pamelagmusings

Musings

Pam's Musings

My writing nook at my house in Laramie, WY.

My writing nook at my house in Laramie, WY.

A long time ago or once upon a time, stifled by the desire to get everything right on paper, rendered immobile by my inner and nasty critic, I was encouraged to read Bird By Bird, by Anne Lamott.  I have read it numerous times and often wish I could commit it to memory.  Ah, the perfection that comes from the memorized verse.  Lamott strikes out at the need and desire for perfection.  Instead, she pushes me to embrace the messiness of writing, to muse.  She tells me to let go and not worry about destination or the big picture.  She set before me the creed by which my musings are written, by which my inner wild woman craves to live:  “Don’t look at your feet to see if you are doing it right.  Just dance.”  When I muse, and this is a necessary part of my writing process, I don’t look.  I just write.  I hope you enjoy these musings.  I hope you muse as well.  

The Dust Among Us, May & June, 2026

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As a little girl, I joined my grandmother, once a week in the summer, when she cleaned my Aunt Cassie’s house. For a time, I simply followed her about, chattering incessantly, as she washed bedsheets, scrubbed floors, vacuumed, and dusted. I adored my grandmother, but her chores were of little interest to me, with one exception. In Aunt Cassie’s living room, a low wooden table with shelves was always veiled with dust, more dust than was visible on any other piece of furniture. It had become my job to remove all items from furniture to be dusted, and this particular table, stripped of items, yielded a delightful surface on which I could draw stick figures, flowers, and swirling tornadoes until Grandma moved in with her dust cloth.

Within a year, Grandma relegated all furniture dusting throughout my aunt’s house to me, and I loved the responsibility and outcome of the task. I continued my artwork, but I delighted in the necessary detail work that transformed dullness to rich shine. I loved the smell of freshness in a room barren of dust.

You might say I was quite fond of dust. It formed a great empty easel on the surfaces of tables and chairs. It was also, according to my grandfather, the means by which good fairies could enter a home. He and my grandmother had earlier lived in a house with an attic, and it was in one of the attic rooms that a sunbeam appeared each late summer afternoon. When my grandfather shook the window’s curtains, the sunbeam, suddenly aswirl with fairy dust, indeed created a ramp of dusty sunlight. “Fairies are tiny,” my German grandfather whispered, “but they’re there, dancing in the dust. And they will bring our house luck.”

Even now, as I clean under the beds and dressers, I sometimes swiff gently, wondering if luck is with us in the form of rather significant dust bunnies, products of two large Labradors and the elderly state of our house.

Despite the luck and the artistry that settled dust still affords me in my playful moments, I admit that at times, I am not fond of dusting. It’s not so much the veils themselves that drape every piece of furniture in the house, reminding me of an opening scene from a Dickens’ classic. It is that dust is reliable in its return; it will not disappoint.

A friend finds solace in believing that dust protects furniture from dings and scratches. I delight in drawing tornadoes, and I often find, as I move books and plants and trinkets, the tiny lost object of days gone by—the single earring or the slip of paper with the important phone number. I also put on music, when no one is around, and theatrically dance my way from table to chair to desk to shelf, swirling the dust cloth above my head.

The dance over, the feeling in the house is like the first day of Spring. And then, one of the Labradors rises from the floor, stretches, and shakes, from ears to tail. In the yellow-dust sunbeam, I sense the presence of the fairies, laden with good luck.