that to an ant hill somewhere close by — a demonstration of nature finding a way, even through the densest pollen cover ever.

When I could bear it no more, I spent an entire day blowing it around with a leaf blower and rinsing it off of our wraparound porch and back deck with the high-power spray nozzle.

“I don’t think it’s over yet,” my husband said. “Yeah, I know,” I said. “Resistance is futile, but I’m trying to gain a little control over it.”

Finally, mercifully, the rain came this weekend — three inches over two days to be exact. Not a heavy downpour, just hard enough to wash the world clean again. The pollen settled into the cracks of our driveway and along the edges of our sidewalks, like Mother Nature had outlined the concrete with a yellow highlighter.

I can’t help but see a metaphor in all of this yellow stuff. Sometimes life covers us in difficulties so thick they seem to darken our days. But just like the pollen, these challenges are temporary, and eventually we find, as the ants do, that even in the midst of overwhelming circumstances, there’s always a way through if we just keep moving forward, one small step at a time.