August Doldrums

T'is the season to lay in a sling backed chair on the screened porch under the gently spinning fans. Humid. Hot. Lazy.

The first figs are ripening on the Celeste and I'm preparing to do battle with the tiny black "sugar ants". Their scouts led me to the first, hidden ripe figs. I'll repay them by wrapping duct tape, sticky side out, around the trunk of the tree to capture the followers. Hell of a way to die, it occurs to me. These years, I have a hard time justifying anything that torments another haphazard being.

In past summers, we did battle with kitchen ants - same tiny black "sugar ants", making their way onto our counter tops and cupboards. I learned to squash the first few scouts and leave them in place. Shortly after, replacements would appear, following the same invisible track and encounter the bodies of the slain. Antennae waving frantically, they scattered away back along the trail and into the invisible places of the farmhouse. No more ants would appear along that route.... but I'd find them winding their way through other avenues. But this was serious consideration - these ants knew how to assess a situation, minimize their losses and recoup for better strategies. Can hardly consider them mindless automatons now, can I?

This summer, the cracks in the concrete parking pad that formerly housed the sugar ants are all occupied with equally tiny reddish ants. Not fire ants, just the Other Ants in our immediate world of ant politics. The black sugar ants have retreated to the yard itself. They have not entered the house -- and the red ants are apparently not "house ants". Who knew?

However, all ants -- and all living creatures -- love figs. Who could not? If someone tells you they "just don't like figs", assume that they have only had the supermarket prepackaged figs, picked wa-ay too soon and stored wa-ay too long, or they have experience with some nasty dried commercial product... or they have no sensuality left to them, in which case they are verging on soulless and better left alone to suffer.