My overlong convalescence from the cold that won't quit trapped me indoors for four days, just long enough to finish some books I'd been floundering in the middle of. Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time was the prize — my track record with non-fiction is not a thing of which I'm proud. This book of dust storms, of farmers, of Model-Ts and centipedes crawling up the walls of dirt huts in Oklahoma, though, had me engrossed to the point where, in my tidy corner of blankets on the living room couch, I felt as if the dust had seeped through the white pages and covered me, battered my eyes, left a lingering scratch in the back of the throat.

Or was that just the cold.

I forget sometimes that non-fiction can move me as well. That quite often it moves me at a more visceral level. I also forget that I'm involved in the creation of my own non-fiction here. Picking up pieces, scraps, to put together a history, a personal narrative. Trying to tell future me what past me used to be like. In the olden days.

For instance, three years ago today, I wrote the following elsewhere:

In November I walked the streets of Riga in yellow rubber boots. As I turned down Peldu Iela, two men laughed and shouted: "what do you think you are, an artist or something?" I shrugged and carried on. When Gustavs saw me, he sang a song about "me and my big yellow boots" that he remembered from his childhood. Anna and her friend kept saying how cool they were, so when I left, I gave Anna my big yellow boots. I returned to New York, and bought myself a pair of orange rubber boots. Walking up Broadway in them today, conquering puddles, I expected to hear someone call out: "what do you think you are, an artist or something?" But no one did.

Orange rubber boots? Artist indeed. These days the closest I get to color are the red buttons on my Campers; the rest is almost always exclusively, deeply, and predictably gray. (And apparently, I'm not alone in my monochromism.)

But after reading a book about dust, and as the bitterness of February sinks in, causing me to grumble about how my bangs are too long, how the bathtub drains too slowly, how time seems to be moving too fast for me to keep up, how much 2008 just plain sucks, I'm starting to feel the need for color to creep back into my wardrobe. A soft purple top dug up from the bottom of my closet. My old cozy green wool jacket teased off the hanger. There's even one dress, my deep dark secret: bronze, red, blue, and green.

But orange rubber boots? I'm afraid that these days, those to me are nothing more than old fiction.

(This was meant to be that promised post on soil conservation, until it became something else entirely. Still, I wouldn't want you to think I came away from reading this book with only superficial thoughts on the palette of my wardrobe, so I point you in the very incredible direction of the database of photographs from the Farm Security Administration — one of the most exciting visual histories to come out of early 20th century America.)