Saturday, July 12, 2008

Man vs. Nature

It's one of the basic conflicts in narrative literature, right up there with Man vs. Self and Man vs. Society.

This morning, when Sarah settled onto our futon to check her e-mail, she noticed an ant in the carpet. Then another one. Then another. And another. Soon, we had traced a trail--right across a pile of clean, folded laundry--to cracks in our fireplace and bookshelves. We're not sure to what they were making a trail: that damp rag? that It's-It wrapper we accidentally missed while cleaning up from dinner last night? that empty container of Gerber Graduates Finger Foods Peach Puffs that Hattie uses as a drum? There were ants here and there on all of those things, but they mostly looked like they were still deciding where they were going to concentrate their efforts. Nothing had been settled on.

We immediately began shaking out the clothes outside, when I noticed that our lawn was overrun with weeds: dandelions, black murdoch, and more I can't identify. Obviously, weeds like that don't spring up overnight--or maybe they do. While Sarah treated all of the ant entryways with clove oil and vacuumed the carpet, I hunkered down on the grass and tried to rip out as many unwanted plants as I could by the roots. Hattie chose to help me with chores by tearing off leaves from the tallest offenders.

After we'd been at our gardening endeavors for a while, a shadow fell across us. Then again. And again. I looked up to see a turkey vulture circling us. It was quite low in the sky--unlike the ants, it seemed to have made a decision about what it wanted to eat. I scooped up Hattie and went inside.

By early afternoon, as I type this, the ants have been evicted, the lawn is mostly grass again, and the turkey vulture is gone. Still, I feel that nature got the upper hand today. I hope that nothing goes wrong when we go to the Charles Paddock Zoo in Atascadero this evening.

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