About This Blog

Settled Dust is a series of short stories, vignettes really, mostly true, or at least mostly true to the best of my aging recollection and written using the vernacular style.

The title comes from my early experience growing up on a farm in rural northern Minnesota. The farmhouse back door opened onto 100 square miles of uninhabited wilderness that I regularly explored. A dirt road connected our farm to civilization and in the summer, when it was dry, a car or truck would pass by leaving an impressive plume of dust in its wake that would remain in the air long after it passed. Even as a young person, I saw this as a metaphor for our busy lives. It seems we frantically drive down the road of life as fast as we dare with a large dust cloud developing behind us. This cloud obscures our vision of the past. If we chance to look back over our life, we can’t see anything because the dust obliterates our view. It is only by stopping and getting off the road to let the dust settle that we can examine our lives with better clarity and hope to learn and gain perspective. Now as an adult, this metaphor has repeatedly shown itself to be an uncanny resemblance of my life.

It is with this picture in mind that, from time to time, I like to get off the road and sit down in wild nature and let the dust settle in my life so I can look back on my recent travels to gain perspective.

So by way of introduction, these vignettes are about letting dust settle on life’s roads I’ve traveled and share what I was thinking and what I may have learned that applied to my life. If, perchance, I’ve gained perspective for my life, I hope it is of some solace or use to you. I do not pretend to have the answers for others, I can only describe the roads I’ve travelled and what I learned, and in too many cases, what I relearned.

At the first of each month, a new vignette will be added.

 

Thanks for reading.