Turns out, I already used the headline “Sandstorm” once before. So our minds do travel in the same ruts, probably even moreso as we get older. The same thoughts at about the same point in the process.

Anyway, at this moment we are having the most alarming weather of our limited meteorological options in this part of the Middle East.

The sandstorm.

Give me rain, any day. Well, not every day, here, but any day. Even the cloudbursts … they might leak into our living spaces and make slick the oily roads … but you don’t feel a general health risk.

Also, too, once you’ve been here a year, you accept the reality of about 180 consecutive days of searing heat. It’s a wet heat, too, and it’s oppressive, but you can plan for it, and you deal with it, and you make sure the AC is working and you scurry from one air-conditioned place to another.

In the “winter” … we get a few days of clouds. I have this theory that when you are exposed to as much light as we get here in the Gulf, you start to go weird after maybe one day of overcast. But that doesn’t happen often. The winter is 95 percent mild sun. In the 70s or low 80s.

The sandstorm is what alarms me.

I began to notice it early in the day, without completely making the connection. It was a bit dark outside, and I looked out the one window we have that faces the world and I saw overcast overhead and figured it was clouds. Maybe some sand. We had a bit of breeze.

Then I noticed that my flip-flops suddenly seemed to be sliding around on the stone floor. inside the apartment. As if they had dust on the bottom of them. It took me hours, literally, to realize that it wasn’t dusty flip-flops … it was sand leaking into the apartment and settling on the floors, coating them.

During the night (it’s February here now), the wind blew hard. And when the wind blows hard here, it picks up tons and tons of dirt and sand and lifts it high in the air and into things. Like into your air-conditioner, into your house, into your car and into jet engines. (I really would not want to be flying on a day like this; how much dirt can a jet engine suck in before it seizes up? Really, I want to know.)

And, of course, it gets into your lungs. Really fine, tiny, dangerous particles.

I have had asthma of varying degrees of severity since I was 12. I have issues with cigarette smoke, and I have almost instant issues with air so dirty you can taste it. Like it is here during sandstorms.

Some people claim sandstorms have been a reality here forever. Others suggest they have gotten worse in the past few decades because of creeping desertification in areas north and west of us (and our weather normally comes from the north and the west), particularly in Iraq.

All I know is … it’s awful, and it alarms me like nothing else here. (Aside, perhaps, from the prospect of a long walk on a 115-degree day.) The windows are closed, the AC is coming on and I hope the filter doesn’t get clogged.