RIVER CITY JOURNAL: EVEN A DEAL WITH GOD PROBABLY WOULDN'T STOP THE RED EYES

If this is spring in Cape Girardeau, it must be allergy season. It's no comfort that you're not suffering alone.

Everybody I know is sniffling and wheezing.

Allergies.

Cape Girardeau's reputation for roses have earned it the title of City of Roses. Most folks would be more likely to call it the City of Post-Nasal Drip.

I've been told by more than one doctor specializing in hay fever and the like that Cape Girardeau is the No. 1 location in the nation for allergies.

Great. Maybe that should be in all the newcomer brochures.

Those experts tell me that a combination of our famous humidity (we're probably No. 1 there too), the murky Mississippi, the nearby farmland and the not-too-distant forests make a nice allergy soup.

My wife has had to deal with allergies most of her life, regardless of where we have lived. She has braved New York smog, wheat chaff in Idaho and tree pollen in Kansas.

Then there was the cat.

The former cat, I should say.

Of all my wife's allergies, cat dander is clearly the worst. So we moved away from smog, wheat and Kansas cottonwoods.

But we kept the cat until just a couple of years ago. Sometimes you have to defy science.

I've never thought much about allergies myself. As I recall growing up on the farm, I probably suffered a bit during hay-baling season. I remember getting all stuffed up and headachy, but I always supposed that was due to the glaring sun in the field and the airless darkness of the barn loft where the bales had to be stacked. Now I think the diagnosis would be allergies.

By and large, I never suffered for any length of time. If I had allergy attacks, I laid them on other ailments such as an early summer cold or a midsummer bout of flu.

Live and learn.

And, boy, did I learn a lot when I moved to Cape Girardeau.

Just as we were buying our house, one of our new neighbors sold out to move to Arizona. For allergy relief.

That's pretty drastic. But he was retiring, and he decided to live somewhere he could breathe. Good plan, I thought.

I've been to Arizona. Once. It was hot. It was muggy. It looked like it hadn't rained this century. So I left.

I suppose I'd go back if it was the only place on Earth where I could breathe.

Since moving to Cape Girardeau, I've had too many colds during warm weather. I finally got suspicious. Last month, we went away from Missouri on vacation. I left with the beginning of a late spring cold. I hacked and snorted the entire time we were gone.

My wife didn't even have to pressure me to go to the doctor when we got home. I hadn't slept through the night for days. I was ready for anything. Even a move to Arizona.

The doctors shined a light up my nose and in my ears and down my throat. He didn't say very much. But he gave me a prescription for one of those high-powered allergy relievers. It worked, thank goodness, sparing me a Southwestern relocation.

Maybe one of the reasons I was never aware of my allergies when I was a boy was that my mind was focused on far worse enemies: poison ivy and red wasps.

I could endure chiggers and ticks and briars and thorns and just about anything else on the farm. But I was -- still am -- deathly afraid of poison ivy and red wasps.

I've never been bitten by a snake. I won't get that close. But I've been attacked by poison ivy vines swooping out of trees and slithering through the weeds to wrap their tendrils around my legs, arms and neck in an effort to strangle me while a raving rash spreads over my body from head to toe.

OK, that's a slight exaggeration. The part about swooping never happened. But all the rest is the gospel truth.

Red wasps are vicious insects invented by an all-knowing God to turn farm boys into born-again Christians. I can't tell you how many deals I made with the Almighty that if he would protect me from wasps, I'd never sin again and I'd tithe for the rest of my life.

I haven't seen any red wasps around Cape Girardeau. So either they are found only around farm houses and barns in the Ozarks or God is keeping his end of the bargain. One or the other.

But the red wasps that built nests in the eaves of the farm house on Kelo Valley -- always near the back screen door -- were trained for attack. They didn't just protect themselves. They would dive bomb a kid who scrupulously stayed at least 30 feet away from any known nest.

And the stings. You never saw such swelling. I was stung on the top of my foot once and couldn't wear my right shoe for more than month.

So my mind wasn't really on the fine points of allergies when I was growing up, if you get my point.

I still manage to grab an occasional poison ivy vine when I'm pulling weeds. It grows everywhere. I still get the ugly rash. I don't get stung anymore, because I don't think there are any red wasps nearby. So now I've got flaming allergies.

God, is this a good deal?

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.