constance | Neither steel nor poison nor cherry blossoms

Hello.

I arrived back home from a gratifying baby-cuddling trip -- I will spare those of you who have no interest in cuddling babies the details, but it was most assuredly gratifying -- to find the entire state hidden under a gigantic dustbowl of a pollen blanket. I have never seen such billowing clouds of pollen just right out in the open air before. I sit under a tree at lunch and read, and I can actually see it in the still air, just floating casually around. My city looks as though it's participating in a city-wide car-washing strike (hooray for the allergen union!).

It gets on everything. It collects on my black pants and pools on my floors and scratches at the back of my throat and probably turns my snot green (but of course I wouldn't know about that).

And because it is the twenty-first century, I just take my daily doses of all those little chemicals which allow me to breathe this stuff without expiring, and I breathe without expiring and only sneeze and cough and sleep a little more, and I even make plans to garden on the weekend because I found some super-cheap azaleas and daisies and fashionable or no I have always wanted enormous banks of these flowers in my front garden and my god! I have a house! And unlike my plans to build houses from the ground up and eat nothing but fritos and cream cheese frosting for the rest of my life, and even given my talent for seeing plants to their most violent of all possible deaths, this is an entirely practicable plan, I think. And so if you happen to be driving down a certain street in Middle Georgia on Saturday and see a ponytailed redhead with a shovel looking completely confounded and outclassed by a bunch of one-gallon pots of innocent shrubbery, well, that's me. And. If you should see me, and you have some helpful advice to offer, feel free to offer it. I'm not proud.