Dust

It never ceases to amaze me at how many different kinds of dust there are. Every place I've lived I've encountered a different kind. It's everywhere! Where I come from there seems to generally be two main kinds of dust. The first is the stuff that's blown around every spring, also known as top soil. This blows from one province to another, then back again, every spring. The second kind is the dust that hides under beds and behind anything that isn't flush against a wall. This dust usually accumulates and amalgamates into what are ubiquitously known as dust bunnies. No matter how many times you suck them up with the vacuum cleaner, they reappear, glom together and mulitply like - you guessed it - rabbits (thus the name).
Living in the Middle East, the predominant kind of dust was sand. Some of it was very fine, while some of it was a little coarser. In truth it really didn't matter what kind of sand it was when the wind was up because it all felt like you were being sandblasted - which is fine for really tough to clean buildings, but not so great for faces. I've been told it's called dermabrasion and some people pay a lot of money to have it done. Guess I'll consider myself "lucky" to have had it done for free. Personally I could have lived without it, but there it is. The fine sand always managed to find its way into the apartment, no matter how hard I tried to plug up gaps around windows and doors. In fact, if I wasn't careful I could actually count on having sand dunes in my place (although they were exceptionally tiny compared to the rest of the desert, they could still be seen).
I left the Middle East and the sand for Mexico. I certainly didn't think I'd experience much dust there. Ha! Little did I know that not all of Mexico is jungle. In fact the part I lived in (central Mexico), had no jungle at all and in fact was quite dry. Naturally there was dust. Not the ordinary house dust (though there was that as well), but a fine silty dust that wasn't quite dirt, and wasn't quite sand, but certainly got on everything. It wasn't in great quantities, but it was there. So what did I do next to get away from the dust (or so I thought)? I moved to India. Again everyone - well ok, me- thinks of India as being predominantly jungle. Not so. In fact I currently live on a plateau in the middle of a group of lesser mountains (back home they'd be called foothills). The dust here is different yet again. It comes in a number of varieties and at different times of the year (it's not nearly as dusty during the monsoons - funny how that works). The first kind of dust is a fine, powdery dirt that blows in and sits on everything. A person never gets their place really clean, you mostly push dirt from one place to another and maybe some of it gets up by the vacuum or swept up and thrown out, but an hour later it's back. The second, and much nastier kind is the sootie dirt that clings to everything. This dust is just nasty. It's greasy and sticky and when counters, etc. are washed (and it's the only way to get rid of this particular kind of dust), the rag or papertowel or whatever you are using comes up black. The residue is really hard to get rid of off cloth and often never comes out. Yuck.
Ah well. This summer I'll be moving to a new country. Wonder what kind of dust I'll find there.