The ants came in from the cold this weekend.

We first saw them in Tracy on Friday morning. To be fair, Kaitlin, just turned 4, the youngest of my 4 nieces/nephews (why is there no communal gender-neutral term for such relations?) first saw them.

She let everyone know, right quick.

Now Kaitlin generally likes bugs. Loves them, in fact. Once demanded that her grandmother (Emily’s mom) pull over to the side of the road because she saw a rock out the window that looked like it would be bug-laden, ambled toward it, pried it up, and giggled uproariously at the creepy-crawlies below that confirmed her drive-by intuition. She then picked some up carefully, trying to identify and befriend them while her grandmother fretted behind her and made sure nothing was likely to bite or sting.

Not generally the child you’d first expect to let out a bloodcurdling scream at the sight of nearly microscopic ants.

One of the things I love about children is that they haven’t learned to lie yet. This is perhaps not altogether true … some children must learn to lie very early on to survive (and not just in the Nazi Empire, circa the 1940’s). And siblings probably introduce lying pretty quickly, because the whole blame game can foist responsibility aside and allow unfettered exploration. But the types of lies they still haven’t learned, especially at age 4, are those which spare feelings or stand on ceremony. They just plain call it like they see it, often with a refreshing matter-of-factness that adults obsessed with navigating expectations can’t fathom.

So I found a certain comedy in her continually reminding our host (my sister-in-law Colleen) that there were ants on the floor running about and this would make it hard to enter the kitchen. When Colleen had already been mortified at their presence and was doing her best to get rid of them. She certainly didn’t need a haranguing urgent chorus of “but there’s ants!” Maybe it’s cruel that I was so amused by this, but it’s also cruel that the solution was deemed to be to kill at least some of the ants. At least in that household there seems to be debate about the issue of whether or not to kill ants.

In our house (Emily’s & mine), there is no such debate. We returned home from Tracy to find that ants had run amok in our bathroom and kitchen, and thus it was time to haul out the cinnamon. Ants hate cinnamon, but it does them no actual harm, making it somewhat akin to putting up a wall of sour cream in whatever path you don’t want me to take. It’s the humane way to manage our tiny industrious friends, one that Em and I have been employing for years now. Inexact, but humane.

They seem to adjust their taste every year, but they’re always scouting around for something appetizing. In the pantry of the Big Blue House, they once unearthed a nearly full jar of sugar. They always seem to love cat food, though not this weekend. This weekend, they were obsessed with the coffee maker. Even when the trail had been siphoned back out the door by walls of cinnamon, the exiles on the coffee maker were frenzied over the blend of the day.

Thus, I have been relegated to going across the street to Nation’s to buy large cups of coffee to-go, supplanting my normal morning routine of brewing up a pot. It’s annoying, but it beats murder. Eventually, they will get bored and wander somewhere else. They’re fundamentally as fickle about food as the American public is about media.

There’s another metaphor in there somewhere too, maybe “The Ant and the Grasshopper”. Ants are mighty industrious and work harder and more communally than probably any being on the planet. But there’s something sad about those who used to be depicted as saving up for the winter while others played instead scavenging indoors for the winter. And in urban settings, they have no alternative… there’s no arable land left for ants in the cities. So it makes perfect sense. But somehow, the old fable doesn’t play quite as well with the ants inviting the rueful winter grasshopper into a raid of the cat food bowl.

I haven’t always viewed ants so compassionately. In grade school, living in Oregon, I used to be one of those kids who killed ants recreationally. Not often, maybe not even more than once or twice, because I did feel incredible remorse about it. But I recall a specific incident, related to one of my favorite backyard activities in those days, which was playing with the hose.

We lived in view of the ocean, so the dirt on our acre and a half of rural Oregon was all sand. This made water-play ideal, and I would either wet down an area or just leave a steady trickle on as I developed my creation. And then I would form peaks and valleys, lakes, rivers, and oceans, and countries between. It was an outgrowth of one of my favorite made-up games, which was drawing maps between hypothetical countries in pencil, then erasing and redrawing borders after disputes and resolutions. Was I a child of the end of the Cold War or what? In the shorthand of my childhood, this game became known as “Zorland”, because that was the name of a ubiquitous and often domineering imperial country on the scrap-paper maps I would draw.

So the sand and the hose gave a unique opportunity to bring Zorland to life, adding elements of geological geography previously untapped. Just studying the contours of water passing the path of least resistance was fascinating. And (you probably saw where this was going), one day there was an anthill right near Zorland. This was too tempting a dynamic to put in play, and so the ants soon had to deal with the Great Flood. It wasn’t pretty. While I was initially entertained, little floating mangled ant corpses would haunt me for some time to come. It ended up, to this day, filed away in the vault of mortifying shameful experiences that I think about all too often and still make me blush.

Two incidents in particular come to mind, if we’re dredging up that vault. They were from the same year (as each other, not as the Ant Flood), my first grade year at St. Paul’s Episcopal School, the school that would carry the distinction of being the only school I attended for two full years (Kindergarten and 1st grade) until 1995, when I completed my second (9th grade) year at the Academy. We were living in Visalia and happened to be fairly regular attendees at the affiliated church, where my parents were raising me to be a somewhat tongue-in-cheek Episcopalian. I had caused a stir at the church the Christmas before for insisting on being an angel in the Christmas pageant instead of a shepherd (they divided angels and shepherds along gender lines) because “angels are closer to God”.

The first memory is simple but powerful. I punched David A. in the upper arm after he cut in line. I still remember the incident, the weather, can go live in that memory whenever I want. I even remember the kid’s name for Christ’s sake (I probably never knew his full last name). I think it was the last time I ever committed violence without being physically threatened. It wasn’t the trouble I got in that prevented future occurrences, it was simply the shame of having done something so disproportionate. David A. was the kind of kid who cut in line all the time, and I remember thinking that was crazy kinds of unfair. That someone had to put a stop to this. But really thinking about him being hit, about someone hitting me, made me cry profusely when someone stopped to talk to me about it. That was pretty much the end of my belief in the commission of violence for justice. Sorry, Malcolm X.

The second memory is one that is very high on the list of things I feel shame for, despite having done some legitimately lousy things in my life. It has to mostly be about the pseudo-sexual nature of the issue. It’s one that mortifies me on the first hint of thinking about it, and it’s hard to believe that I’m about to put it in writing publicly when I’m not sure I’ve ever told anyone about it. Maybe one or two people.

We were working on workbooks in some sort of enrichment class in first grade. Kids were talking too much, but the assignment was ridiculously easy (that year I stayed in from about five recesses for loudly complaining that things were too easy when we weren’t supposed to be talking), so I wasn’t really minding distraction. We were seated loosely in pairs at tables of four.

I don’t remember this kid’s name, but he was a boy. He leaned over to me and told me to do something.

Boy: “Say ‘penis’.”
Me: “Why?”
Boy: “Just say it.”
Me: “Okay. Penis.”
Boy: [laughs] “Say it again!”
Me: “Penis.”
Boy: [shrieking with laughter] “Say it again! Again!”
Me: “Penis. Penis.”
Boy: “Mrs. Vickers! Storey said ‘penis’!”

The white-hot depth of this memory is almost terrifying given that it was over two decades ago and I was just six years old.

Mrs. Vickers, one of the people I liked and respected most at both the church and the school, took me aside. I go to absolute pieces today (and every day in the past) thinking of what she must have thought of me during this dialogue:

Mrs. V.: “Did you say ‘penis’?”
Me: “Yes.”
Mrs. V.: “Is your reading about penises?”
Me: “No.”
Mrs. V.” “Is your work about penises?”
Me: “No.”
Mrs. V.: “Then why did you say that?”
Me: “Because he told me to.”
Mrs. V.: “What are you supposed to be doing right now?”
Me: “The reading and the work.”
Mrs. V.: “Okay. Then go do that, and no more talk about penises.”

That incident was my first lesson that people, even children, are not to be trusted.

And, over the years, has become a second lesson about the power of shame and my memory and my inability to let things go.

There are other things like that which stick out. It might not be the best time to rehash everything or this will be a laundry list of my misadventures. I remember, in particular, throwing away one of my earliest attempts at a diary (written when I was eight) when I was about eleven because it contained copious detailed notes on a crush I had on a girl at the time. The crush seemed profoundly inappropriate in retrospect, an eight-year-old talking so boldly about admiring a girl, wanting to spend all his time with her, and so on. I have regretted the decision to sneak that journal into a garbage can in the garage ever since. (I knew my parents would stop me if they saw me throw it out, being collectors of my artifacts and also encouragers of my keeping journals and diaries.) I can still see its orange cover. I remember vague topic areas – the girl, primarily, and also an early frenemy who worked on my campaign for class president. But I would do a lot to actually read the words and see the handwriting, verbatim, again.

Especially now that I’ve heard friends say they openly called people their boyfriends or girlfriends at ages younger than eight!

But that orange-covered journal is gone, and somewhere industrious ants are probably chewing through the remains of my earnest age-eight confessions. Picking up a little scrap of paper, holding it aloft like the Ten Commandments, and carrying the weighty tome to an underground factory of use and consumption.

Ah yes, Ants Marching…

“Take these chances
place them in a box until a
quieter time
lights down, you up and die.”

Tell you what, ants. Bring back my orange-covered diary, loosely reassembled, from 1988 and I will throw the coffee maker in the backyard. Yours to keep. Whaddya say?