I grew up mostly in Pennsylvania. Visited Georgia every chance I got, came back for good as soon as life would let me, and have considered myself Southern every single day of my existence regardless of what my zip code said at any given time. Southern is not a location. It is a condition you are born with.
And even I, a woman who spent a solid chunk of her childhood in a state that has actual winters and does not require a daily antihistamine just to check the mail, knew about pollen season before I ever lived through a full one. It was spoken of. Warned about. Discussed at family gatherings with the kind of gravity usually reserved for bad weather and difficult people.
So if you just relocated here from somewhere comfortably north of Tennessee, no Southern family, no prior warning, nobody who loved you enough to sit you down and explain what March was about to do to your vehicle and your sinuses and your last good nerve?
Honey. I am so sorry. Nobody should have to find out that way.
The Evidence Is Everywhere
Every surface outside this log cabin is coated. The porch rails. The rocking chairs. The little table where I set my coffee every morning like a woman who still believes in things. All of it buried under a thick, gritty, snot-colored layer of what I can only describe as nature’s audacity. The creek is still pretty. I will give the creek that much. But everything between me and the creek looks like it lost a slow argument with a bag of self-rising flour that had opinions and nowhere else to be.
Drive any road in this county and it is the same story on every porch. Farmhouse, double-wide, four-bedroom with a tasteful wreath on the door. Does not matter. Pollen does not care about your square footage or your curb appeal. It is the great equalizer of the South and it has decided we will all suffer together, equally and without exception.
Shelby Has Made Her Peace With It
My dog Shelby goes outside yellow and comes back yellower. She has accepted her fate with a kind of quiet dignity I find both admirable and a little heartbreaking. She walks through it, rolls in the grass, trots back inside looking like a golden retriever doing a mustard cosplay, and just stares at me like everything is completely fine.
I wipe her paws. I do not wipe her entire body because I am one woman with a finite number of towels and a will to live that is already running thin this time of year.
She sneezes. I sneeze. We look at each other. Neither one of us has anything useful to offer.
The Car Situation Is a Spiritual Test and I Am Failing It
Washing your vehicle during pollen season in Georgia is an act of pure stubborn delusion and honestly I respect it. You spend twenty or thirty minutes on it. You step back and feel that little quiet satisfaction, that small “I did something” feeling. And then you walk outside the next morning and it looks exactly like it did before except now it also has water spots.
The pollen does not even wait until you are back inside. It starts before you put the hose away. I have stood there and watched it happen in real time and felt something I can only describe as personally targeted by a tree.
If you are newly arrived and you just washed your car for the first time in March and felt genuinely proud of yourself, I want you to know I was rooting for you with my whole heart. And I am truly sorry about what you are going to find tomorrow morning.
A Brief Medical Update from My Sinuses
They are not well. They have not been well for some time now. They are staging what feels like a full organized protest and no amount of Zyrtec is getting through to the people in charge. My eyes itch. My throat does that thing where it is not quite sore but it is also absolutely not fine. I sneezed so hard the other day that Shelby got up and left the room, and that dog has witnessed enough around here that very little should surprise her anymore.
People who did not grow up down here think allergies are a minor inconvenience. A few sneezes. A single tissue. Cute. Come spend a week in Cherokee County in late March and then report back. You will not be able to report back at full volume because your chest will be congested but I would still love to hear your updated thoughts.
New Southerners, take note: the first time you sneeze five or six times in a row at the Publix checkout and the person behind you just gives you one slow nod without a word, you will understand something important. That nod is not judgment. That nod is recognition. That nod means you live here now, for real, in your bones.
And Yet.
Here is the part where I wrap this up with something soft and grateful about how gorgeous spring is and how the dogwoods make every bit of it worth it.
And fine. Yes. The dogwoods are unreasonably beautiful. The redbuds are doing entirely too much and I love every bit of it. The air underneath all the suffering smells like something green and alive and hopeful. The light through the trees at this cabin in the late afternoon looks like something a painter would try for and get almost right but not quite. The creek is running and the world outside is that particular shade of green that only shows up for about three weeks before the Georgia heat arrives and ends the whole conversation.
It is beautiful here. Violently, stubbornly, make-you-sneeze-till-you-cry beautiful.
I just wish it could manage all that without coating everything I own in yellow dust first.
But nobody asked the pollen. And it is very clear that it does not care.

XOXO, Jani

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Journeys With Jani is written from a log cabin in the woods of Taylorsville, Georgia, where the creek is running and the pollen count is absolutely nobody’s friend.