Oak leaves
and clumps of dirt cling to her old patterns, old memories of baby blankets and
calico dresses and tweed slacks. Books, a journal, a mason jars of herby water,
a yoga mat, a headlamp compete for space on her calming flat body.
She found me
in Oregon. In the back of a house in a front-yard-garden kind of neighborhood. A basement full of porcelain cherubs and yellowing prairie-themed books, the back patio adrift in broken toys and bulbless lamps and penguin ashtrays.
She lay
folded on a table underneath other folded warmth and effort. A pile of blankets
and quilts, stained and torn and perfect for picnics and roadtrips and
campfires under tall trees. I scooped up the pale pinks and violets and once whites and promised an extended life,
if not an easy one.
She cradled me back, soft against my belly, and promised
she’d seen her share of love and loss and adventure and was ready for more.
The quilt is the storyteller
of blanket world.
Last night, the ants
created more lines and circles and marched spatters of red and black on her back. They found my bare arms, flung out of the too
warm sleeping bag and resting above tangled hair. I woke to feathers of touch
on my hands, forehead, on bare legs covered by covered down. I brushed little
bodies from my sunburnt face, I picked them off my mud flecked chest. I tried not to crush,
squish, maul. I just wanted to sleep in my bag on my quilt on the ground
underneath the oaks with the sliver of a moon coming over the mountains.
Maybe
they were just a few and would go away, grow tired of this game.
Then I
noticed the smell.
Strong.
Sweet and spicy.
Strangely minty.
Was it the sage
growing into the valley? Or that these little mouths ate that sage to give off
this dusky incense? Without flicking on a light I knew they surrounded me. I could almost hear them. What
by day was an ant-free domain, by night was the I-5 of this acorn antdom.
And I
was the center divide. On a lawless highway.
Have you ever
noticed how ants seem to bump into one another as they pass? Like a small
town where crossing to the other side of the street isn’t a true avoidance
technique, these ants forgo the cowardice and simply body check one another as
they move down the way. I’m sure there is information being passed, but I like
to imagine all their little ant arms meeting in microsecond Namastes before
moving on. Or even high fiving. The things you think of at three oclock in the morning when you
discover you are covered with ants and after enough swatting you finally surrender, yes this is
happening I need to move back to my hammock. But not before staring at the ants who pay no mind to your squirming body or blinding headlamp and continue with
their Very Urgent chores.
You are slightly miffed to be woken up from intriguing
dreams and you dread the fatigue of the morning, but you soon laugh as your
days consist of moving rocks from here to there, of sweeping leaves from
ancient rugs under more ancient trees, of finding shade to nap under, of
talking and laughing and (gratefully) grieving at picnic tables and in tiny
kitchens that remind you of boats.
And you are excited: that you have time to
notice the ants’ customs, to see this nocturnal commotion, and most stunningly,
to recognize that you (I) were able to SMELL ANTS and know that that is what
you (I) were smelling!
I know in my
sun strengthened bones that the wild is returning not only to this campsite but
to my body and heart night after night, day after day, breath after breath.
That sleeping outside is not a punishment, it is an honor; to hear the coyotes
scream their prayers into the canyons at dusk, to breathe in the midnight breeze
as it flutters past my face and into the trees above, to feel the vibrations from
roosters crowing as Venus skims the mountaintops, to step onto the leaves and
dirt and feel the earth on my skin first thing after sunrise.
Primal is not a
derogatory term here. It is welcomed, nourished, bathed in sun and starlight.
Here I can
howl with the wild.
Here I can hold the earth in dirty fingernailed (happy)
hands.
Here I can
SMELL ANTS.
