Springsville

Spring arrives in stages. First there are the warmer days. February sunshine brings a welcome change from the chill of January. Still nothing really changes in the land. Everything is bare, stark, skeletal.

Then the first daffodils come. Spots of green and yellow standing out in a sea of brown leaves and pine needles trampled since last fall. A week passes, the daffodils enjoy their time in the spotlight.

And then without any more fanfare, one day we’re walking up the road to visit the cows and the ground is a riot of color. Flowers are everywhere. Blue, purple, white, red, yellow. Tiny flowers, huge flowers.

We celebrate the spring equinox the way most people do easter, with dyed eggs, chocolate treats, egg hunts, and detailed pre-planned fruit plate sculptures of a bunny. The usual stuff.

Like everything, spring in the south has one near fatal flaw: pollen.

Pollen comes like the flowers do, one at time, cycling through oak, pecan, grass, and so on. The one that was new to us this year was one I’d seen once before, briefly, in the Okefenokee Swamp: the pines. Living in the middle of a several hundred acre circle of near monocultural pines… well, let’s just say there was quite a bit of pine pollen.

One day the wind kicked up and started sending it all up in great clouds. We looked out the kitchen window and couldn’t see past the second row of trees. The forest was a yellow-green fog with great clouds of pollen billowing off the tops of the trees. Thankfully, none of us are allergic to pine pollen, but this much of anything in the air makes life miserable. We hid indoors for a few days, but eventually the rains came and knocked it down and washed it off.

There were couple of nice days to get outside and play, but then the next round started. Oaks, then pecans. For most of March, that’s just how it goes down here.