I have to admit, seeing the prompt this morning felt oddly appropriate for this time of year. The temps may have dropped to pre spring levels, but the pollen is still everywhere. S lets see what becomes of today’s prompt. Timer set for fifteen minutes if you are writing along.
Well, definitely pollen related…
Monday, April 15th: Everything was covered in a thin yellow film.
Everything was covered in a thin yellow film. Sam gazed out at it through watery eyes. She liked the sight of the green buds on the trees. She adored the look of the flowers in the planting beds. But this yellow dust storm of pollen was often featured in her springtime nightmares.
‘Probably because I wake up unable to breathe.’ She decided. ‘Lack of oxygen’
It didn’t matter how well sealed her windows were when closed and locked or how extra her filters were on her HVAC system. At this time of year she would go to bed and feel fine, confident her air purifier unit and the houses system were working well. Then somehow in the night pollen would sneak through the filter, dance through the air and then cause her to snuffle her way through the remainder of the night, waking up with watery eyes and a stuffy nose. She knew that if she took her antihistamine and moved around a bit inside the house, her packed sinuses would drain and by about 6:30 she would be able to sound relatively normal when talking.
Then there was the outside world. She worked from home, which let her pick and choose the times and days she wanted to leave the house. Normally she made certain to spend a bit f time in the park each afternoon as well as running errands and in the evening seeing friends. Once the yellow veil arrived to drape over the world, Sam put off every errand she could think of for as long as she could and claimed her schedule was too swamped to meet anyone out until the pollen settled.
As she knew most of her friends did the same, no one took issue with it. Even if they didn’t have allergies when they moved her, after a few months they started to develop them. Then schedules would switch.
Soon Sam would have to leave the house. She put off grocery shopping for as long as possible and was no running low. She made a long list and sipped the last cup of coffee from the last grounds she had in the bag. In an effort to minimize her errands, instead of doing the weekly shopping, she shopped for a couple of weeks at a time. She bought extra bread and put the loaves in the freezer. While she knew this week’s meals would heavily feature fresh veg, after it was gone she would lean heavily into her supply of canned and frozen foods.
As she sipped her coffee and found some of the stuffiness start to recede, she looked through the window at the car. It had been eight days since she last moved it and instead of a light dusting of yellow, it now looked as though her blue car was draped in a yellow blanket. It somehow made the blue underneath look vaguely green.
‘I’m going to leave a Pig Pen style dust cloud in my wake,’ she thought. She sipped. ‘Although I think his cloud was stinky. I don’t think pollen really has a scent.’
As soon as the thought crossed her mind, Sam envisioned sniffing the pollen to check. She also pictured the inhaled pollen from the sniff test blocking her sinuses for the foreseeable future.
‘Probably not the best of ideas,’ she decided.
Knowing putting it off wasn’t going to make this better, she finished her coffee and set her cup in the sink. It was time to see if the pollen blanket her car was wearing would dissipate in a dust cloud as she drove or if it would peel back in one solid mass and thump to the street behind her.
Ten til Midnight 