Ant

  There was a time when we actually bought ants, or at least I have  memory of having purchased an ant habitat for a young nature enthusiast or two,  and the ants must have come with it, as I'm pretty sure it was a closed system.  I can not recall what became of it, or of its inhabitants.  I know that the advertised "endless hours"  of observation of ant life in an ecosystem came nowhere near the time spent watching the ants in the driveway, alternately feeding them from those little sugar packets and devising ways of torture.
     And so I find myself, in the fading days of summer, sitting on my front steps and observing ants.  I should clarify that all my references are to the medium-sized black ants, not those innocuous tiny red ones that appear to be an infestation, and definitely not those scary big black ones that seem bent on destroying something.  The ants are just regular ants, the kind that stay outside and amuse young children with their hell-bent scurrying around.   All documentation states that ants are highly disciplined in their lives, with all their societal tasks performed in a regimented manner.  But you would never know that by watching them.  They scurry back and forth, with a single ant laboriously carrying a large crumb of something, way bigger than itself, only to release it, seemingly at random on the ground, and then take off in another direction.  Maybe it was a  prearranged drop off point, to be picked up later by a designated transporter ant; no one here will ever know. The follow-up was not that assiduously performed.
   The ant this day is pacing back and forth, when from no apparent source, it is suddenly carrying a large piece of something, a piece of cookie perhaps.  A large foot tromps down on the ant as it is navigating the brick sidewalk, an instrument of sudden death it would seem.  But no, the ant has slid into the cracks between the bricks, and it quickly emerges, burden dropped, and races down the path to where a dead leaf has fallen on the bricks. It halts its progress, and dives under the leaf, where it remains motionless.  I sit, watching it.  It cowers under the leaf, watching, waiting, for some unknown danger to be gone, for some allotted period of time to pass.   I can see it clearly, can determine whether or not it has a future.  I go inside.  The sun is going down anyway.