Dust to Dust

By Sally Franz

Vacuuming and dusting always killed me. I have always hated it. I will clean dishes, straighten the place, decorate, make the bed every morning, wipe off the kitchen surfaces and clean bathrooms and place flowers everywhere. But regular dusting and vacuuming seemed so ridiculous. It just settled back in place. So I avoided it like the plague. At least I did.

Then I decided to find out just what was inside dust. According to David Layton and Paloma Beamer, professors of environmental policy at the University of Arizona, (In a Time Magazine article 02/23/10) dust consists of a combination of shed bits of human skin, animal fur, decomposing insects, food debris, lint and organic fibers from clothes, bedding and other fabrics, tracked-in soil, soot, particulate matter from smoking and cooking, and, disturbingly, lead, arsenic and even DDT. Much of the toxins come from our shoes as we come into the house.

Turns out DDT, which was outlawed in 1972, still is in the air, the ground and likely in your carpets. In fact they suggested that your carpets are like their very own archeology dig showing what was going on in the environment through the years. (Maybe time for new carpets or hard floors.) Arsenic is also present. And while the major source of arsenic is volcanoes, it can come from car exhaust too, and fracking. Wait, Stop the presses. The American Chemical Society study of July 25, 2013 showed higher levels of arsenic in home water wells in the Barnett Shale fracking district than outside. So arsenic is in the air and water. Yikes!

Now you may counter that we can’t live like the boy-in-the-bubble or say that it never killed us before. But that was before we let companies toss vast quantities of poisons around willy-nilly into the water and soil right under our noses and feet.

This to preface the fact that I have been wrong about dust, VERY wrong. I assumed it was dirt from the air, some lint from an old dryer hose with a few crumbs of pound cake between my sheets. In fact, I had this myth going on that if a household had fewer people in it there would be less dust and therefor maybe I didn’t really care about cleaning, more specifically dusting all that often (read: at all if possible…unless company was coming over).

Add to that I have to now apologized (at least in my head) to all those flakes who said, “We take our shoes off in our house.” Geez, I thought, has everyone bought a Shiva statue and gone Zen monk and Feng Shui on me? I had a roommate once who was all gaga for Feng Shui. I would come home and the mirrors were turned around, the couch was dead in the middle of the living room and the toilet seat lid left down at night. Great for being half asleep at 3 am and peeing down your leg. She was worried about chi getting out. I was worried about pee staying in the toilet. So I ignored her and the “shoes off” mumbo-jumbo.

Anyway, I will start leaving shoes at the door, and turn the car off before I close the garage door, and YES I will try to get the dust off of surfaces in a timely manner, now that I know that it is literally trying to kill me.

Sally Franz and her third husband live on the Olympic Peninsula. She has two daughters, a stepson, and three grandchildren. Sally is the author of several humor books including Scrambled Leggs: A Snarky Tale of Hospital Hooey and The Baby Boomer’s Guide to Menopause. She hosts a local radio humor segment, “Baby Boomer Humor with Sassy Sally”.