WORLD SHARING IN THE GREEN OF SPRING

It has been a beautiful weather week here in the Blackstone Valley. We should be outside enjoying the beautiful weather, but the air is so heavy with pollen, neither of us can breathe. Look out the window and watch it fall! Sometimes, clumps of it fall. I’m grateful that spring has come, but not being able to breathe takes a lot of the fun out of it.

QUESTIONS:

What inanimate object do you wish you could eliminate from existence?

Pollen. I know we need it. That’s how plants and trees grow. This spring has been really bad. The pollen levels are off the charts — literally OFF the charts. Everyone sounds like they have COVID. Coughing, sneezing, runny eyes, headaches. Even the dog is sneezing. Except unlike a real disease, allergies are like having a bad cold that never ends. You feel sick, but you aren’t “really” sick in the sense o having something bacterial or viral.

I think it’s worse than sick because just as your spring allergies start to go away, the late summer allergies start to come into play. Ragweed and every other weed and its pollen. It looks like it’s snowing outside, but the snow is green. When we get a bit of rain, it makes the green covering on your car turn to a green muck that’s hard to remove in any normal way.

Couldn’t the trees and other plants find another substance to send flying into the air?

What tells you the most about a person?

What they read. What they watch on TV or in the movies. How they treat other people and to a degree, how they treat themselves.

What is something you thought would be easy until you tried it?

Driving a clutch car in a hilly city when no one seems to realize that a car with a clutch needs a few inches to roll backward when starting up a hill. It was never a problem living in New York because we were in the suburbs and it was flat as a pancake. I didn’t drive in Jerusalem. There was absolutely nowhere to park where you wouldn’t get towed, so if you were going into town, you took a bus.

Boston was a whole different story. It was all hills. Starting a clutch car going up a sharp hill when the driver behind you is glued to your back bumper is a balancing act between clutch and parking brake. Between hill starts, parking, and heavy traffic, a manual transmission made even a little bit of driving exhausting.

I got rid of the manual car until we moved out of Boston. I had another one when we moved here, but it was a sportscar. I loved it, but after a while, I couldn’t get out of it. In was easy. Gravity did most of the work, but getting out? I needed a functional sky hook.

Then, there was the weather. We moved from Boston where we got some snow to Uxbridge where it snowed three times a week until you had to hire someone to shovel the roof before it caved in. A sports cars was the wrong vehicle. We started buying SUVs and never looked back.

What ridiculous and untrue, yet slightly plausible, theories can you come up with for the cause of common ailments like headaches or cavities?

The dog did it. Whatever it is, blame the dog. He doesn’t mind being blamed as long as he gets a cookie as part of the deal.

GRATITUDE SECTION:

What are you grateful for since they ‘cured’ COVID?   (yeah, I realize it’s not cured.  But at least the vaccine is available and restrictions have eased up in many places.  If that’s a good thing or not remains to be seen I suppose).

Nothing has changed very much. I feel less worried about going out and it’s nice not wearing a mask, but otherwise, life is pretty much the same as it was before except that — unrelated to COVID — the weather has improved. Also, our favorite restaurants closed, so even if we wanted to do something, there’s nowhere to do it.

One of our two local malls closed, too. But we have better television — which has nothing to do with COVID. We don’t lead a very interesting life.

SHARE YOUR WORLD 5-17-2021

Categories: #foliage, #Photography, Anecdote, Blackstone Valley, Humor, Share My World

Tags: #Photography, manual transmission, Marilyn Armstrong, pollen, Share My World, Weather