From the top of the next rise she looked down through towering curtains of bone-colored dust at the cement plant and its quarries, the whole place resembling a catastrophic bleach stain among the folded green and purple hills. Inside the joint-rattling roar of its machinery a certain half-shriek half-groan meant Dovid’s job was safe for now—the kilns were rotating. Underfoot the gravel danced minutely. The road around here was always spilling away, the bare treacherous clay showing through.

It was unusually fun to translate research into real-life setting when it came to this one–partly because I found such an excellent and thorough guide to cement-making basics in the Portland Cement Association (PCA) of Skokie, Illinois. If you don’t know the facts already, I hope you enjoy learning them as much as I did.