Widespread Dust

When you live in the desert, there's gonna be a lot of dust in your life. When you consider how much sand is out there in the desert to be blown our way, it's really not surprising. So we deal with it by having our car washed daily and our floors cleaned several times a week, and by keeping things sealed and covered. And it's just common knowledge that anything left out in the open is going to get very, very dusty if you don't clean it regularly.

Sometimes we have real live dust storms, where the dust is so thick it stings your eyes and makes your teeth feel gritty. On days like that, it's painfully obvious how very dusty our city can be. But the fact is that even on clear days, there's still a tremendous amount of sandy junk in our air.

That's what we got a reminder of this week.

The weather has been really nice and springy lately, so last Thursday I decided to leave our windows open. We have two large windows directly opposite each other in our living and dining areas, so it creates a nice cross breeze to have them both open. Here's one of the open windows:

Now Thursday is one of our much-anticipated "housekeeper days," so she showed up around 10 a.m. After cleaning the kitchen, she moved to the dining area and thoroughly wiped down the table. It was still sparkling clean when we sat down for lunch at 1:00 p.m., which is why I was so incredibly shocked to find this... 

just four hours later! Around 5:00, I was standing in the kitchen looking into the dining room when I noticed that the setting sun shining through the window was illuminating every single speck of dust on the table...and there were LOTS of specks to illuminate! I was seriously floored to see how much dust had accumulated on my table in one afternoon. And here's the kicker--it wasn't a dusty day! If it were, I never would have dreamed of leaving the windows open. But since it was a nice, normal day outside, I thought it might be ok. The kids graciously agreed to draw some pictures in the dust, just so that you could see how bad it was.

Like I said, that wasn't a terribly dusty day. However, today we had one of those days, so I kept our windows shut tight. I also took a picture, so you can see the difference. The first photo is from March 15, a cloudy but clear day.

This second photo is from today, April 1. It's like putting on a pair of beige-tinted glasses. This is one of those days when you might get on weather.com and find that the forecast for our city is "widespread dust."

Thankfully, we have many more clear days than dusty days, and you can be sure that when the breezes are blowing and the temps are agreeable, I'm going to keep opening our windows, even if it means we have to wipe the table down before dinner!