Don't Inhale!

So something occurred to me as I made the first of 2018's weekly assaults upon the Bermuda (actually at this point of the year it's more of an assault on henbit and dandelions, but still...they task me. They task me, and I shall have them!). It being a little windy, I found myself breathing in the pulverized bits of leaf and bloom, and I wondered what long term effect this might have on my health.

My body's immediate response is something along the lines of: "Incoming greenery! Activate hay fever!" I can lessen the effects of that with a shower, extra attention given to washing the face and some spritzes of saline up the nostrils to help wash out green stuff or pollen that may have lodged there. But could there be a long term effect? I don't really know, which on the one hand prompts me to quit cutting the grass. On the other hand, there's no one else to do it and I'm not in the mood to pay, so I wind up on the Allergen Throne, defending the realm against the threat of a yard tall enough to alert code enforcement officers and harbor rodents.

It could be worse, of course. According to Thomas Lupton's 1595 volume A Thousand Notable Things, I could have inhaled basil -- with the predictable result of breeding a scorpion inside my brain that would not only a long time grieve me but at the last kill me.

Unfortunately, in researching this I learned that henbit is of the same genus, lamium, as basil. Please don't try to visit; I would prefer you remember me as I was, with a brain free of predatory arachnid arthropods.

Plus, if I discover that basil/henbit brain scorpions are contagious, I have a few people I want to meet before I go.