What the Dust Remembers

On the quietest mornings, before the crows wake and before the dogs begin their perimeter patrols, I step outside with my coffee and listen to the gravel road.

It does not speak, not exactly. But it remembers.

Each summer, a fine dust rises from its shoulders. It settles on the porch rails, on the window screens, on the topsoil of the tomatoes. There’s something solemn in that drift, like the faint hush of a prayer. If you’ve lived here long enough, you stop cursing the dust. You start noticing it…how it clings to the stems of thistles, how it hovers in the early sun like something undecided. It smells like the world coming alive.

Our road is not much to look at. A narrow bend of crushed limestone that runs past six homes and two cornfields before disappearing into a dip of trees. It’s a pleasant stretch of rural Minnesota…nestled among a few fragrant hills before the vast flood plain that begins just east of us and stretches all the way to Fargo. The county map doesn’t even label it by name…just a number, as if it were a mistake they meant to pave over years ago. We like it that way. Most of the time.

When the county posted the detour signs last summer…construction on the Highway 12…our little stretch became the chosen bypass. Day and night, cars spilled into our hidden place. The dust that had once risen politely now swirled in angry clouds, coating the screen door so thick we stopped using it. Every breeze carried the scent of brake pads and gasoline. Every inch of road bore down on us, like a friend had suddenly turned on us out of nowhere.

I remember the mailboxes leaning with exhaustion. The children counting out-of-state plates. My neighbor, dragging a lawn chair to the edge of his property just to scowl at each passing Ford. The road held all of it. The traffic. The tension. The long line of anonymous faces who never saw us…just a shortcut through an inconvenient summer.

When the construction ended, the cars left as suddenly as they came. And silence returned.

But I noticed something in me had shifted. For a few days, I missed the motion. The proof that something existed beyond the fields. The headlights that made the windows flicker at night like candlelight in an old church.

We’ve talked, all of us, about the question of paving. It comes up every year at the township meeting, somewhere between the motion to fund a new culvert and a heated discussion about the county assessor. Some want it for the convenience, the neatness, the way it might save a suspension or two. Others fear what paving might invite…more traffic, more speed, more visibility.

I listen. I nod. I say I haven’t made up my mind.

But the truth is, I have. I want both. I want the comfort of pavement and the poetry of dust. I want to be seen, but not visited. I want to belong to the map, and also to the margins.

The gravel road remembers those before us…wagon wheels, work boots, the padded feet of deer. It has no illusions about permanence. It expects change. But not all at once. Not with a steamroller.

So, I drink my coffee and listen. The gravel shifts slightly under each morning breeze. And I wonder if, like the road, I too can hold memory without bitterness. If I can love the hush even after knowing the noise.

And if, perhaps, the dust can be a kind of grace…not something to wipe away, but something to let settle.

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Zary Fekete grew up in Hungary. He has a debut novella (Words on the Page) out with DarkWinter Lit Press and a short story collection (To Accept the Things I Cannot Change: Writing My Way Out of Addiction) out with Creative Texts. He enjoys books, podcasts, and many many many films.

Twitter and Instagram: @ZaryFekete
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