Saving Ants
By Jenna Brack
@jennabrackwriting
“Mom, come quick! Now!”
My four-year-old daughter is yelling from the downstairs bathroom. Her voice sounds distressed, but—I listen carefully—not at the level of an actual emergency. I walk instead of run.
“What’s happening?” I call.
“The ants! They’re getting me!”
I walk around the corner to find her standing on the toilet, staring down at the floor, where four—maybe five—tiny ants are crawling around.
“Mom! Kill them!”
I press my lips together and try not to laugh.
“Hon, it’s okay, they won’t hurt you,” I say, lifting the toe of my shoe, poised to end the ant threat. “I’ll get them.”
But something stops me.
“Here, let me get a paper towel.”
I grab a few paper towels from the kitchen, then return to begin scooping up the ants, one at a time, and flicking them out the back door.
My husband walks around the corner. “What are you doing?”
“Getting rid of the ants.”
“You mean saving them? Why?”
My husband is an engineer; he is the definition of a practical thinker. In approximately three minutes, he will be searching for the ants’ entrance point; in one hour, he will order ant bait, and in one week, ants will no longer be crawling around our house.
“Um, I read this poem—” I start to explain.
“Will someone help me?” My daughter is no longer yelling, but she is still standing on the toilet. My husband goes to help her, while I scoop up the last ant onto a paper towel and drop it out the back door. The ant falls onto its back, squirms around onto its legs, and scurries between a crack in the deck.
“I’ll order some ant bait,” my husband says, as he leaves the bathroom. His ant execution plan is moving along faster than I predicted.
After he leaves, I stand at the back door and stare at the deck. I do not want ants in my house. So why do I find myself willing them to live?
***
I blame many of my strange tendencies—saving ants, for instance—on poets. Their words have a way of crawling inside of me and altering the way I see things. For example, I recently read the poem “The Prayer” by Melissa Reeser Poulin, which begins:
“The ants know something.
Each one carries work,
whether it fits
in a lifetime
or not.”[1]
I think of Poulin’s words as I stand near the fence in our front yard, watching my neighbor’s cream and magenta peonies unfold. Ants climb out of the buds and scatter across the leaves, eagerly filling themselves with nectar and keeping the papery blossoms alive a little longer in the process. One ant scales a stem much like I climb a creaky flight of stairs up to my writing desk each morning before sunrise, like my children crawl up the same flight of stairs a few hours later to greet me, immediately overtaking my lap with their growing limbs and questions.
Some mornings, it takes me nearly an hour to write a few sentences. My children are already growing too tall for me to carry on my hip down the stairs—even the younger one has recently been promoted to my back. The peonies may bloom for a few more weeks, if we’re lucky. Living, mothering, writing—it feels enormous, yet so fleeting and fragile.
Fragile, like the ants. I suppose that’s why I am scooping them onto paper towels.
***
My son is reading a book to me on the porch swing, just across the fence from the peonies.
“Mom, who is stronger: an elephant or a weaver ant?”
“That sounds like a trick question,” I say. “The ant?”
“Correct!” he cheers, as though I have won a game show. “The ant can carry up to 100 times its own weight. Stronger than an elephant.”
I think again of my daughter, yelling at ants on the bathroom floor. She is only afraid of them because she does not yet understand her own size—the ants certainly pose her no threat. Still, maybe in her childhood imagination, she has seen their strength more accurately than I have. Although the ants are small—nearly invisible, at times—they are capable of carrying great loads.
Like the fleeting nectar of a peony.
Or, like a mother carrying a child on her back, the weight of syllables rolling around in her tired mind.
Stronger than an elephant.
***
“Mom! There’s going to be animals crawling around the house!”
This time, my daughter’s voice sounds excited. My kids have discovered one of their animal books comes with an app, which will “bring the animals to life.” My husband, currently on a ladder outside, said he would download it after he finishes scraping paint.
“It’s okay, Mom,” my son is telling me, eyes wide and serious. “When they crawl out of the computer screen, they won’t hurt you. If they bite you, there will be no blood.”
The look on his face tells me this is not a test. My children think metaphor is real life, and although I know they will be disappointed when they realize this app is not the magical invention they are expecting, I am not about to squash their hopes.
“I hope I get to see a whale. I am going to try picking it up. It will be so heavy!” my son says, raising his arms above him. His blonde curls, far past their due date for being trimmed, bounce wildly.
“I bet you’ll be strong enough,” I say. “Or, trying will be a good challenge.”
My kids ask me which animal I want to see, and I inform them that I will have to miss out on the fun. As soon as their dad comes inside, I’m going upstairs to write.
“That’s fine—you’ll be okay there,” my son says. “No animals can get in, if the door is locked.”
Then, my daughter has a thought: “Oh, Mom! The ants! They can still get in through the cracks!”
She stares at the floor and thinks for a moment. “But if you need me, just yell, and I’ll run up and protect you!”
I laugh and hug her. “I’m so glad to know you would save me from the ants,” I say.
An hour later, I have climbed the stairs to my desk on the third floor, and I am sitting in front of my computer screen crawling little lines across the page, while my children are downstairs, waiting to see if the creatures in their books will come to life. Our hopes, it seems, are not all that different.
Through the window at my desk, I can see the peonies still blooming in my neighbor’s yard. I scoop up some letters as though I am sweeping ants onto a paper towel, and release them onto the page. This is the work I have been given to carry,
“whether it fits
in a lifetime
or not.”
Guest essay written by Jenna Brack. Jenna is a writer and teacher living in Kansas City. She has an M.A. in English and enjoys good coffee, serious conversation, and not-too-serious fiction.
[1] Used with permission from the author. Poem appears in Rupture, Light.