Hi everyone,
I’ve been watching ants on our patio. Nights are still a bit cool for their liking but some days warm up enough to draw them from their deep nests down below the pavers. Here’s the result of my thinking.

Waking Ants Pouring down the funnel into their bed chambers, the same sun that sponsors weed seedlings excites their dreams, gets them moving. In ones and twos, they emerge uncertainly into spring. Half awake, half asleep, staggering like extras in a zombie movie, each ant wanders in a different direction, as though in search of where it left off last fall when colding days numbed purpose and changed priorities. Somewhere there was a moth wing that needed extracting from a spider’s lacy net. Where was that cricket leg, easily a 2-ant job to lug to the nest? There was a freshly deceased bee... Hard work – when your brain is the size of a fleck of pollen – to remember what page you were on when you fell asleep reading the sites of your kingdom. It won’t take long. New food will be found. Lines will form. Ants, after all, must be ants. © 2023 David L Harrison, all rights reserved