My skin crawled before I even knew what I was looking at. Because it seemed as though the ground was moving. Not quaking or shifting, but writhing. Is it maggots? My usual peaceful morning walk turned abruptly into a horror movie as I tried to figure out what sort of foulness from which a mass of fly larvae could burst forth in such a way on the path right in front of me. I should turn away.
But I didn’t.
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And as I looked more closely, I could see that I was wrong. And of course I was wrong because Mother Nature would not have done that to me. This darker section of this asphalt wasn’t writhing, it was shimmering. Winged ants wiggled their way along the trail. How had they all come to be together in this particular spot of the trail? And how had the birds not already taken them all? Now that I could see that it wasn’t maggots emerging from some rotten flesh, I stepped carefully to the side so as to avoid stomping them and carried on my daily loop, wondering if they’d still be there when I next passed by them. Ten or so minutes later, they were mostly gone.
A robin stood innocently by.
In the interval, I clearly had not learned or seen what I was meant to learn and see from these creatures for as I walked further along the path, I saw another patch of winged ants. Like the first group, they were clustered around a crack in the asphalt that ran the width of the path. Had they recently emerged from the ground beneath? I considered that they were shaking their wings dry or else attempting (having never used those flight muscles before) to lift off from the ground. Still further on, another batch was doing the same shimmy shimmy shake shake with its brethren creating a sort of disco disc as sunlight glinted off their gossamer wings.
Three summers ago, a few times each week in July, a flock of starlings would take flight outside my kitchen window and murmurate through the sky over our roof and our neighbors’ houses. (Yes, in the summer, as unlikely as that might seem.) And it was beautiful and made me feel chosen.
But as I stand over these flocks of ants, I think of the magic of those birds taking flight. But I do not want to experience these ants in the same way. I can almost feel them flying up my nose and into my ears and I do not want to be chosen in this way and I take one step back but no more, thankfully, because then I would have missed the way they take flight not en masse but one by one, on their own, reminding me of (sorry for the spoiler) Charlotte’s babies at the end of the book about her web and the talking pig Wilbur. And I manage to find within myself the ability to appreciate a certain grace in their flight that I cannot see in their wingless cousins who somehow find their way onto my kitchen counters each spring.
Rhena Writes 