Anthill in the Sky

When I was young, my older siblings liked to torture me by saying, "You need to eat all of that! Kids in Africa are starving and you're not even eating your peas!" I was a very, very picky eater and, although their taunting never made me eat my food, they at least instilled a healthy sense of guilt in me for all of the food I was wasting.

I have often pondered this: how many people in *insert improverished nation* could eat for a week just on the leftovers from my family's dinner tonight? The problem is that I can't just pick up my dinner and take it to them. It requires more deliberate action--action that involves blindly handing cash to some humanitarian group, who spends my money however they want. This requires a lot of faith in people I don't know and results in no knowledge of whether my money actually did the help I wanted it to.

But all that is changing. I now know that I can feed an entire civilization just from one homemade meal. It's true! Each night, our belated sweeping results in hundreds (if not thousands) of little black ants swarming into our dining room and proceeding, in a very organized way, to transport our crumbs to who-knows-where.

Yes, at first I was utterly disgusted. Somewhat nauseated in fact. But then I saw this:



I saw my little, disgusting visitors in a new light. Not that I really want them to clean up the floor for me (which they do very well) but I started to find their habits fascinating. So last night, when Joseph asked if he could drop a chip on the floor to see if the ants would find it, I said "NO!" and then quickly relented. He dropped the chip and then sat, fascinated, as the ants found it and started to actually carry it away. Okay, it's disgusting, I admit. But it's still interesting.

It's almost enough to make me not call our pest control service and demand they get their bodies over here STAT to take care of this. Almost, almost. Alas, all of our new little friends will soon be floating up to that great anthill in the sky, where they can dream about the feast we provided them with each dinner time. We'll miss them, but it's for the best.