Allergy Season

Dear Spring Time,

Why do you make it so hard for me to love you? Don’t get me wrong, you’re beautiful and I want to be your friend. In fact, I am quite jealous of the people who get to enjoy your company. I envy those who get to walk around their neighborhoods and have picnics and go on hikes your time of the year. I envy those who can stop to admire flowers growing by a neighbor’s mailbox. I even envy people who can do yard work without sneezing because I am not able to do that myself. And I love seeing the trees and flowers blossom, with all their bright purple and yellow and white petals.

But there are a lot of people in this world with whom you don’t get along very well, and I am one of them. I think you might hate us or something, even though we never did anything to you. Because I feel your wrath every FRICKIN’ year, and I don’t know why you treat me and so many others so horrendously. Or why you would even want to, for that matter. Maybe you’re just sadistic, since you don’t seem ready to quit making people’s lives miserable any time soon. And if that’s the case, maybe I am a masochist for even wanting to befriend you in the first place.

You see, in order for you to be so lovely and creative, you have to produce this stuff called pollen. And pollen makes me itch and sneeze like nothing doing. Because of it, I don’t get spring fever. I get spring hay fever instead. And I can’t seem to cure it or avoid it no matter what I do. It’s an unholy trinity of sneezing, an itchy nose, and itchy eyes. Maybe this is a foreshadowing of hell; or maybe it’s Purgatory on Earth. Because it’s not heavenly, that’s for sure! There’s no way I want to join the angels in singing God’s praises over this stuff. Some people might, but it’s not my thing. Gerard Manley Hopkins and Emily Dickinson can have their fun doing that as long as they leave me out of it.

Every March through May, my entire world becomes a torture chamber. If it gets cold at my house, I can’t go outside because I’ll be sneezing once or twice every minute. Even if I am inside, the least bit of dust anywhere adds to my problems. Come to think of it, if sneezes and nose-blowings were musical notes, I could probably write a symphony every year, and have a lifetime output rivaling that of Mozart or Beethoven.

My nose oozes snot like a leaky faucet periodically throughout the day, my nostrils becoming slime factories. I can’t keep my purse organized, because everything is buried under a pile of tissues. I have to wear glasses instead of contacts for several weeks, because it feels like SOMEONE lit my eyes on fire with a blowtorch (*HINT, HINT*), and it’s very tempting to claw them out. It’s like Dante’s Inferno in my eyeballs, except there’s no frozen hostile wasteland. I can’t even escape your presence through sleep, because I wake up every morning looking like I have pink-eye, with my eyes nearly swollen shut, and my eyelids crusted together with dried up gunk. Chances are I probably had some sneezing fits during the night too.

You sure are a slob, because you strew this pollen garbage around pretty well, and you won’t clean up after yourself. You just wait for people or the rain to do it for you. And when the rain does come, it just gives you fuel to create more pollen; so it’s a never-ending cycle, like Nietzche’s Eternal Return. Or, to put it another way, it’s almost like when Mount Vesuvius erupted in ancient Italy, except it’s not quite as deadly and it’s in yellow. It’s all over everyone’s cars. It’s on the sidewalk and the street. It’s on my driveway. There’s no getting away from it. I bet you like color coordination because it’s the same hue of the substance that seeps from my nose and eyes.

I’ve tried several times to let go of my resistance to you. It just doesn’t seem to work out for some reason. Every year, during the last 5-6 weeks of winter, I take bee pollen tablets. The whole idea behind this is for me to let some of this pollen into my system, so that I won’t be suffering quite as bad once you come to visit. But there’s still something about you that rubs me the wrong way when you arrive in full force. I’m not sure what it is, but it makes my life a living nightmare. It gets to the point where I have to medicate myself with Allegra or Claritin or Zyrtec and eye drops, because I need them to help numb the pain you inflict. Sometimes those things can’t even help me! And I sure look forward to seeing you leave every time, because you are the bane of my existence for a quarter of every year.

When I was growing up in New York, things were different. You are much milder up there then you are here in Tennessee. It’s because the climate is much cooler. In fact, I still remember going over to my grandpa’s house each spring when he would have his annual garage sale, and it would often be in the 50s when he set everything up in the morning. I would sell lemonade and soda on those days, and every year I wouldn’t get any customers for the first few hours because it was too cold for soft drinks. There were many springs where it was still snowing. And even if it wasn’t snowing, it wouldn’t be 80+ degrees in April. It would be in the low 70s at the most. So when things started blossoming, it would happen much more gradually instead of all at once. The only time I miss living in New York is when you come around, and I would be more than happy to shovel snow in April and March if it meant that you were almost non-existent.

Of course, it’s physically impossible to get away from you. You stay away for about nine months of the year (thank you for that, by the way), but then you make your annual visit for three months, and I can’t stop you from coming. I can’t make you go away either. I can’t impose a restraining order on you. I can’t start up an anti-bullying campaign or a picket line against allergy season or anything like that. I can protest by myself until my face turns blue and I pass out, but that won’t change a thing. There’s literally nothing I can do to avoid you. I just have to put up with you.

Here’s to hoping that we can be on better terms with each other in the future. I wish we could be friends, and I understand that it’s necessary that you have to make your annual appearance. There are four seasons every year. We can’t go from winter straight to summer. There needs to be some kind of a transitional period in between so things don’t go from cold weather to hot weather all at once. That’s not good for the plants or the environment. And there needs to be some time allowed for the trees and flowers to bloom. I just wish everything wasn’t so painful, that’s all.

So would you quit being so harsh and mean to me and my fellow allergy-sufferers? I’m begging you, for the sake of our sanity and the sake of our health. Help me so I can sleep at night. Help me so I don’t have to hear people sniffle constantly. Help me so I can breathe a little easier. But more than anything, I just want to enjoy your company, and you’re not letting me do that. I want to get to know you better; honestly I do. I know my pleas will likely be futile, but I really hope they’re not. So I’m keeping my fingers crossed that you’ll take me up on my offer.

                                                                         Sincerely,

                                                                         Briana