This entire area of Georgia used to be "piney woods" and there are still pines in evidence everywhere. They are tall, thin trees, like legions of wooden basketball stars, that sway and wave in the breezes as if they are onstage performing in Swan Lake.

The pine trees also, at this time in April, have big yellow tassels that shed pollen dust copiously over everything. The allergy reports on television, radio and the web steadfastly insist that these pollen grains do not affect allergies because they are "too big" to invade the nostrils and set off allergen alerts.

Maybe so, but anyone sensitive to dust—which describes most folks!—will still sneeze and have itchy eyes after minimum exposure to this gunk fouling up the air. My purple car looks as if someone sprinkled it copiously with yellow powdered sugar; the pollen grains clump around anything that leaves a greasy residue, like fingerprints, giving the cars a weird mottled effect. If the pollen falls after a rain, the effect is more like dozens of cats having walked on your car with dirty yellow pawprints.

I just had to clean my black shoes off a while ago; they were covered with this yellow dust just from walking back from the car at lunchtime. I got the surface dust off with the paper towel, but the saffron color is still deep in the creases made by wear and in the stitched seams. For all anyone knew I had taken a half hour walk in the woods rather than taken five or six steps across a pine-straw scattered verge between parking lots!

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 3:47:00 PM

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