Just a Little Thing
It was just a little thing. Out of the corner of my eye, my peripheral vision picked up a slight movement. I turned to see an ant crawling along my kitchen countertop. As always, my first thought was, I wonder where you came from. And I returned to my day. One little ant was of no concern to me.
When I went to my kitchen later, I noticed this little ant had brought some friends. “Really!” and I slapped my hand on the counter. At least twenty ants scurried from under the lip of the sink, running in circles and into each other.
Off I went to Ocean State Job Lot in search of ant traps. It would not have been my first choice of stores, but I needed something else that I knew they carried. My decision on which ant trap to buy was easy; they only had one brand. After placing three traps at strategic points, I stood back to watch the ants tumble into the small, circular blue tins. Only they did not.
Instead, they circled the traps like a car in a rotary. Visions of the old Sagamore Bridge rotary came to mind as the ants encircled the traps more than once before spinning off in different directions. Some went to Bourne, some over the bridge to Cape Cod, and others traveled west towards Boston.
They are just getting used to them, I thought. By morning, these ants will have gotten the idea that they need to climb into the little holes and eat the contents. (I am not sure why I thought ants should innately know they are supposed to eat poison.)
In the morning, I woke up and found I was in the middle of a 1970s Faberge Shampoo commercial. Apparently, in the middle of the night, the ants told two friends, and they told two friends, and so on and so on. Not hundreds but thousands of ants coursed through my house, their target my kitchen.
I searched for the answers to how, where, and why there were so many ants. Yes, one ant was just a little thing, but when multiplied, it looked like they were at home, and I was the intruder. As if entering the ark, they seemed to travel in pairs up the wooden molding alongside the stairs, crossing a hallway of white carpet before entering the kitchen.
On a recent flight to South Carolina, I watched the traffic below as it traveled in both directions along the highway. It is the same scene I am witnessing now. Coming and going, the ants had their own secret code for staying in their lanes. Like a traffic copter reporting rush-hour traffic, I hovered over the ants, checking entrance and exit ramps and volume at the rotaries. This one little ant had morphed into something that was so much more.
Why did they come? My kitchen was clean. What was making them so crazy that they came in droves? As I washed my counter (again), I picked up a handheld hummingbird feeder to wipe underneath it and noticed it looked different. This clear plastic container is small enough to hold between your thumb and index finger. The top is a red plastic flower with yellow accents. There is a hole in the center of the flower that gives access to the contents within. Now, the sugar water is gone and instead filled with dead ants. What a way to go!
Grabbing my purse, I marched to a different armory for more ammunition. After placing this new pesticide at strategic points, I started to feel guilty. I called my sister and invited myself to her house the next day. I couldn’t stay and watch.
What started as just a little thing grew and grew to great proportions. It was exponential, and thoughts of Mr. Quinn, my eleventh-grade math teacher, came to mind. Pardon the math lesson, but if you add 2 + 2 = 4. Now 4 + 4 = 8. Then 8 + 8 = 16, and so on, and so on. It only takes nineteen of this addition pattern until you reach over one million. One small thing can be bigger than it seems.
Recently entering the church, a man held open the door for me. After thanking him, I turned behind me to see a teenage boy coming up the stairs, so I kept open the door for him. Then I noticed him turn to look behind as he patiently held open the door for a slow-moving older woman.
Her face lit up when she saw what he was doing. Her smile was contagious. It was just a little thing…