Dust & Dyes: A Journey Through Grit, Glamour, and Grey Areas

Some stories grip your heart before you even realize it.

This is one of those stories.

The Sagacity Stories Series invites you into a world thick with dust, bright with dreams, and tangled with choices that leave no one untouched.

Book 1, Zoetic Solace, closes in Butte, Montana, in 1900.

Book 2, Reaching for Reveries, opens there again — a city pulsing with new dreams, old scars, and a restless future.

Butte is only the beginning — Sena’s story stretches across cities and states, across boundaries seen and unseen. Yet somehow, no matter where she goes, the ground beneath her feet is always the same: uncertain.

In 1900, Sena lives in the Paumie Block — not as a wife, not even as a performer anymore, but as a woman stranded between two worlds.Her husband Owen has vanished. Loneliness seeps into the cracks of her days. To survive, she turns to Madame Paumie’s Parisian Dye House by day, and clings to the fading applause of theater stages at night.

But surviving isn’t simple. Not in a world where every step could threaten your reputation — or your livelihood. Not in a time when women were rising up for suffrage while still judged by the narrowest sliver of “respectability.” Not when morality was a weapon just as much as it was an ideal.

Sena stands at a crossroads — one she never asked for.

Paumie's Parisian Dye House Source: Butte, America's Story, Episode 212, The Verdigris Story s

Every decision she faces is steeped in questions without easy answers:

• Is it possible to pursue your dreams while maintaining your self-respect?

• Can you choose stability over passion and not regret it?

• Can you live with the grey areas — or must everything be black and white to survive?

There is no safety net. Only the aching choice between staying in the shadows or daring to step back into the light — and risking everything.

This is what Sena goes through behind the scenes, in the quiet moments when no one is watching: The invisible wars. The silent reckonings. The desperate need to stay afloat, while still holding onto some small thread of who she once was — and who she might still become.

This summer, I’ll walk the streets of Butte — breathing in the air, standing where Sena once stood, imagining the way the wind must have carried the scents of dye, the sweat, the dust, through the air.

Every word I write is layered with research: the businesses next door, the headlines in the newspapers, the food served in corner restaurants. I want you to not just read Sena’s world — I want you to feel it.

Because Sena’s story isn’t just history. It’s a mirror, showing how some struggles — the fight between survival and dreams, morality and necessity — are timeless.

And if you’re curious about the woman running the Parisian Dye House — Madame Paumie — you’re going to want to meet her. She is one of the real historical figures woven into the story. One who led her own unique business at a time when women entrepreneurs were rare and remarkable. Sena learns skills from her that, trust me, will become vital in the dusty, dry years ahead…

But that's a story for another time. For now — stand at the crossroads with Sena. And it’s one hell of a story. Get all the details by reading The Sagacity Stories Series -- Zoetic Solace and Reaching for Reveries. 

P.S. If you can’t wait to hear about Madame Paumie, check this blog out! https://www.verdigrisproject.org/butte-americas-story-blog/butte-americas-story-episode-212-paumie-dye-house