Today's Daily Double is... pollen season back home!

Quiet Saturday, two lazy bike loops and a lot of dock sitting, and somewhere in the middle of it I remembered what late March means in North Carolina: pollen. If you have never lived in the South you cannot conceive of it. The pines let go all at once and everything turns yellow, cars, porches, puddles ringed in it, and washing the car is pointless because the pines are not done. In Cary they read the pollen counts on the evening news like storm warnings, because it was weather. Then some April afternoon a real thunderstorm commits (the kind California has never once managed) and rinses the whole Piedmont clean in twenty minutes, and the next morning everything smells like wet pine.

Spring out here is subtler. The light stretches, the headlands go green for their six weeks, the fog adjusts its schedule. I love it, and it has never once turned my car yellow, and some part of me misses that. The South does not do subtle. That's the charm.