Yesterday I was out in the country and saw something that I’d never witnessed before. I was going by fields of grass and they looked like they were on fire. Or maybe a better description would be that it looked like plumes of dust, like when someone drives by on a gravel road, were coming out of individual spots in the grass fields.

The plumes had to have been pollen from the grasses. I have to admit that the grass is very tall this year, but I’ve lived here most of my life and had never seen this occurrence before. I was with my friend Vincent, he grew up in Topeka too, and he’s never seen it. Vincent went over to the ditch and pulled up a chunk of grass and shook it pretty good, but nothing dust-like came off. It was really weird.

Anyway, I’ve been super stuffed up the past week. Most of the time I get sick this time of the year, it starts out feeling like I’m really stuffy because of allergies. If I can keep the dripping out of my lungs, then I do okay. If not, it lates for a while. I’m doing pretty good with that this time so far. But, it can switch on a dime.

I am allergic, to the maximum, to two different types of local grass, Timothy and Johnson. I have no idea what either of these grasses look like. I thought I would have a allergic reaction if I came in contact with the grass. I didn’t really know that these grasses produce pollen that gets airborne. That isn’t good.

I think that there is something weird going on with allergies nowadays. It seems like on the evening rides, everyone is having nearly the same problems. Some people that have never had any allergies say that they have them now. It has to be an environmental thing. Kind of worrisome.

It’s kind of hard to see from these photos, but if you enlarge them you can see the pollen.

It was weird, I’d been watching a field and these little plums of pollen would just pop out of nowhere all over.

Allergy tests for grass and trees.

After looking at the comments about gnats, it got me wondering. So, I did a Google search and there are lots of photos like this of blowing grass pollen.

The guy that wrote this piece is the executive editor of the Salina Kansas paper. Wow is all I can say. How inappropriate of a time to try to send out his caution. And the title of the piece is so wrong. Like it makes a difference the reason the woman was out on her bike when she was killed by a hit and run driver. She was killed that involved a crime.

Better than emailing Ben and telling him he’s a complete ass, it would probably do better to email his boss, Olaf Frandsen, the editor and publisher of the Salina Journal. Here’s a link to Olaf’s email. It will only take a second to tell him that this is completely inappropriate and that his executive editor, Ben, is an idiot.