Well, runny nose season is in full-swing at the House. At this very moment, I am the only person here who isn’t coughing, sneezing, snorting, dripping, or sniffing. Of course this could change very rapidly and then I could make my own contribution to the nasal cacophony around here.

Spring and fall are usually my noisiest seasons. I am allergic to trees (especially cottonwood, the devil’s tree), grass, ragweed, cats, mold spores, and some flowers. These allergies and their loathsome effects have been my seasonal companions for better than thirty years, so for portions of the year, my nose hates me. I also have a very sensitive sense of smell, I can smell things that no one else can. My nose has saved us from food poisoning several times. Maybe it’s my super-power, Super Schnauze to the rescue! My nose is also generally sensitive, I hate to have it touched, so naturally Mr. Prairie loves to poke at my nose.

One of the worst things I have ever had to do to treat my allergies involved using those nasal inhalers that are so popular now. It feels bad and leaves a funny taste in my mouth. But apparently there are some people who have way more fun with their noses than I. Which reminds me of my sister.

I don’t believe I have ever written extensively about my sister, but I really should, she’s hilarious! I will call her “Sissy” to preserve whatever tattered shreds of her dignity remain after she reads this story. Sissy is younger than me by six years, she’s married to Fireman and has two kids, my 14-year old nephew who I’ll just call Nephew because he’s at that easily embarrassed age, and my 6-year old niece I’ll call Flower.

Since there are six years between us, there were large swathes of our lives during which we were at vastly different stages and had nothing in common except shared ancestry. And to tell the truth, early on I was bitterly resentful of her mere presence in my life. I was happy, content, I had mom and dad to myself, and along comes this loud, smelly interloper who ruint everything! Things have become so much clearer now that I have two children, I understand my son’s feelings towards his sister, because I went through the same thing, which in turn has caused me to finally see and understand some of my own motivations and feelings way back then.

All very nice, Prairie, but what pray-tell is the point, you may ask? What does all this stuff about motivations have to with noses and your sister, you wonder? Wonder no longer. My sister shoved peas and shoe-string potatoes up her nose.

Of course she was four years old at the time, and the peas and shoe-string potatoes were two different nasal incursion incidents. I don’t know which was first, peas or potatoes, but the potatoes were nowhere near as entertaining as the peas so I won’t dwell on them. But I remember the pea-insertion incident like it happened yesterday.

My mom usually made very basic, meat-potatoes-vegetable dinners and she had a particular fondness for La Seur peas. Sissy did not share that fondness, and one evening she came up with a unique solution to the pea problem. Something, anything, had to be done with the accursed peas. Clearly they had to go, but where? Her nose seemed like the obvious hiding place. Because she was only four years old, Sissy didn’t really think through all the possible ramifications of shoving peas up her nose. At ten years old, I just mostly thought it was funny.

There was my little sister, with her big blue eyes and cherubic golden curls, furtively pushing peas up her nose. It was the funniest thing I had ever seen and still reduces me to tear-inducing laughter to this very day. I imagined the peas made a little vacuum sound as they each disappeared into her pert, little nose. Fwoop, there goes a pea, fwoop, and another! About five or six peas into this bizarre little ritual my mother finally noticed what was happening under her nose, or under my sister’s nose, rather.

And because it was her job to do so, my mother freaked out. After her usual operatic “NOOOOO!” mom got right to business. She and Dad held Sissy’s head immobile and used tweezers to remove the offending vegetables from her nose. Luckily they were able to get them all or we would have taken a little trip to the emergency room, which would’ve mortified my mother. Nothing embarrassed my mother more than taking imperfect children out in public, too bad she had human children; and peas up the nose definitely qualified as imperfect.

When they finally got around to questioning me about why I didn’t immediately report such atrocious behavior I was stumped for an answer. I’m sure I just shrugged and uttered the universal answer of busted kids, “I dunno.” I know now. At 10, I didn’t have the sophistication to understand that Sissy couldn’t be held to the standards to which I was held. And I resented her blonde perfection at a desperately awkward stage in my life. For just a little while negative attention was deflected from me and onto her, it was strangely gratifying to see her being scolded instead of “polishing her halo” as I once told my mom. But the overriding reason why I just sat and watched is because it was darn funny! It never occurred to me at the time that my mother might not think it was funny, too.

Today I discovered that the propensity for shoving stuff up one’s nose might possibly have a genetic component. Pumpkin has had a runny nose for about two weeks which developed into another ear infection, number two in as many months. We’ve been to the doctor, gotten her medicine, and indulged most of her whimsies, but she’s still pretty whiny.

We were relaxing together on the couch, I was perusing a blog I frequent and Pumpkin was playing with her “Yo Dabba Dabba” guys. She sprang to her feet, looked at me, flapped her hands and started yelling, “I CAN’T BREATHE!!!! I CAN’T BREATHE!!!!” Thinking she just needed to wipe her nose, I handed her a tissue. She looked at me, took her tissue, then she promptly tore a little piece off and tried to shove it up her nose. Because it is my job to do so, I freaked. After my own operatic “NOOOO!!!”, I pulled her in front of a window and tilted her head back. There were little pieces of tissue shoved up each nostril; she had managed this while sitting literally right under my nose!

So I put her on the couch and pulled the little tissue pieces out of her nose, very carefully. I thought that I had stopped her before she had managed to put much in there. I was wrong. Her nose was like a clown car–I would pull out what I thought was the last piece and there would be another piece right behind it! Finally I got the last, gruesome piece out of her nose. Then I went around and put all the tissue boxes up on tall windowsills and the like.

I’d say what I normally say when faced with the weirder aspects of parenting, “I swear this doesn’t happen to anyone else,” but I’ve seen it happen to someone else with my own two eyes. And right under our noses.

As you may know I have a love/hate relationship with children’s TV programming. My daughter watches the “valuable lesson”-type shows on Sprout, Noggin, and Nick Jr. and she seems to enjoy most of them. And as I think that everyone needs a little harmless, mindless diversion occasionally, I put Boomerang on at least once a day. She likes some of the cartoons I grew up with, like Scooby Doo, Where Are You, Yogi Bear, and Popeye, and Tom and Jerry and Pink Panther are so loved that we bought them on DVD so we can watch them whenever we want. And by we I mean Pumpkin. Just yesterday, during a game of involuntary Ring Around the Rosy instigated by her brother, I heard her yell, “Jane! Get me off this crazy thing!” I’m so proud that my 3-year old can quote the classics!

But before school and in the evenings, we watch some shows that my son prefers. We are a Pokemon family and watch Pokemon: Battle Dimension before school. In the evenings, we watch iCarly which I highly recommend as truly funny and well-written and… I have sat here for several minutes trying to figure how to admit that I watch this show and find it both ridiculous and hilarious, much to my chagrin, so I’ll just quit hemming and hawing and spit it out, I’ll just own up to it, I’ll cop to it, I’ll bite the bullet, I’ll…. Oh for heaven’s sake, it’s Spongebob Squarepants. There, I said it.

We sing the song to each other, do our impressions of the characters, and try to guess who does the various voices. Mermaid Man is voiced by Ernest Borgnine and Barnacle Boy is done by Tim Conway. Patrick Star is voiced by exactly the actor I thought, Bill Fagerbakke from Coach and The Stand. M-O-O-N, that spells Patrick! The one voice that threw me for a loop was that for Mr. Krabs. Mr. Krabs is The Kurgan, from Highlander. Clancy Brown has quite an impressive list of rolls on IMDB, including a lot of voice-over work. But when you think about him, isn’t The Kurgan the first thing that springs to mind? Now, on top of hearing Mr. Krabs say, “I’ll save you, money!” and laugh, “Ack, ack, ack, ack, ack, ack, ack,” I’ll also picture The Kurgan ripping the top off a car and saying, “Mom.”

Now there’s some cognitive dissonance for ya!

The economic stimulus is going into the Senate, and it is a dreary certainty that republican know-nothings will make their usual bleatings about tax cuts. Of course the tax cuts republicans venerate are the ones designed to reward large corporations for exporting our jobs overseas and to make sure that those who can afford to consume the most resources (gas for their Hummers, wasted energy in their McMansions, fat bonuses for driving their companies into the ground) bear the least financial responsibility for the society in which they consume those resources.

And the average conservative on the street marches in lock-step with these ideas even to his or her own detriment! When corporations are rewarded with ridiculously low tax obligations do they take those savings to reinvest in American jobs? Not so far. So excuse me if I don’t trust in the better natures of these companies and those who run them. We have seen companies approach the federal government like some kind of Oliver Twist, “Please, sirs, may we have the tax-payers’ money so we can stay in business and keep employing those tax-payers?” And then we hear that the bailout money has gone to provide fat bonuses to the very people most responsible for their companies’ troubles!

I recently un-friended someone on Facebook for the kind of subtle racism-laden “joke” that he can later claim, “What? It was about my dog. You liberals just can’t take a joke! I hate this PC crap.” Before I un-friended him he repeated the classist, racist, and damnable lie that he makes more money than poor people because he works harder and therefore shouldn’t have to pay a higher percentage of taxes than those poor people. And this person claims to be a christian. I happen to think it isn’t very christian to expect that someone who earns a fraction of what you do should be required to pay the same percentage of taxes as you. What is an inconvenience for someone who makes 100K a year is an unbearable burden for someone who makes 20K or less per year. Your decision to buy a new car or not this year becomes a “choice” between paying for food, medications, or shoes for the children. And a christian is ok with this?!

So, let’s talk about why no one should grouse about paying taxes. Taxes are the dues we pay to live in a civilized society. Taxes are what we pay so we can get from point A to point B without paying usage fees to every property owner we pass. Taxes are the price we pay for the privilege of interacting with the vast majority of US citizens who are literate even though their parents couldn’t afford private schools. Taxes are what make our government function for the greater good of the people, and that is, full stop, a good thing. Some examples of what can happen when government doesn’t function for the people anymore: anarchy, fascism, oppression, violent revolution.

I don’t mind paying the taxes necessary to functioning in the modern world so I’m going to put forth some ideas for those of you who like to whine about taxes, bearing in mind that what we pay for in taxes belongs to each of us.

Get off of my roads. State highway systems, bought and paid for with the help of my tax dollars. Ditto on the Interstate highway system. Hope you don’t have any trouble negotiating on surface streets and toll roads to do all of your traveling .

Take your children out of my schools. Oh, I realize that some of you already have. Incidentally, if your religion can’t survive your children being taught evolution then it isn’t much of a religion. And even if you manage to send your kids to private schools or homeschool them, you and they will still be forced to function in the world with people who went to public schools. Isn’t it in your (and your kids’) best interest to make sure people (like me) coming out of public schools are literate and competent. Don’t you want your surgeon and your pilot and your bus driver to be able to read and think critically?

Hope you are never the victim of a crime, because all of those tax-payer supported police officers and FBI agents? They work for me.

Better invest in a sprinkler system for your house and buy lots of fire extinguishers, because that thoroughly socialist concept known as a fire department? Yep, mine.

Wouldn’t want you patronizing the library, what with all that tax money being “wasted” there.

Are your children prepared to care for you in your dotage? I assume you invested all of your retirement savings in the stock market because of your faith in the free market system. Well, we’ve seen what has happened there, haven’t we? And since you are so opposed to entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, I know you won’t miss that safety net.

And when all the rest of us decide that we are ready for a single-payer healthcare system because we don’t mind getting beneficial things for our taxes, you can just sit that one out.

I hope you are never flooded out, FEMA and the National Guard? You guessed it, they’re mine.

So unless you decide to chuck it all, move to a remote mountain cabin where you can scratch a barely subsistence-level existence out of the soil, and never burden polite society with your anti-tax, anti-government, anti-poor, anti-people, anti-children, anti-elderly, anti-knowledge, anti-safety, anti-health, nutty blatherings then you are politely invited to keep your poorly thought-out opinions to yourself.

But if you enjoy NOT living in a third-world (now politely called “developing”) country, then pony up. You have to pay your share, just like everybody else. And if your share is larger because your income is larger, then consider yourself blessed and dig out your wallet.