beloved enemy

"Eyes!"  declares Lil' Snip with a grin, pointing.  "Hide!  Gasses!!"

My eyes are indeed hiding behind glasses these days as the pollen flies thick and my contacts betray me by delivering the miniscule bits straight to my eyeballs, grinding like sand, regardless of whether I'm inside or out.  I who have weathered many a miserable spring due to increasingly severe allergies should despise this season violently, but how can I?

The crabapple blossoms float down in the breeze like fragrant snowflakes, layering their round pink petals over porch, walks, and grass like so many cloaks spread for a triumphal entry.  We walk on pale pink, happy for such fairy litter, and sweep away the withered ones only to make room for fresh.

Spice wants to start a log book of flowers in bloom, by month, and was about to give it up, discouraged that so many had already opened - crocus, daffodil, bluebell, star magnolia, hyacinth, primrose, bleeding heart, tulip, crabapple - when I remind her of all the flowers yet to come:  dogwood, columbine, lilac, lavender, iris, daylily, rose, daisy, peony, crepe myrtle, gladiola, hosta, and so many more.  She smiles and heads out to document her favorites.

Walking alongside her mother, a neighbor child picks a bouquet for me, dandelions and some small white wildflower.  I plop it in a pint milkbottle leftover from the dairy days here, and the roadside posy disarms me with its charm.

Even the trees offer blooms - not just the crabapple and the flowering almond, the dogwood and the orchard trees, but the maples, too, have their contribution.  "It smells like a perfumer's shop down there under the silver maple," Spice tells me, rapturous.

Among so many beauties, how could I let mere physical symptoms get me down?  I can choose which I will see, and today, at least, I will see spring instead of sneezes.