LOCAL ANGLES: MOTHER NATURE WICKED WITCH TO ALLERGY SUFFERERS

As Americans, we're supposed to love the outdoors. It's part of our kids-running-through-the-clover, Little-House-on-the-Prairie heritage.

Somehow that heritage passed me by. My family and I are among the allergy sufferers of the world.

To us, Mother Nature is anything but motherly. In the midst of the allergy season, she's the wicked witch.

America is beautiful, as the song says, but "amber waves of grain" give me fits, not to mention ragweed. The great outdoors is anything but great when your eyes are itching and your nose feels like a bazooka.

Actually, I love to look at trees and flowers, but my nose prefers I do so from inside an air conditioned, well-filtered house.

When I do step outside into Mother Nature's combat zone, I make sure I'm armed with antihistamine.

Poets never talk about antihistamine. They talk about nature in glowing terms that we usually reserve for our children.

John Greenleaf Whittier was one of those American poets. He wrote:

The green earth sends her incense up

From many a mountain shrine;

From folded leaf and dewey cup

She pours her sacred wine.

No allergy sufferer would have written that. It may be wine to Whittier, but to an allergy victim it's hemlock.

The image of a kid running through the wildflowers may seem idyllic to some people, but for me it's like watching a child run through a field of land mines. Any minute, I surmise, one of those pollen land mines is going to explode with a loud sneeze.

Where's the Environmental Protection Agency when you need it? The EPA spends its time muzzling smokestacks, but what about all those noxious plants out there? Can't we require nature to clean up its act?

Our whole family goes to the ear, nose and throat doctor like most people go to the grocery store. For allergy sufferers it's a routine errand like dropping by the cleaners.

My 2-year-old daughter Rebecca has been so often she thinks she owns the place. On her last visit she wasted no time in asking the doctor for a sucker.

My wife Joni and I admit we're not the Davy Crockett sort. We don't want to rough it.

Camping out in some national forest isn't for us. It's not just allergies that make us leery of all that foliage, it's all those mosquitoes out there.

When Joni and I step outside in the summertime it's as if we're wearing signs saying: "Bite me." When mosquitoes see us they know they're in for a banquet.

Plus, we're not the sweating types. Some people look good in sweat, just like the hero in a movie. But Joni and I are not among them.

Our idea of roughing it is an economy motel. We love nature too, when it's indoors. If we want to camp out, we book a room at a luxury hotel with an atrium and a waterfall in the lobby. That's air-conditioned nature at its best, and you don't have to worry about the mosquitoes.

~Mark Bliss is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.