There’s been a strange shimmer in the air, the last few days.
I first noticed it, looking west across the gardens in the long, slanting, late-afternoon sunlight. It took me a minute to register it, and even then I wasn’t sure that I wasn’t just imagining it. All the world seemed softly illuminated, the acid-green yellowish shades of spring on the hills more utterly beautiful than I had ever noticed before.
The next few days were cloudy, or rainy, at least near sunset, or I didn’t occasion to look westward at that hour. But I noticed it again yesterday, and the day before that, a sort of tenderness in the very air.
And then it hit me:
Pollen.
Or, more precisely, I guess, the pollen had hit me first. Slammed into me week before last, stronger than many spring seasons, in many a year.
Pollen has always been my enemy, or so my body always seemed to think it, before I even knew what pollen was. A spring baby, I had never really delighted in the spring, and by the time I entered elementary school I had a new reason not to: contending with fountains of mucus, generating unceasingly in my wearying nose, cascading uncontrollably to be caught by reams and reams of facial tissue.
People said it was “allergies.” My schoolmates, most of whom had never much liked me to begin with, had now more reason to find me repulsive. I couldn’t understand this: I hadn’t asked to have allergies, had I? And there wasn’t anything I could do about them.
Over the years, I came to try many remedies, natural or allopathic, some of which worked more or less, or worked at first, or became unavailable, praying for rain to knock the pollen down to the earth even as the bright vernal days lofted the tiny particles high into the air to torment me. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I received an effective series of allergy shots, patiently endured over the better part of a five-year course of treatment. (And none too soon – by then my eyes had become reactive, too. That had been the last straw that had driven me to treatment, when on particularly bad days I had felt like I just wanted to rip my eyes out and get it over with.)
And one of the best decisions I’ve ever made in my life – the tolerance it gave me has lasted me some twenty-five years, and few have been the really bad seasons, when I have needed to fall back on antihistamines or other daily medications.
Sadly, this seems to be one of those seasons. I’m not the only one, either – my friends and neighbors who are regular spring sufferers are complaining more than usual, including some who have rarely experienced symptoms before.
And yet.
The tenderness, in the air.
Has it always been this way, in the spring? The soft shimmer, the unearthly beauty?
Is it only that I have never noticed it before?
Or is it a gift, perhaps, of the most challenging years, laden with pollen far beyond the range of the norm?
I don’t know. I am grateful for my medications, even now as I find myself pulling out all the stops, drops for the eyes and sprays for the nose, working my way through boxes and boxes of facial tissues.
The beauty and the misery don’t seem to belong to the same world, and yet, somehow, they do.
The sky was overcast when I woke this morning. The forecast for today says chance of showers, with clouds diminishing at least partly towards sunset. Not enough to beat the pollen down and bring blessed relief…not enough to wipe the strange and beautiful shimmer from the air, though I won’t know if the lessening clouds will allow enough slanting sunlight to make the shimmer visible, until I walk out towards the western view in the last hours of sunlight, daring the pollen, hoping my medication holds, seeking the last of the beautiful shimmer, before the trees and grasses are done with their spring flowering.