After five days in Maryland – that’s where I grew up – my sinuses started to flare (ever slightly so). They say that sensitivity to poison ivy increases with exposure:
Does that mean our sensitivity to pollens also increase the longer we stay in a single place?
Or do we become immune over time instead?
The day I arrived in Belgium I was briefly overwhelmed with a maddening fit of sneezing …
Then a day later it was fine.
Upon looking out my Belgian window (where we are staying), I was momentarily mystified to see what I at first mistook to be a light drizzle, but seeing no rain worthy clouds in the sky or feeling no moisture on the ground I was suddenly struck with sense that I was starring what is normally invisible – dare I say a ghost – square in the face: Pollen (and lots of it) …
But not sneezing.
Even when you can see it (and I mean “stacks” of it), hay fever is a mystery:
When it strikes, who it gets, or when it will go away.
It’s sort of nowhere and everywhere at the same time.
3 comments:
I hold to the immunity theory, unless your immune system is compromised by something else. You certainly have a beautiful early morning vista while on vacation.
Hay fever in my family seems to wax and wane - this year has been troublesome. Even I have been sneezing and I don't get hay fever! It is extraordinary to see clouds of pollen in the forest and then see it settled on the surfaces of the ponds.
Allergies are a mysterious ailment. I get the equivalent of "hayfever" from pine pollen or sage pollen. So far, I haven't become immune, unfortunately.
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