All we are is dust on the wind....

I don't know what image reading that title brought to your mind, but for me, I think of the dust bowl of the 30's that wiped out the bean industry, farmers dreams, and blackened the skies of the Eastern seaboard cities. It is also a line and the title of a nice song. There are numerous other references in different religious philosophies that reference that line in one way or another also, however I am not nearly that deep in my subject matter for this blog. I really am focused upon the dust part and not so much on the wind part.

For most of my life, I lived on paved roads and streets. You only lived on dirt roads if you were a farmer or very poor. I did live in a town when I was young that only had 8 paved streets up until about 1970 when they got enough money to start paving all the streets and putting in sidewalks. The one thing that set even that event off from just living on dirt roads was the fact of oiling. Every summer the municipal street department would dredge up oyster shells from the bay and crush them up and spread them on the streets.

Here is a photo of an oyster shell road before being oiled.

Then after a few days would bring out the rollers and crush and pack the shell down into the road and then take used recycled motor oil and "Oil" the streets. If you can, imagine a water truck with the long pipe running from side to side where the rear bumper of the truck is usually located, and think of the pipe with holes in it for the water to spray out onto the dirt as the truck drives along. Now replace the water with oil. Black oozy oil spraying out onto the surface of the street. Not really too bad if you factor in the cost of the used oil instead of asphalt. Back then, used oil was something that people would pay to just to get rid of it. That and the fact that the city got the equipment donated to it added up to great savings for the city, AND it worked! It was just one notch short of actually paving the street. Cars and trucks passing over the street, packed down the material, it was black, and sort of looked like asphalt. You had to be careful for several days after the "paving" if you rode a bike. Too sharp of a turn and you would end up with very black road rash. Yuck! Mom was not very happy about the permanent stain on your jeans.

All of this rant is just the lead in to say that I miss the oil on the road. No really! Because I live on a dirt road. "So what?" you might say. Well, if you were thinking that or something like it, let me be the first one to tell you that living on a dirt road in New Mexico is not quite like living on a dirt road in other places. The dust here is almost like volcanic ash after an eruption. The dust here covers everything after a storm (which more likely than not does not include rain, just wind) with a reddish layer ready to whirl into the air at the slightest breeze. With the lack of humidity, most things have a static electric charge which causes the dust to cling. If you do brush it off, it immediately is drawn back to the surface that you just cleaned.

I never thought that this would be an issue. Unfortunately, or fortunately, however you wish to look at it, it has become an issue with me. Call it snobbery or unreal expectations of life, there it is. To bring home the point even more, we, Jude and I, went into Rio Rancho for our regular scheduled dental check up and had the car washed. My car, which is affectionately known as Belle, is a Chev. Trail Blazer (some would say SUV, but actually it is classified as an MPV or multi-purpose vehicle) and is dark blue in color with black trim. The car wash was a delightful event and made us feel like real city folk, what with a clean car and all.

Belle clean and swell.

Well, that feeling crashed and burned when we got back home and took a look at Belle.

Belle not so clean and swell.

I will leave you today with a poem that I penned waaay back in the last century, 1997.

BETIMES

Shackles rattling in the darkness, not very close but too near for one to feel at ease,
bringing thoughts and ghosts from beyond memory,
to harass and haunt what we like to keep to ourselves in our innermost parts,
protected, undisturbed, unenlightened, secure in unchanged ignorance, primeval.
A name, a face, a culture reaches across the barrier to invade and make chaos from order.
Alien feelings thrust forward like little toad tongues snapping up fleeting irrelevancies like tiny insects,
making us gag emotionally as we teeter in our apathy and watch unseeing.
The hand of conscience never still but working like a shuttle, back and forth, back and forth guided by the
expert hands of guilt, weaving our "used-to-be's" into a pattern of sorrow and joy,
completing the fabric of our life that we use to cover those naked places where none save one tread.
Even barefooted we leave deep socketed tracks through the emotional loam of our character,
sometimes tripping on a stone of a hard memory, a thing regretted, painful, but deeply embedded.
On occasion we feel it and worry at it like a sore tongue on a chipped tooth.
Left alone it will heal, but do we?
All of this for the sake of what we have been in order to make up what we are and what we will become.
Willfully or not,
we will become.

Thanks for tuning in. Have a great day and have a little fun when you can.
Remember, don't take life too seriously because you will never get out of it alive anyway.