hay fever

I inherited a few things from my mother.

Each spring I am especially aware of one. We used to call it “hay fever”, which sounds like something from the African jungles.

But it wasn't. I think “allergies” is what most call it now. Mom's allergies were pretty well developed. Each spring she had this bout of blow and sneeze and trudge. It was long before any affective antihistamine and mom just toughed it through.

I did pretty well for some years, but when we went to Texas I discovered that anything I could be allergic to grew in abundance around there. There was a tree that had bad pollen, that affected a lot of Texans, but it grew a couple hundred miles north in Oklahoma or Kansas, but those nice people shared it with us.

Each spring I was miserable.

There were by then, two types of antihistamines. One was very effective, but it would make you very sleepy. “Do not take this while operating machines,” the labels darkly warned, and ther was the “non-drowsy” formulas, but they did not work very well.

So I took the first kind, then tanked up on caffein to function. I was teaching two classes and was a full time graduate student as well. It was a wild ride each spring.

Then the drug genii came out with Claratin and my whole world changed. I wrangled a prescription. It worked and I could function with out all of that caffein.

Here in Idaho I get a shot of this allergy each spring. It goes about a month, so I can buy the generic formula to make it through the spring.

We are there right now!

Where did I put that bottle?