Time for some serious dirty talk.
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We went away on a road trip for eight days and when we got back, old Casa Bushwhacked was covered with a thick blanket of it.
Dirt.
Not just powdery dust filmed over the furniture.
There was red dirt over everything.
It was though the Mallee had popped in for an Airbnb visit while we were away.
“Where does it all come from?” Mrs Whacked moaned.
“If dirt is always falling in and on our house, where does it come from and why?”
I offered to find out.
To get down and dirty, so to speak, and it turned out to be a fascinating issue.
Dirt is from Old Norse about 1000 years ago and was pronounced “drit” and meant – literally – excrement.
It has connections with words such as diarrhea, and in its original sense is still found in words and phrases such as “looking for the dirt on someone”, “eat dirt” and “dirty words and minds.”
So, the old homestead wasn’t covered in actual dirt – well, not much – but mostly soil … and a bale or two of corgi hair.
Dirt intrigues me and has since the year 1980 when a lovely bloke in London who was in charge of parking control in the central city, showed me a deep hole which was being dug for foundations for a new tall building.
His point was to prove that there was no such thing as a pure Cockney or even a pure Brit.
You could see layer after layer going deep into the earth.
Near the top was London of the World War II Blitz, lower came London of the Great Fire in 1666, then the detritus (see the drit link again?) of Tudor London, then to the agricultural layers around the time of the Norman invasion and down about 15 metres to Roman London.
And the question which sprung to mind is: why is history usually buried?
Why do archaeologists always have to remove the layers to expose the past?
Where did all this dirt come from?
And if everything in the past is buried, is the Earth actually getting fatter?
If we went away on a five-year holiday, would we have to dig our way to the front door?
A couple of years ago we were in Rome where we repeatedly walked past a very old church on Via Nazionale.
It used to be at street level, but the modern-day pedestrian looks down on its roof.
The official explanation is that there are three ways dirt buries things: it falls ever so softly from space, it gets blown and washed around by nature, it gets carted in and dumped by humans and corgis.
Having seen a fair few Mallee red-dust storms over the years, it seems that half the real estate in Bendigo, Ballarat and Melbourne came from the west and at this rate, Ouyen is one day going to be like the Grand Canyon.
There is one other source of dirt in our houses which is not nice to think about: organic material.
Yep, bits of dead skin, hair, the poop of dust mites, dead dust mites themselves, old pizza in the shag pile rug, that sort of thing.
I once read that in our homes we walk about in an invisible cloud of dead stuff which settles on your piano or your coffee table as dust.
It’s enough to make you want to have a shower, but that’s another dirty story for another day.
WAYNE GREGSON