“Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
dust thou art, to dust returnest,
was not spoken of the soul.” ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
She said it just before the lightning forked across the western sky. One hand on the steering wheel, I had turned and caught the tilt of her head and tone of her words, just as the sheet of white flashed behind the arching bolt framed by the passenger window.
Perhaps it was the tingling aura of power charging the air, but I tend to think it was more the weight of what she said next that seared her words into my mind.
“After combining the wheat all afternoon with Dad in the fields, we’ll need to go home for baths, won’t we?” Hope brushed her tangled hair out of her face. She looked around at her tired, grimy brothers. “We are all like… dust.” And then the lightning tore up the blackening sky.
I couldn’t speak. A nod would have to suffice. My fingers, but shaped dust, fumbled to slip through Hope’s dirty ones. I squeezed tight. Heavy raindrops pelted against the windshield.
We drove home from the harvest fields, dust in a rainstorm.
And in that moment I knew who I was: just dust, headed Home.
Lord, this body came from it, and there will return. I am a flower fading, a leaf blown away, dust returning. My time on this dirt is short….and then the earth opens up and my body lies deep. But I, I am coming home to You. Let this body of dust breathe, live, love, laugh well… until then.
