August 14, 2012

Perfect day, as yesterday was perfect. High, blue summer.

I was spreading mulch this morning, when I lifted one of the bags to see that between the leaning bags, the tiny brown ants that patrol my house and my car had made a nest. There was a shivering multitude, with their white eggs. I moved the bag a little, and saw something else. There was a small hole in the bag, and out of this hole boiled black ants, very large and substantial, black but with a red cast in the sunlight. They and the little ants must have been in some sort of symbiosis, or merely ignored one another. They had made their way into the mulch through the hole and had turned the whole bag into an ant mansion. They were big, energetic, dismaying. I hacked the bag with a spade and it opened up into a boiling mass of big black ants and their hoard of eggs. Each time I stirred the spilled mulch with the spade I revealed a fresh layer of boiling ants. It was too much.

Driving from Sligo to Shannon, I stopped for gas. I saw something on the pavement of the station. It was a snail, carrying its beautiful shell across the asphalt. It couldn’t have been having a good time, so I picked it up and carried it to a hedgerow.  On the day I returned I was having coffee at Edna’s, when I saw a slug in the middle of the patio. It was moments before the sun would sweep that spot, so I lifted the slug up and put it in one of the jugs of flowers that line the patio. It wasn’t happy there (none of the flowers was very good slug food) and soon was stretching out over thin air, trying to get somewhere, anywhere else. I let it climb onto my sleeve. I carried it across Merrimon Avenue and set it onto the Grace Church terrace, where it had an acre or so of greenery to choose from. That time I left it charging into the depths of the foliage, satisfied at last.