A mighty gust of wind roars over the sacred mounds and through the branches of the oaks, filling the air with a golden haze and cloaking everything in its reach with a powder as fine as the dust of a pixie’s wing.
This is my own poetic way to describe what many students, myself included, are seeing on the LSU campus as pollen takes its toll on our health, as well as anything else outdoors.
I personally loathe this time of year and all the terrors pollen brings. I’m essentially the Grinch of the spring season. If I could, I would sleep through spring just to avoid dealing with all the pollen. Not to mention, I’d skip out on those cheesy “Where are you summer?” Facebook selfies of people in their swimsuits making pouting faces.
Louisiana was ranked third in the country this year as the worst place for spring allergies, according to the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America. This could be viewed as a triumph for the purple and gold seeing that our city climbed from 10th place in last year’s ranking to its current position behind Louisville, Ky., and Memphis, Tenn., in the 2014 season. If it weren’t for the bounty of trees on our campus, Baton Rouge never would have advanced. Geaux Tigers!
You might ask what is it that’s making this spring much worse than previous years. You can point a finger at Punxsutawney Phil the groundhog for being such a wimp or more understandably at the polar vortex, but recall the splendid snow days that it allotted earlier in the semester. Because winter was drawn out and shortened up spring, Mother Nature reacted quick and in excess. The trees are playing catch up, and it sucks.
A man can only wash his car so many times a week before the paint starts to come off, and I may overdose if I take one more allergy pill. The pros and cons of the pollinating process are leaning heavily on the con side for me right now. I’m not the only one out there though.
“I usually love spending time in the Quad between classes and sometimes eating my lunch there, but it’s nearly impossible to do that with a storm of pollen filling the air,” said Kayla South, natural resource ecology and management freshman.
Pollen is all about reproduction. Therefore, it’s love that’s in the air. Pollen is created by plants and contains reproductive cells. The wind, or whatever else it can cling to, carries the pollen to other plant life and fertilizes it. It’s pure environmental romance until a person sucks the particles into his or her nose or it lands in an eye. That’s when the booger-blasting, teary-eyed extravaganza begins.
Even though student’s heads are pounding, eyes are itching and they’re sneezing endlessly, it’s not the apocalypse. Allergists suggest that an allergy shot is the most effective way to deal with the symptoms. However, these injections take time to help the body become less sensitive to a substance.
Other alternatives to making it through spring are washing your hair each night after being outside all day, taking antihistamines like Claritin and avoiding being outside when the pollen count is high.
Pollen will continue to find a way to make my health miserable for a while, but I hope your ailments are few. Students might consider taking their studying indoors and just observe nature’s bittersweet reproduction process from behind a window in the Union next to me or risk their health with finals week fast approaching.
Justin Stafford is a 21-year-old mass communication junior from Walker, La.