# 27 DUST CONTROL

Every year same discussion. The neighbors to the east and the neighbors to the north want to know if we’re going to kick in for a portion of the cost for the local municipality to apply dust control to our main road. And because Hub will not allow it to be ever said that he took unfair advantage or he was unjust in his appropriation of what is right and equal and fair, once again, he wrote out a check that we can ill afford for dust control.

I sulked and cringed. Seems he had forgotten our discussion last year. We happen to live on a 4-way intersection. The stretch of dust control runs north and south but the summer winds come from the southwest so the road treatment gives us virtually no protection. From dawn to dusk, dust pours in my south and west-facing windows each time a vehicle goes by whether they are travelling east and west or north and south.

If I spent every day riding across the bald prairie in an open wagon, I wouldn’t be eating more dust than I do right now, day in and day out. Last week the farmer north of us was seeding the field across the road and I now have enough fertilizer and dust in this house that with a little water I could probably grow real indoor-outdoor turf on my kitchen floor. If the numbers were added up, I buy so many bottles of End-Dust, I have a sizable ownership in the company. The vacuum cleaner sucks up what it can, but most of it takes to the air and remains in flight until the motion of the cleaning machinery is quiet and still.

There is a twirly-bird vent on the roof of the house. Now I don’t know a lot about physics so I don’t know if this vent is supposed to propel air in or out, but I do know that the water in Australian homes swirls the opposite way down the drain as it does in Canada. So I checked my twirly-bird vent hoping it was twirling in an Australian direction. But no such luck. It is rotating in fine form and at top speed in the same direction as swirling toilet and sink drains in Canada. That means that it is efficiently sucking. Sucking in any of the dust in the air that didn’t manage to climb in the windows.

So what is the solution? It’s tough, but something must be done. The solution is don’t move, don’t vacuum, don’t exercise, don’t make beds. Just sit at the computer all day and read electronic literary offerings because paper books only create more dust. Computers, on the other hand, have a special ability to zap a good share of dust out of the air and hold it fast to the screen. So why am I writing this entry. This is the one thing I can do that will not stir up MORE dust!

If you deal with as much dust as I do -- I'd like to hear from you. If you live in a dust-free neighbourhood, in a dust-free house, I could use some sympathy or discussion about what that kind of living is like, cause I will never know.