Ant farms

All summer long I had a companion at my desk. One large black ant. I would see it marching across the top of my monitor, or sunning on the windowsill. I couldn't bring myself to smash it. It wasn't crawling on me, or generally on my papers, or on my keyboard. It kept to the edges. I wondered that there was just one ant. Though there just is not that much to sustain even one ant in my study. The crumbs from lunch stay in the dining room, and my glass of ice water will not power an ant for any distance.

I finished a solid draft of one of the chapters of the tea book, and took the opportunity to clear the papers off my desk. Turns out there wasn't just one ant, but a dozen of them living in the terrarium on my desk. Am I hosting an Airbnb for ants? If so, does this violate the party policy? I sent the vacationing ants back to the garden, where they may or may not be living happily ever after. But I do miss my reminder to keep at it, to move the words one at a time from my mind to the keyboard to the document.

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Photo credit: Dawidl at the English-language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons