On Dust

My family is currently in the process of fixing up our house. It had been pretty much destroyed by a fire before we bought it a few months ago (and the parts that weren't ruined were fairly ugly), so the whole place needed to be gutted and rebuilt on the inside. It's not finished yet, but as for the months' worth of work already completed, most of it was done by my dad, who can do nearly anything as long as he's got his extensive collection of tools nearby.  

Anyway, a couple weeks ago, he was removing the flooring in the foyer so we could replace it with tiles. Don't ask me what tool he was using, because I don't know--some sort of device that cuts the floor up, maybe--I just know that the process required the production of dust. Lots and lots of dust.

So he surrounded the area with sheets of plastic curtains, to protect the rest of the house from the dust, and pulled on his face mask, and got to work.

In the meantime, I'm upstairs in my room with the door shut, doing school and trying to drown out the noise of whatever Dad's doing by turning up the radio. And then ten or so minutes go by, and my mom comes in, letting in air that is curiously shaded gray as she opens the door. She's all distressed, and says, "Clog your doorknob-hole, and make sure your door is shut all the way! Don't leave your room! There's a leak!"

(My doorknob-hole was pretty much what it sounds like: the empty hole in my door where my doorknob should have been. This was waaaay back last month, when we still didn't have doorknobs, but none of us minded much because it was exponentially better than the brief stage when we didn't have doors.)

So I get a pair of socks and clog my doorknob-hole, and then, you know, open the door even though Mom told me not to, because, come on, I really wanted to know what was happening. And as soon as I open the door, a wave of grime hits my eyes and my nose and my mouth, tearing up my eyes and blocking my airways and coating my tongue, so I jump back in my room and shut the door and go straight for the bottle of water on my bedside table.

It takes a long time for the dust to fully settle, and many rounds of vacuuming before the house is reasonably clean again. My parents' room's door had been left open, and every surface was covered with a blanket of gray.

My dad hadn't sealed up his work site tightly enough, and hadn't spotted the leak until it was too late. My mom, my siblings, and I had been in rooms with shut doors, oblivious to what was going on outside.

Dust. It hides in the air, taking refuge in plain sight. It fills up the nooks and crannies. It goes unnoticed, building up slowly, gradually, until one day you realize that you're surrounded by dust, that you've been breathing it in all along, unsuspecting. All of a sudden it hits you, how it's filling you up more and more with every breath, how dusty you are, how dusty your life is. How hard it will be to clean up the mess--because with every motion, with every step you take to attack it, the air and wind lift the dust from the surfaces and carry it to somewhere else, lying in wait to attack you again.

You have to be on your guard against dust. It's better to never let it in, rather than struggle to drive an unmanageable amount of it out. It's better to get rid of it bit by bit, day by day, rather than risk suffocating in it by letting it build up.

Are you guarding yourself against your dust?