Tissue & Me

October is the one month everybody else gets to be scared on purpose:

Haunted houses.

Horror movies.

Fake blood.

For those of us with severe allergies, October is scary for free. No ticket required. No costume necessary. The ragweed doesn’t take Halloween night off. The mold in the leaf piles doesn’t care what you’re dressed as.
So here it is, a Halloween horror story, allergy edition. Actual horrors.

The Fog Machine. Nothing says “haunted house” like standing in a cloud of chemically-scented mist while your sinuses file a formal complaint. Everybody else is screaming at the actors. I’m screaming internally because I can’t breathe and my eyes are watering. The scariest thing in the haunted house was the fog, and I was the only one who noticed.

The Haunted Hayride. Picture it: a bale of hay, a dark field, everyone shrieking with delight. Meanwhile, my eyes are swelling shut and I’m calculating how fast I can get to my car without ruining everybody’s night. Nobody writes horror stories about this. I might be the first.

Raking Leaves. The most haunted chore of the season. You disturb the pile, the pile releases the mold spores, and you spend the next three days paying for thirty minutes of yard work. The leaves are beautiful. The leaves are also trying to kill me. Every fall, same deal, and every fall I forget until it’s too late (not really, I’m not settling for a leafy yard so it has to get done).

The Pumpkin-Spice Air Freshener at the Halloween Party. Chemical warfare, but make it festive. If you read my last post, you know exactly where this is going. I’m not crying. It’s the Glade. (There’s a difference.) Who likes pumpkin spice anything anyway?

The scariest costume of all: a person who can breathe through her nose. Nobody would believe it. Too unrealistic. The judges would disqualify me for breaking character.
And the real kicker? The ragweed is still going strong this October. Forecasts say weed pollen is hanging around later than usual this year, so the horror doesn’t even end on November 1st. The masks come off, the candy’s gone, and I’m still sneezing. Classic.

Tell me yours. I know you’ve got a Halloween allergy horror story: the fog machine, the mask, the leaf pile. Drop it in the comments. Misery loves company, and company loves tissues.

Tissue in every room. Every purse. Every car. And now, every trick-or-treat bag.