My morning consisted of sleeping in to compensate for the long days on the road and the lack of contiguous hours of uninterrupted sleep that so often accompanies business travel to places in strange time zones where the sun is not where it is supposed to be when you are starting out the day or finishing one up. The mundane chores of dumping a week’s load of dirty laundry in the machine and catching up on the groceries filled the remainder of the morning.
Most of the afternoon was consumed furthering the progress on my house project to replace the soffits. Waiting for the afternoon sun to cast the work area in shadow is the most intelligent approach to getting this summer-long project completed without reaching the point of exhaustion before the job is done. Of course the interruptions by work travel makes this project longer than if the task was worked on a little bit each day.
Fortunately the heat of the day had moderated and the humidity was not so oppressive that one did not wish to venture out of doors. I put in my Saturday hours demolishing the old soffits on the east end of the house and decided that the presence of wasps entering and leaving the corner of the house signaled my time to break for the day.
After blowing all the dust and debris off my clothing and skin with the compressed air chuck I settled into evening recovery mode. I keyed up a CD of ethereal Native American music called “Burning Sky” and leaned back with a bottle of Newcastle beer. The bottle cap flipped through the air on its way to the glass table top before bouncing and landing on the weathered wooden deck a few feet from mine.
The sky above was mostly blue with a few clumps of cloud chasing each other along on an easterly bearing. My backyard sky is just a small piece of the whole and is constrained by the close horizon that makes my world there very small and comforting. In South Dakota, from where I just returned, the sky way very big. The anvil of land made the horizon quite far indeed. The world is much larger out there but being so close to the surface makes people see so much less of it. One must be able to get above the topography to see farther.
Near my feet a few tiny ants scurried about in their ant-pursuits. These were not the typical brown ants that usually populate your kitchen floor. They were only about one-fourth that size. Midgets in a world of dwarfs, with all due respect to people of small stature.
I realized that they were so small that even if they could ponder their existence and the why and wherefores, they would be blind to my presence towering over them. One philosopher-ant might dare to postulate the existence of a superior being or a loving god who watches over each and every one of them only to be scorned by the nay-sayers who refuse to accept such existences without irrefutable evidence. A human being is so different from them that they might not even recognize me as a living thing at all. I might merely be another terrestrial surface upon which they tread seeking access to food and hospitable habitat.
Just as they are miniscule as compare to me, so might I be to such a being that I too cannot fathom. I know that even in their sub-millimeter stature, that there are dust mites that live under the scales of their insect exo-skeletons.
As I look to the celestial regions, my planet may only be an electron to a galactic nucleus and all galaxies may be atoms in the molecules of a far greater DNA than anyone has ever dared imagine.
The ants were not fussing about at random. There was purpose in their movements. They were converging on the upturned beer bottle cap that landed in their world a few minutes earlier. Manna from Heaven perchance. I wondered if their anxious masses had prayed for deliverance from a famine and draught. Each of these little bodies were smaller than the hairs on my forearms. Each of those hairs had more mass that any one of those ants. Yet the ant-mass had mobility, intent and proclivities that are lacking in the hairs of my arm. It was then that I felt compelled to retrieve my tablet and pen. I always write better when first putting pen to paper than hacking away at a keyboard.
Within the circular world of the bottle cap with its corrugated boundary was a gram or two of the beer that adhered to the cap surface as my cap lifter pried it loose and sent it tumbling through space and landing on the wide plane of the backyard deck. They found it quite rapidly.
Soon there was a colony of ants sipping at the Nectar of the Gods. I wondered if the alcohol made them drunk. Did they sing their way home after neglecting their assigned duties too long? Do any of them become morose and sardonic when partaking of the brew? Does anyone become belligerent and boorish with too much of a good thing? Will they be chastised for being less than virtuous? Will any of them say, “shut up, Bitch, I’m not that drunk. And if I am, it’s none of your business?” Will they even know what hit them?
I only know that 24 oz. of the stuff compared to my body size is quite ample to wax me philosophic. The beer and the music and the absolutely perfect evening have converged to make me not care if I am part of something bigger or not, although they are not enough to make me stop thinking that I am. A light breeze blows from the east across the expanse of the deck and makes the trees gently sway allowing the rays of the sun through the leaves to occasionally find my face.
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