Pollen Bowl 2012: The Worst Pollen Season Ever

This year has been the strangest year as far as I can remember. March is the craziest and most chaotic month in the US Deep South since you normally don’t know what it is going to do. Sometimes springtime comes and there is an impromptu ice storm, and sometimes we have supercell thunderstorms, tornadoes, and rainstorms. In 1992 we had a blizzard–I’ll never forget that. That’s a story for later! 😉 This year it has been unusually warm early. We had an unusually warm winter without a killing frost. We have more flowers and more bugs this year than ever!

This year we have what I call the Pollen Bowl. It could almost be like the Dust Bowl, but in this case we have pollen.

Pollen Cloud

Every year everyone dreads springtime because we always have the pollen/allergy season. We enjoy the nice weather, flowers, birds, and nature…but with it comes the pollen. It’s always bad here. Everything outside turns yellow from all the pollen. You know that makes a lot of people sick and miserable. When the wind blows you can see yellow clouds floating in the air. When it rains the ground and puddles become yellow. Ugh!

I am not allergic to pollen. My tolerance to it is very high, but I can only take so much before it begins to affect me. When the pollen count gets really high, then it is like breathing in dust. It gets into my eyes and I breathe it in and it irritates my nasal passages and throat. It’s just like if you beat your rug out and took a big sniff. What do you think would happen? Yeah.

For those not familiar what the pollen count is: grains of pollen/cubic meter of air

Pollen grains under a microscope

Pollen refresher: pollen is plant sperm. What a lovely thought!

In the backwoods we have more plants than the suburbs. But in the suburbs there is more air pollution that mixes with the pollen. When I used to live in the suburbs I used to get sick. My body didn’t like the air pollutants. One trip to the country would make me 50% better.

This year though we have had pollen counts off the charts. We have had some bad years in the past at about 6,000. We have had counts up to 11,000. To put this into perspective, 1,500 is considered very high. So we are 10x over that amount.

Going out for walks or doing outdoor springtime activities is fun while I’m doing it, but then I pay for it that evening or the next morning with a headache, irritated throat,  swelling around my eyes and nose, and sneezing. Some people are having to go to the doctor and eat Zyrtec, Claritin, and Benedryl like M&M’s. Totally sucks. We need rain ASAP, but it only clears the air for about a day, but it helps.