Tiny Seeds of Summer

In the last week or so, another little sign of seasonal change has been in the air. Literally. It’s hard to miss the flecks of brown stuff floating on the breeze and filtering in through our open windows to settle on everything from desktops to bedspreads. Outside it sometimes looks like a barely visible snowstorm.

These tiny, winged bits of flotsam are birch-tree seeds, the result of this spring’s prolific output of pollen.

Since they don’t affect anyone’s nose, throat or lungs, birch seeds are not much of a topic of conversation. As you could imagine. I usually don’t give them much thought, except this year, which is seeing a “crop” much bigger (in a relative sense) than normal.

Lately, they are hard to miss, as tiny as they are. Besides finding these flea-sized seeds sprinkled around the house, I see them littering walking paths and accumulating along sidewalks, where even miniature “seed drifts” sometimes form.

The fact that there’s an exceptional amount of these tiny flakes of biomass all around us only hammers home a fact no one here could escape anyway – summer, as it always does, is coming to an end. 

Birch seeds.