Textile Ghosts

Little balls and streams of fluff keep appearing in our yard. For a while I've assumed that someone burst a pillow or something and the stuff has been drifting to us

This town is an old mill town where the mill closed. A while back a Kannapolis old-timer told us about how our house was built on land where the mill dumped textile byproducts. No wonder the soil's so rich and dark. But we decided to get the soil tested; who knows what chemicals may have been in those byproducts?. Still waiting on the results. Another old-timer tells us that it'll probably be a while...

The other day I chatted with a local preacher who bemoaned the stuck-in-the-past "lintheads" who yearned for the demolished mill to be rebuilt and reopened. Lintheads, huh?

Later I took a walk around town, and noticed those bits of fluff in the yards of houses far from ours.

Fluff... lint... textiles... suddenly it all made somber sense. Little tactile ghosts, byproducts of a lost mill, tumbling on the wind or oozing up from below to remind us, again and again, that this town was built on textiles.