Refusing to Dust
I like a clean house, but I don’t like to clean it. I particularly to do not like dusting.
Part of that is because the job is made more difficult due to my tchotchkes: some shells (I am a Floridian after all), candle sticks, decorative tea pots, and more. I say I’m a minimalist, but I’m also sentimental.
Mostly, I hate it because I’m allergic, and it’s not really dust that’s the problem but dust mites — bugs living in that dust. It’s worse, really, because what I’m actually allergic to is dust mite poop. If we thought too much about what we breathe, we probably would pass out from holding our breath.
An article I read described dust as, “More than just dirt, house dust is a mix of sloughed-off skin cells, hair, clothing fibers, bacteria, dust mites, bits of dead bugs, soil particles, pollen, and microscopic specks of plastic.” Honestly, it just got worse from there.
The article explains that dust contains our unique signature given that it is made up of hair and skin that also attracts contaminants we may drag into our homes.
This is why dust can be symbolic. It has a story to tell.
The great Irish writer James Joyce wrote his short story collection Dubliners to hold a “looking glass” up to the Irish with a recurring theme of paralysis. In one way or the other, these characters are stuck.
In “Eveline,” Joyce uses dust to make his point.
Eveline is a young woman still living at home with her abusive alcoholic father in Dublin. (Aside: I just sneezed. I really do need to dust.)
Joyce introduces her as leaning her head against window curtains “and in her nostrils was the odour of dusty cretonne,” the fabric of the curtains.
Eveline is contemplating the past and her future as she gazes out the window. She has decided to leave home at last. “Home! She looked around the room, reviewing all its familiar objects which she had dusted once a week for so many years, wondering where on earth all the dust came from.”
The dust is her history and her present.
We get a quick inventory of Eveline’s situation: a dead mother, a dead brother, another brother too busy to help, Saturday night arguments with her drunken father who wants the house money for alcohol not the groceries that are needed, and a constant fear that he will become violent against her, his nineteen-year-old daughter.
Now, though, there is a chance to walk away from the dust — the stagnation of her life — thanks to Frank, the sailor who loves her, wishes to marry her, and wants to take her far away to Buenos Ayres.
Throughout all of this, Eveline continues “to sit by the window, leaning her head against the window curtain, inhaling the odour of dusty cretonne.”
The symbolism is clear. The window is an opportunity for change, a look outside free from the dust of guilt over leaving her father and from the fear of leaving what is familiar.
The dust wins.
Eveline goes to the dock, initially choosing freedom and a life with Frank far away from the dust, but she can’t follow through, can’t follow him as he “rushed beyond the barrier and called to her to follow.” Instead, she is paralyzed, “passive, like a helpless animal” as he rushes off to a new life without her.
I don’t dust because I procrastinate when it comes to things I don’t like. Then it gets dustier, which means I want to dust even less, and on and on and on.
And, like Eveline, I confess to resisting change, sometimes preferring that dust over the window that leads to new vistas and the unknown.
None of us can escape dust.
We can’t escape change either.
We might as well accept both and maybe even embrace change.
