What is all this dust?

As a city vitki - albeit a city with some trees - I see a lot of dust. It's everywhere, and we spend a lot of time trying to get rid of it. I also work in a shop, and remove dust daily. One of the branches of the shop is in an old, exposed-brick building in a dirtier part of the French Quarter. I watch the bricks turn themselves into dust, then sweep the building outside of itself.

So much of the dust, we know, is us. Bits of skin flaked off and sent away. In a town as old as New Orleans, as brick-cemeteried, as hurricane-hit, there is a lot of dust-that-is-us. We are mixed with those bricks, blown by those winds, settle into corners or skitter along the streets along with the generations of dust and dander (for we love our pets).

There will come a day when we will be getting into people's eyes, making them stop and rub (despite every mother's admonition to Don't) to try to get us out. We will mingle with the bricks, we'll travel on the winds, we'll meet new old dust and be part of that history, that mobile layer visiting, being swept up, visiting elsewhere.