the thin line between optimism and delusion…

If you don’t live in a pollen infested place, you can’t possibly understand the wreck that pollen invokes.  It is disgusting.  Molly sent me an email the other day that while she was sitting outside at panera in the ATL stealing wireless internet she kept having to wipe her screen clean because the yellow build up happened almost immediately.  At the lake a couple of weeks ago I watched my uncle’s eye glasses slowly turn yellow until he had to take them off and clean them in order to see.  My parent’s front porch, which is normally black, is now a pale buttercup. 

Everyone’s car has a yellow film over it.  If you pour water out onto the ground you get a yellow puddle.  Or, actually I guess you get a puddle of water with a yellow film over it. 

APPARENTLY, I’ve been told that this yucky yellow coating pollen is not the pollen that gives you allergies.  It has been explained to me that if the pollen is big enough for you to see it, it is too big for you to breathe in.  I’m not sure if I believe this, but this is what I have been told.  Question everything. 

All I do know is that some sort of pollen, whether it is this big yellow stuff or some unseen pollen floating around, has been making me feel poorly.  Sore throat, always thirsty congested in neck sort of poorly.  I’m hoping this goes away soon. 

We need a good rain to wash all this yellowness away.  But it needs to rain before monday, then be beautiful and sunny for the rest of the week. 

Whose excited about the Masters?  I AM!

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A lot of the sidewalks in my neighborhood are not concrete, but are dirt or grass.  The sidewalk outside my parent’s house is reddish sand, that is deep at points, deep enough that my little hybrid bike tires get bogged down.  Todd says I shouldn’t ever ride my bike on the sidewalks anyway, because that is the best way in the world to get hit by a car coming out of a driveway.  He is probably right, since I think he has been hit by a few cars. 

I love the red sand sidewalk, with the big roots of the huge trees that line the street.  Down the road a little bit and across the street there is a strip of sidewalk that is no longer sandy, but grassy.  Grassy with the same sort of big roots, and shady from the trees overhead.  And it is long grass.  Long grass that when trampled smells of rain and dirt and springtime in the backyards of my childhood. 

The best part about this little strip of shady, grassy sidewalk, other than the fact that it always seems to be damp and cooler than everywhere else, is that little blue flowers grow there in the spring time.  Pretty little pale blue stars.  These little flowers have hollow stalks, and don’t take very kindly to being picked.  These flowers also grow in other scattered spots around the neighborhood, but nowhere in the abundance of this strip of sidewalk.  When they are in full bloom there are always mothers taking pictures of their children. 

This year there seemed to be two bouts of the flowers, a first growth of the pale pale blue variety, and about two weeks later after a big rain another growth of the same flowers in a deeper blue color.  Like when the new green grass grows up through the old grass. 

Two things about these pretty little flowers. 

1.  I found one growing in my back yard yesterday.  Actually, there were a couple of them, but they weren’t growing in a patch, they were solitary little souls growing all alone.  Of the pale color. 

2.  SOMEONE thought it was a good idea to mow the path through the pretty little star flowers the other day.  WTF?  I mean, really.  They last a month, tops.  There is no need to mow them up.  Everyone can stomp on through them.  It made me sad.   There was a border of crushed blue flowers that didn’t get mowed up, but did get smashed in the grass along the path.  WHO DOES STUFF LIKE THAT?  Probably the same people who cut down all the trees on a lot before they build a house.  Idiots. 

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