WHERE WE FIND OURSELVES

We are dust, and to dust we will return. The words are ancient first showing up in The Book of Common Prayer in 1549, but they rang in my ears as we toured the Sauer-Beckmann Living History Farm in the Texas Hill Country. I found myself thinking less about history as dates and more about history as dust. What do we leave behind as we live our lives, in our kitchens and bedrooms, porches and barns, every space we pass through and every object we touch. The rooms of this beautifully preserved farm are full of the particles left by the families that once lived here. That is what I was meditating on as I captured these photographs.

Dust is the first ghost we ever meet. It waits on the windowsill, gathers in corners, glitters in a shaft of light. We think of it as neglectful housekeeping, something to sweep away, but dust is made of particles of us. It is proof that we are here, but also that we won't always be. To walk through these rooms is to walk through layers of lives, some remembered in history books and some that we will never even know their names. All still present in the air, on the floorboards and in the objects that endure.

The cotton glows in the half light from yonder window

Yonder window

The boll weevil was responsible for devastating the cotton industry in Texas. It crossed the Rio Grande in 1892 and had traveled all the way through Texas by the 1920's.

Corn husk dolls

The garden plentiful

The rangers actually work the small farm

Things you need hung in convenient places

The beauty of homegrown tomatoes

Herbs drying

For remedies and recipes

Plaster crumbles leaving dust on the floorboards along with memories of the seasons it has weathered and the people who have leaned against it.

Kitchen is the heart of the home

Dust softens the light turning the view outside into a dreamscape

Reflections in an antique mirror

Dust softens the edge of memories

Even gates hold memories of those that shaped them

Water is life

Pig getting fat bacon to follow

We are dust, and to dust we will return.

But before we return, we scatter, leaving traces in the bend of a chair, in the hollow of a door knob, or the soft air above a bed. Ghosts are not always scary apparitions, often they are just particles, waiting for the right light to be seen.

Maybe that's the quiet mercy of dust, it carries us forward, speck by speck, into the lives of the ones that come after, reminding them that, once in this place, we existed.