Fall Visitors

August and September are Ant Festival months, a much-anticipated annual event in this creaky old house. These pesky little insects just appear one day, and they seem to appear almost everywhere in the kitchen simultaneously. They’re skinny and small, about 3/8ths of an inch long, with rangy stilt-like legs. They’re not stubby and rounded like their outdoor cousins. Also they’re not deliberate and driven as though on a mission. While they can be very fast, most of the time they seem rather aimless. While they usually prowl around on the surfaces in the kitchen, I sometimes find one of them scaling the walls in the living room or wandering around among the flotsam on my desk. They don’t travel in packs or conga lines. They’re almost always alone, solitary and somewhat meandering in their leisurely pace, as though they were out for a stroll or on some ant version of a walkabout.

The only thing that draws a congregation is the maple syrup container. If I forget and leave it out too long in the morning, there are usually at least half a dozen ants, sometimes more, clustered around the cap or moving up and down the sides. Occasionally one makes it inside and I find him (I’m assuming it’s a him because they act so male-like.) breast-stroking in my tea after I’ve spooned in some syrup. Once, when I had failed to tighten the cap, I found a couple of dozen of them paddling around in the syrup inside as though it was some sort of community swimming pool. Their time in the pool seems to render them almost senseless or drunk; they slow way down and become easy to pluck out once you’ve emptied the syrup into a bowl. Then I always try to flush them down the drain; it’s a hopeless exercise and a great waste of water. Even in an inebriated condition their ability to resist a strong flow of water from the tap is astonishing. I don’t feel any compelling need to kill or eradicate them. I probably couldn’t accomplish the latter even if I wanted to. Anyway, my hands and fingernails carry around more possible toxins and diseases than their little feet possibly can.

There’s never enough of them to be really disturbing or worrisome. They’re not like a crowd of sumo wrestler-like carpenter ants, or even a mob of those really shiny black mustard-seed-like ants that accumulate in teeming masses looking as though they’re waiting for some rock concert to begin. These fall visitors are more like reedy hobos looking for the way to the Big Rock Candy Mountain. If I listen hard enough maybe I’ll hear one of them singing, “This Land Is Your Land, this Land Is My Land.”