A few weeks ago, I was driving down the highway when I noticed the sky had gone hazy and brown. The light came through thick, the way it does before a storm that never arrives.

That air was out of place. Austin is rain and green and trees. I grew up in Chihuahua. I know dust. I’ve seen how the wind lifts it, how a day turns the color of sand. And suddenly, there it was again, right in the middle of all this green.

Then I remembered the post I had scrolled past a few days before. A wave of dust lifted off the Sahara desert and rode the wind across the entire Atlantic, into the Gulf, over Texas. Sand from the far side of the planet hung in the air above my car.