Walnuts on a Plane

I told you that, so I could tell you this:
I was flying back to Vancouver from Montreal with a bag of mixed nuts. I love nuts, when they aren't hiding in cakes. Nuts in ice cream by the way is perfectly acceptable. Salads. Chocolate. Just not cake. In fact I even like them on top of a muffin, which is far from hidden. So nuts in a bag - perfect. Unless of course they are walnuts. And or pecans, the walnut wannabe. But in this bag of nuts, I found no walnuts, nor any pecans. And if I had, I would have simply picked around them.
Having nearly finished the bag of nuts and wanting the last few tucked in the edges of the bottom of the bag, I chose, rather than to pick them out, to pour them out. Delicious. Having finished the bag, I put it away in the seat pocket in front of me and thought nothing more of it.
A short while later, I began rubbing my eyes. I suppose I had been doing it all along. I was tired. More to the point, I was rubbing my eyes incessantly. It was a strange sensation that seemed to be getting worse. Of course, denial was my first reaction. I'm just tired, I said. It will go away soon, I thought. And as I headed towards looking more and more insane, denial made way for concern.
Through red swollen eyes I read the back of the bag of nuts and in the list of ingredients I found walnuts. It was my best guess that in the powder at the bottom of the bag was at least a trace amount of crushed walnuts and when I poured that into my hand some of that trace stayed on my fingers.
No one wants to experience an allergic reaction. And the first time is probably the worst, because you don't have a sense of its limits. Now what you certainly don't want is to have that first allergic reaction on a five hour plane flight. In fact, on first glance, I would say it is the worst place to do so.
The cure was pretty simple and straightforward. I washed my hands and face and stopped touching my eyes. By the time we landed, I just looked tired and upset.
The lesson for me is a pretty easy one to live by: Don't rub walnuts in my eyes.