It's over now, but in the spring the pine trees give off a pollen that covers everything in layers of yellow haze. Recently I came across these passages (in the New York Review of Books, November 20, 2008) from Edmund Wilson's journals of 1942, at Gull Pond on Cape Cod, describing the same phenomenon:

"As one walked in the water one encountered pines putting out their soft straw-colored (?) bunches of cones and smelling with a special almost sweet-fern fragrance. The baby cones seemed almost embarrassingly soft, almost like a woman's nipples."

"The little yellow buds of the pines are not the cones, neither these nor 'the candles', with bristly conelike scales, that rise from the middle of the cluster. The cones are little round green cones that grown underneath the branch. When you shake the soft things, they give out a lemon-yellow dust that looks like (lemon-colored) smoke."