On cue, in the tail end of July, seasonal allergies explode inside my head. Growing up they called it hay fever. It happens when things start to die.
Which means I was fine in the Spring. But in the Fall, everything breaks loose. All those fields of plants drying and browning in the sun with no concrete and glass to slow it down.
More than anything hay fever reminds me of youth and home.
They make me reflect on how my home was probably never a place I was made to live. I don’t remember having allergies in Europe. But here they’re crippling. Millennia of my inherited inoculation means nothing in the face of native prairie five-thousand miles from where my great-grandparents started. It’s like a less crippling version of War of the Worlds.
It’s strange to think that place that you called home was never really meant to be your home. And yet often it feels like the only one I have.
