Allergy Season
an essay in which I wonder if I can be part of nature when nature is attacking my sinuses
Today I woke up stuffy, head pounding, eyes watering and itchy. Last week, I spent an hour walking through the cherry trees blossoming in downtown Portland. The city has been getting greener every day, animals seeming more active than I remember as they come out of hiding and sing or scamper or flutter to find mates. Everything is in bloom.
It’s all one delight after another until the pollen comes. The first thing I did on my phone was check the allergy forecast on pollen.com, a website I hadn’t known about until I moved to Portland and started feeling like I’d been hit by a small truck around the end of March/early April every year. I got more trees when I left New York City for Portland—but I got the pollen that came with them too.
I know from checking this website that I always feel worst when tree pollen is highest. Today the top allergens are from junipers and elms. The company behind Pollen.com—IQVIA—has apparently been keeping “vast amounts of historical pollen data” since the 1960s and has a network of secret “pollen counting stations” that they use to provide the information about how much pollen is in the air and where it comes from.
Today the allergy report said the severity was only “medium” which feels like an understatement given how much of the day I spent alternately napping and feeling watery eyed. When I went to the drug store pick up allergy medicine, the pharmacist told me “every other person” had been in line for the same medicine (because while Oregon made allergy medicine that actually works available without a prescription in 2021, it’s still kept behind a desk and requires a photo ID to purchase). The line was long.
It would be one thing if allergy season just meant a stuffy nose and itchy eyes but it always makes me impossibly tired too. Apparently this is common since the chemicals being released in my body to fend off the attack from foreign pollen can cause fatigue. But it’s strange that spring—the longer days and new growth and warmer weather that all bring humans so much joy after a long winter—is something my body has to fight against.
For several years, I’ve been thinking about the ways in which humans—despite being animals—feel very separate from nature. Often I take a moment to imagine what it would be like if ants or seagulls or elephants were doing things like comparing house design styles, going to museums, driving cars, or making mix CDs for their friends. It’s so absurd it feels like something from a cartoon. Our rituals might look different from other animals and our home construction might involve more moving of dirt and other building materials over longer distances but we are fundamentally just ecosystem engineers. The cities we build are habitats and ecosystems for us and other species. Our houses are just a variation on nests or dens.
The fact that nature attacks us every spring in the form of pollen would, at first, make it seem like another thing that divides us from other species. That is, until I remember that one of my dogs has allergies that are even worse than mine.
A few years ago Mesa started losing fur on her neck and front legs; the skin underneath got infected from all her itching. When she got an allergy panel—which I still have a copy of because I think it’s endlessly amusing—most of the categories had several things she was somewhat or very allergic to. The trees that bothered me weren’t an issue for Mesa though Russian Thistle was a problem for her. (For a long time I thought this was referring to the thistles in the yard and not a plant more commonly known as tumbleweed. Go figure.) This dog was allergic to molds and insects like cockroaches and black ants. She also had a mild allergy to cat dander and sheep wool. Impressively, Mesa was also highly allergic to human dander.
That’s right. My dog—the pet so many people don’t have because we are sometimes allergic to them—was allergic to me and the skin flakes and hair I shed around the house.
She’s better now thanks to years of (expensive) immunotherapy and (also expensive) medicine she takes in the summer along with medicated baths. Her fur doesn’t fall off anymore and she doesn’t get skin infections. But as far as I know she’s still allergic to me, a creature that doesn’t have a season. I guess I got lucky with trees. They bloom and spray their pollen into the air for just a few magical weeks. It’s a reason to wake up from my nap and go outside at least. I’ll just take some Claritin before I go.
Not much to report since last week though I finished Justin Torres’ standout book Blackouts and loved it. There’s a lot to admire about the book’s dreamy blend of history and found text and fiction but I especially loved reading a book by someone who is so good at something I struggle with in my own writing—not being afraid for the reader to find their own way. Especially when I’m writing fiction I have this worry that if I don’t account for every minute of a character’s time on the page, they’ll disappear or the reader won’t believe they’re real. This gets boring fast and the best fiction knows which scenes help the narrative along or are unnecessary. It’s something I’m working on and Torres is an excellent guide. (Clearly others agree—it won the National Book Award for fiction last year.)
Because all writers have a never-ending hope of finding ways to make writing more financially sustainable, I’ve opened a Bookshop.org affiliate page. If you buy any of the books I mention here, I will get a small commission.
I have atrocious allergies and if I wake up and feel the Badness, as I call it, coming on, I’ve been able to knock it out with 2 Claritin rather than my usual 1…