I weeded our patio bricks yesterday. This involves pulling out the Queen Anne’s lace, violets, lilies of the valley, chocolate mint, creeping jenny, horsetail, and more that somehow thinks it can thrive in the sandy, sun-blasted cracks between the old bricks behind our house. (Joke’s on me: that stuff does thrive and is a bear to pull out.) When moving something that had been sitting in one place for any length of time—umbrella base, hose box—I’d reveal mounds of sand and a zillion busy ants perfecting their dream apartments.
As I push-broomed extraneous sand and leaves and pine needles into a pile, I imagined this process from the ant’s perspective.
It was a little worrying. I may have a problem with anthropomorphism.
Still, I kept at it and cleared the mounds. I am all for empathy, but it’s also June and I really want the option to sit in the sunshine somewhere that is (a) not my driveway and (b) not in the direct sightline of the neighbors’ kitchen window. I tell myself that this self-care trumps the needs of these zillions of ants, who have a billion zillion places to live. The world is their oyster!
But they looked agitated.
And now I was (slightly) agitated. These ants had no idea they were doing anything wrong, and here I was, clearing them away with the sand, pushbrooming them into the garden. My mind drew parallels with those who build mansions on eroding cliff-faces, or in flood zones: these ants OUGHT to have known better. This is a patio, not a side yard!
Well, I thought, maybe they did know better. Maybe an oral tradition (or the ant equivalent) of the periodic pushbrooming was handed down generationally, and building these sandy apartments on the patio was just a calculated risk. After all, might it not be worth living on the edge if you could last for, say, one or even two generations with a view of the blooming cranesbill and apple trees in a lovely sandy crack with all of your friends and family? Heck, given my poor track record on maintaining the patio, they might get even longer.
The ants, in my mind, were now like the residents of Pompeii, trusting that—although they lived in the shadow of a volcano—the odds were good that they would live a non-catastrophic life, the gods being willing. Only now Vesuvius was rumbling, and the pushbroom had arrived.
But, I reasoned, these ants are pretty fast. Faster than Pompeiians, relatively speaking. I could see them moving at speed, diving down other cracks, scrambling out of the sand pile and into the garden. They would certainly not die encased in lava.
In the grand scheme of things, a pushbroom is a relatively uncatastrophic catastrophe. These ants would live to see another day, and I would be able to enjoy a little sunshine. I know from experience that I’ll be pushbrooming them out of the way again soon enough.