When I was little I hated the idea of living down South, the heat was merciless and I longed for the snow that I grew up around. Now that I’m older I guess I’m used to it. I love the big tree in the front yard of my childhood home, I used to climb all the way to the top and pretended I could navigate my way home. Back to where I had made a life for myself.
There’s a hole in that tree with rotting bits and ivy running up one side. It also has ants running in and out of it, all of them on little missions, making lives for themselves. Even now I leave them parts of my lunch, or leftovers of dinner whenever I visit mom and dad. An offering for the ants, so they don’t tear my parents’ house apart, so they’ll look out for them when I can’t. They’re not as young as they were when we first moved.
It’s amazing how two different species could work and play around each other. Wait do ants play? Do they have a life outside of their constant struggle for survival? Who knows maybe they have their own games like people do; ant, ant, goose! I wonder if they have families too, like at the end of a hard day do they go home to ant parents and ant children to eat the scraps they collected for the day? Do they think of us a giants trampling about above them? Like gods?
Do they pray? Pray to us? Are we the ears that hear their prayers for more food, to stop the rain that must be like floods to them? Do they pray to us to save them from predators? Are we their predators? Do they fear us? Do they hope to answer all of life’s questions and think we have the answers if they don’t? Do they look up at us and wonder? Do they get lost in that wonder? Do they resent us, hate us? Do they scream at the top of their ant voices to be heard by us? Do they want to be noticed by us?
Are we ants to someone else? Do we scream and shake our heads at those above us, if there is anyone above us? Are we it, the final say in the universe? I shake my head, over thinking about the lives of such trivial creatures, as I place the leftover peas in the hole and walk away into the summer heat.
