You learn something every day
If someone tells you about borrowing fuzz they have accumulated through accretion,
you’ve learnt about lent lint (though some people don’t lend in the stretch leading up to Easter,
so you’re out of luck for lent lint in Lent—feel free to substitute lentils),
but lint doesn’t come as one size fits all, no one pulls a uniform
fuzzy orb from a pocket knowingly. They are galaxies of uncertainty.
They built quantum computing. Trained, you can read the future in a good pile of unlent Lent lint (so I’ve learnt).
Dryer lint. Pocket lint. Sock lint. Their ancestor, archaeologists call the Ur Lint,
the common ancestor to all species of lint, once roamed the steppes
and savannas, mountains and jungles in cosmic peace, unknown to outsiders, unaccretedly
independent. We all know the ensuing history. The last observation of free lint was over 100
years ago. The domesticated variety is now all that’s left. Lint zoos were once as depressing
as kazoos are not. Lucky for lint, we live in an age where people have begun to take responsibility
for their actions and adopt lint in an effort to repopulate the world with undomesticated fuzz.
Many houses now contain “dust bunnies,” as wild and free as tumbleweeds on western
movie sets. Some are swept away. Pests, people claim, no better than rodents—of which, of course,
they are distantly related, but imagine someone trying to sweep a porcupine out from under the couch—
size does matter, and so does a highly developed defensive system. Some people, a lucky few,
have become like midwives or kangaroos to a new generation of lint, fostering lint babies
in their belly buttons. These linty belly button babies are a new generation of hope,
a generation to prove that we’re all here to help each other, living side-by-lint, acknowledging
our roots, from dust to dust, all rolling across main street, hiding under the couch,
dreaming of the wombs we came from and to which we will return.