Observables #51

on ants and ground cherries and all the nature that wants to come inside

My evolving peppers and ground cherries. The peppers particularly are vocal about how they’re feeling in the heat. Wilting, crying and then coming back to life. It’s quite spiritual. I see myself in the peppers, also squawking when the conditions aren’t just right. The ground cherries, on the other hand, are much more consistent.

Ground cherries up close!

Bird’s eye view of the ground cherries!

A letter to the ants.

Dear ants,

I have been smashing you—the ants—at the farm because you are big and therefore threatening. Although I remember the small versions of you (or is that fair to group you like that?) from our California apartment. I was threatened by you then too. How you organized systematically against me. To bring me grief in my long days as a new mother. I wrote about you daily in a story I was crafting: “Goldberg and the ants.”

Remember when I left the watermelon on the floor of the kitchen? You formed yourself into a battalion and by the time we returned, there was a thick band of black stretching across the room. I had never seen anything like it.

Yesterday, I listened to a podcast and discovered the short story writer Lydia Davis has a fondness for ants. She doesn’t see them as a threat at all, but as industrious marvels. She says they often show up in her stories too, but as agents of good. It doesn’t mean she wants them inside, but she would never smash them to get rid of them. She blows them away and encourages them elsewhere by removing whatever it is they are hankering for. She does not even want to disturb their little legs by sweeping them up. Only breath.

Suddenly, I am regretting my disdain. Is it possible I could fall in love with the ants this summer? Will the time I might lose escorting each ant out the door with a little breath be so much to set me back in other ways. I think not. Yes, I might hyperventilate on the path from my bedroom (location of the latest ant sighting) to the backdoor and briefly feel annoyed, but I suspect the internal change will be revolutionary. I’m ready to be transformed. And I think it comes from being another way with you…the ants.

Does this internal change also require that I come to peace with the other nature that wants to come inside? The earwigs, mice, flies, hornets? To discuss.

This dress. I mean, I’m not. But I sure want to be resting leisurely against a tree trunk in a sandy coloured dress by a label that is “Women-founded, women-run, sewn in downtown Toronto since 2012.”

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