Powd’ry

It’s yellow. It’s fine. It’s everywhere, most obviously on dark cars and on windshields.

But it really is everywhere. It’s on white plastic handrails, hard to see but obvious to the touch.

It’s ground into wooden stairs.

It’s piled up in tiny drifts along the ridges of a metal threshold.

It catches on any surface irregularities in concrete sidewalks and asphalt roads.

It forms a scummy layer on still bodies of water.

It’s throughout my breathing apparatus, coating my bronchial passages and the inside of my nose. No photos available, you’ll be glad to know.

*It* is pine pollen and the experts on allergies say that it is not responsible for the coughing and sneezing that enliven spring in Myrtle Beach, notwithstanding what the locals say. Pine pollen, it turns out, is too big to trigger true allergic reactions: that requires smaller particles.

Pine pollen grains can be 60 to 100 micrometers in diameter.
Pine pollen is large compared to other pollen grains
(typical pollen grain size is approximately 10 micrometers).
– The Asthma Center

Are you finding 60 to 100 micrometers hard to visualize, or is it just me?

A human hair is approximately 70 microns,
give or take 20 microns
depending on the thickness of a given individual’s hair.
– Benchmark

We’re not making a watch or an electronic microscope here, so for our purposes it’s close enough to say that an individual pine-pollen grain is about the thickness of a human hair, or about twice the size of the smallest thing we can see.

The experts are admirably non-judgmental about pollen, even philosophical.

Pollen is the male part of a plant’s life.
It isn’t good or bad.
It’s just there, in great volume, in the spring.

Pollen is a part of life.
It’s the trees’ investment in the future.
It also clearly shows that spring is here.
Smile as you sneeze — life is good.

In case you want to make your own investment in the future, consider this: Just being seen can be enough to attract all the blame.