My husband and I don’t have a garage on our property, so we both park outside in the driveway all year. Our cars sit side by side during snow storms, hurricanes and the annual pollen explosion that happens every darn spring.
My car pretty much sits under a large oak tree and boy, does it bear the brunt of it. Yellow pollen dust covers every inch of my blue car from the end of April until July. Every time I think about getting behind the wheel, I have to grab a bottle of glass cleaner and a wad of paper towels just to clean off my back windshield, otherwise there is no way I would be able to see to back out of my driveway. Well, not safely anyway…
The pollen was pretty bad a few weeks ago and we haven’t had a ton of rain this month. And believe me, I watch the forecast for rain — and I’m parking my car on the street the second I see those dark clouds rolling in, because who doesn’t like a free car wash!
And the past few days the temperature has been in the high 80’s or just hitting 90 degrees, so any leftover pollen has now baked onto my car’s surface. I basically have a hard candy-coated shell glistening on every part of my car including that darn back windshield. It’s so sticky and gross that I would be embarrassed to pull into the parking lot of the local car wash. It’s that bad.
So yesterday I decided to wash it myself! I grew up washing my parents’ cars, I’m a grown adult — I can wash a car. So I pulled out a bucket, some car wash soap (it was even non-toxic!) and a multifiber cloth and I scrubbed that candy shell off! It took a few laps around and some serious scrubbing on some areas, and then I’m not tall enough to reach the entire roof, but that car got washed!
And then my husband told me that our hose wasn’t long enough to go from the water spigot on the side of the house to the driveway…so I used the bucket and a gardening watering can to rinse all the soap off my car. It took many trips from the spigot to the car, but think about all the Fitbit steps I got! And the car was finally sparkling clean!
This morning, the car had a layer of yellow pollen on it. But at least now I can take it to the car wash!
Notes from a Self Quarantine 