I Don't Make These Things Up

On my birthday, I started the day being given a beautiful bouquet of wildflowers by my morning attendant. Maria’s a wonderfully sweet woman, originally from Mexico, and she accompanied the flowers with a Mexican birthday song. We put the bouquet in a vase and although flowers normally make me wheeze (damned asthma), these didn’t. What they did seem to do was make my sinuses… er… go into overproduction. Niagara Falls down the back of my throat. Love that post-nasal drip. So I asked my mother if they could come live with her and I’d visit them. I did take a picture of them before they left my house:




Nice, eh? (please ignore the clutter. I'm thinking about cleaning)

The next day, when I called my mother, she’d developed Niagara symptoms, along with a set of eyes that looked as if she’d been crying for weeks. After some discussion, we hit upon the flowers as likely culprits (neither of us had been up long, it took a while) and out they went.

Later that day, I wondered idly what ragweed looked like. Click here.

Feel free to laugh.

Update: it's been brought to my attention by people more horticulturally inclined than I that this is likely not ragweed, but goldenrod. They seem to look alike. Apparently, I am allergic to that, too.

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