Beaten Senseless

Today we took all the carpets out of our house into the backyard and tried to beat the dust of ages out of them. They look pretty much the same, but I don't. There's something different about me. I think it's not just the pink in my cheeks brought out by the slightly chilly air and the unaccustomed exercise. It's not the embarassment caused by having the neighbors see a cloud of debris rising into the air behind the voodoo bungalow. It's that I'm now lightly powdered in dirt that once blew across the steppes of Mongolia, sand that perhaps drifted across a ziggurat, that was collected in a tiny pot in Nevada, that irritated a Japanese pearl, that blurted from a diggery-doo, that once erupted in a stellar nursery along with the stuff that made Jupiter. You get the picture: I am a child of the universe. I look a little bit proud of myself.