An Ant Migration

It's the strangest thing. The first time we noticed it was Friday evening: red ants were streaming across the driveway, diagonally, and over the railroad tie and into the front yard. Young'un and I traced their path, he investigating their destination while I tried to determine where they were coming from. All I had to do was scan across the crispy yellowish grass and soon I'd see the motion of the ant parade. I followed them across the side yard, into the neighbor's yard, almost to the big tree... and there the trail went cold. I just couldn't see a source. Meanwhile, Young'un was in the middle of our front yard, and he'd found their new home: a small hole in the ground, a bit smaller in diameter than a pencil.

The first ants we'd seen were empty-handed (or empty-pincered), but the ones on the driveway were all carrying little white blobs of varying sizes. We determined that these must be eggs! They were moving the eggs! Some of them were so large they were probably larvae. Soon the egg-bearers began reaching the hole, and down they went. Ants were coming out of the hole, but none of them ever brought eggs out. There was a lot of activity around the new home. There were a few black ants in the neighborhood, the same size as the red ones or maybe a little smaller, and they'd occasionally wander into the middle of the busy red-ant traffic. We wondered if they'd fight -- but no, they seemed to check each other out and go their separate ways.

We probably watched them for fifteen or twenty minutes. I found myself humming the theme music to Young'un's "Sim Ant" computer game, and he recognized it and joined in. We hoped we might see them bring in the queen, but there was no sign of her. She was probably already in the nest; perhaps she'd put down the scent they were all following.

Then yesterday evening we saw another migration of red ants across the driveway. This time they were coming from a different direction in the side yard, but their destination was the same as the ones on Friday. Again, lots and lots of activity around the nest in the front yard; again, black ants wandered into their midst and then wandered back out unmolested.

We've really been enjoying our ant-watching. It's been a long time since Young'un played "Sim Ant", but now he's going to install it on his computer and fire it up again.

Summer Reading

I'm hoping to have a Book of the Summer again. It's been a long time since a book came and got me in the summer heat, put a schhhhhpell on me, enthralled me from beginning to end. Oh, I know, the new Harry Potter is coming out, and I'll read that one feverishly whenever Young'un puts it down -- but that's not what I'm talking about. There have been books I've happened upon in the summertime, just by chance browsing in the library or bookstore, that instantly became favorites. There's something about the summer that's conducive to this.

For example, there was the summer of 1983. I'd been going to college for the past seven months straight: mini-mester, spring semester, mini-mester, and summer semester. I was racing against time; trying to get my AAS in Data Processing and get a job before then-hub's unemployment ran out. At the end of July, though, I finally had a month off, with no classes, and plenty of time to lie in the sun and read. At this time I discovered Endless Love. The movie sucked, but the book is absolutely incredible!

Another good summer read is Laguna Heat -- a noir beauty set in Orange County, California. When I lent it to my mom, I said, "I envy you. You're about to read this book for the first time, an experience I can never have again."

A chance encounter brought me together with one of my favorite books of all time. Firstborn and I had walked to the grocery store one hot summer day, and as we waited in the checkout line I glanced over the paperback book rack... and Fuel-Injected Dreams caught my eye. This is a fabulous book that I never tire of re-reading.

The granddaddy of all my obsessive summer reads is The Other Side of the Sun, which I first read the summer after I graduated from high school. I've practically got it memorized by now, and I love every word of it.

For something more recent, there's The Houdini Girl, yet another in the finish-it-and-start-again category. I liked it so much that by the time I returned it to the library, I had it on order from Amazon.

So, will this summer bring me another new favorite book? I hope so, because it's a wonderful feeling, and it's been too long since I had the pleasure.

Eep!

Well, we toured my old house. It's... really different. Somebody (probably in the mid to late 1970s) redecorated practically every room with heavy, dark wood. The honey-colored hardwood floors are now dark brown. The living room and hallway wall-to-wall carpet is gone, with the wood underneath stained dark. Dark, dark paneling is up in the living room and my room. Dark beams were added to the ceiling. It's very, very 1970s. After seeing that, I expected the kitchen to be harvest gold or avocado, but they surprised me: putty-colored fake brick, trimmed with light blue. The kitchen was pale blue in my day too; tile up to about five feet and then paint on plaster.

That was then (and that was Mom)...


...this is now:


In my old bedroom, the glass handles on the cabinets above the closet are the same ones my mother installed there. Other than that, the room looks radically different. Between the dark paneling and the dark floor, it gives the sensation of being inside a cigar box. In my day everything was light and airy, and the room looked larger.

They kind of enclosed the breezeway and garage, but kind of didn't either. Though there's paneling on the walls, I suspect there's no insulation. The garage floor is painted but otherwise looks just as it did when my dad used to park our 1952 Pontiac there -- complete with floor drain and the crack that bisected the concrete. They built another little room off the breezeway, into the back yard -- and I didn't immediately realize what they'd done until I spotted the curved edge of the original slab. The floor of the room was the patio my dad built! They'd filled in with more concrete to make the corner square, but it was easy to see where the edge of the patio was.

The basement -- ohhhhhhh, mercy. Mercy. It's hard to describe. Our wonderful rec room has stained walls, some half-built wooden and concrete structures, suspended ceiling drooping in places, ugly brick-red linoleum at one end, and a pervasive odor of mildew and cat urine. Oh, but the furnace was exactly the same coal-to-gas conversion monster that was there in my day. I'd forgotten how low some of the beams and furnace pipes were: Husband and Young'un kept having to duck their heads to avoid injury.

Outside, the tree I used to climb is gone. Another tree is there, though, at the side of the yard. The heavy iron T-shaped clothesline posts are still there. Somebody put down a concrete pad from the room that used to be the patio, all along the back side of the house. It looks awful. The two-car garage at the back of the property is jam cram full of JUNK. I'd want to be wearing a biohazard suit to clean it out; I'll bet it's crawling with brown recluses. The whole yard is enclosed in a chain-link fence which has rusted. Out in front, at the very front of the property, stands a rusty mailbox on a pole. It's the mailbox we brought with us when we moved from our other home -- it shows up in pictures taken of me when I was a toddler, so it's almost fifty years old.

Are we going to buy the place? We're considering it, and looking at our options. We wouldn't be physically doing the work of restoring it ourselves; we don't have the time. We'd want an actual rehabber-type to do that work. We could do things like painting, papering, landscaping and so on. I'd want to get rid of that nasty concrete slab, and we'd probably just dismantle the "patio room". I'm going to talk to some people at work who own rental property; get some advice.

Watergate Revisited

Everything old is new again. W. Mark Felt is old, but he's newly revealed as "Deep Throat", Bob Woodward's legendary deep-background source on the Watergate story. The right-wing types are practically foaming at the mouth, trying to discredit Felt as a traitor. --To which my response is, "You've got to be kidding."

Felt saw how spectacularly corrupt the Nixon White House was, and when a reporter acquaintance called him to confirm or deny information obtained from other sources, Felt did so. He didn't approach Woodward, nor did he directly feed him information. Woodward would tell him, "So-and-so told me this, which makes me wonder if this other person is involved" and Felt might say, "You're on the wrong track with that one." He guided Woodward and Bernstein's investigation, and doubtless saved them a lot of time they might otherwise have wasted.

To those who say, while looking down from atop their high horse, that Felt should have used "official channels" to reveal the corruption, I would reply "Such as what?" The problem here was that the president of the United States believed himself and his aides to be above the law. Who, exactly, do you report that to? W. Mark Felt was the number-two man at the FBI. The top man, L. Patrick Gray, was a Nixon appointee -- and was generally believed to have his head so far up Nixon's ass that if the president took a corner too fast, he'd break Gray's neck.

There's also the fact that the president and his men were absolutely ruthless in pursuing and punishing their enemies -- for nothing more than being their enemies. They used the IRS (tax audits) and the FBI (wiretaps, intrusive security checks) as harassment against private citizens whose only crime was disagreeing with them. They used high-powered investigators to dig up dirt on people. This White House kept an "enemies list" estimated at anywhere between 490 and 600 people: journalists, celebrities, businesses, academics. It seems so juvenile as to be almost laughable -- but the laughter freezes in your throat when you think about the power these guys had, and didn't hesitate to use. That's the barrel that Felt was staring down.

So Felt's conscience demanded that he get the information about White House corruption into the light of day -- and self-preservation demanded that he keep his identity secret. Even at that, the Nixon tapes reveal that the president and his men suspected him. Nixon has a few choice words about him: "a Jew in the FBI???". (Nixon was a real treat. Take a gander at the transcript of his White House tapes -- but don't look too long; they'll make you feel dirty.)

Why is Felt revealing his secret identity now? I don't know, and I don't really care. If it's for money, I don't have a problem with that. Many, many other people have profited monitarily from telling stories of their part in Watergate -- including the criminals! In my opinion the man who blew the whistle, who was instrumental in the bringing down of the Nixon presidency, deserves our gratitude, his fifteen minutes of fame, and as much money as the infotainment industry is willing to pay him.

We can't go back in time...

...but we're going back in space. This Saturday afternoon, Husband and I (and Young'un) are going to take a tour of the house I used to live in, the one where I lived when he and I first met. We went for a drive last weekend, took a look at our former homes, and saw a "For Sale" sign in front of mine. We wrote down the realtor's name, and on Tuesday Husband called him.

My parents and I moved into that house when I was eleven, just after starting seventh grade. It was just a couple of blocks away from the junior high school I attended, in a newer neighborhood than the one we were leaving. The house where I was born had practically no yard at all, but this one had been built on a double lot that was also on a corner. The backyard seemed luxuriously huge to me. Out in the north 40, almost to the alley, stood a pole that had held a basketball goal when the previous owners lived there. Come spring, my father would put one up for his basketball-loving daughter, and this would be the premise for the boy who lived across the alley to come over and meet his future wife.

That house was the setting for most of my teenage angst. I was nearly seventeen when we moved out, soon to be a high-school senior, and trying on the role of adult daughter. The walls of that house echoed with angry shouts, sobs, door slams, laughter, hours-long giggling conversations on the phone. The wild mood swings of adolescence, almost bipolar in retrospect: the highs so high, the lows so low. Slumber parties. A petition to keep "The Monkees" on the air. First love. :::sigh:::

I haven't been inside that house since we moved out, in the summer of 1970. I have no idea how subsequent owners have changed it. In my time, there was a one-car garage attached to the house by a breezeway. Many years ago the breezeway and garage were remodeled into part of the house, and a two-car garage was built at the back of the property, entered from the alley. I wonder if the increased square footage of living space makes up for the decrease in backyard. (My past self would say no.) In the first year we lived there my dad built a smooth, curving concrete patio in the corner formed by the breezeway and garage. It didn't surprise me a bit that my father, a factory worker, could build such a perfect and professional-looking patio: I was still in the Daddy-can-do-everything stage then. That stage didn't last; I wonder if the patio did.

Husband told the realtor that we're looking at the house as possible rental property. This is a bit of a stretch, but could become true if the price is right and the property in good enough shape. The neighborhood has declined since the 1970s, but the houses are still well kept, lawns mowed and gardens tended; walls and surfaces free of gang signs. So it's not beyond the realm of possibility that this house that loomed so large in our past could be a part of our lives again. Right now I'm not thinking that far ahead. The very idea of walking into that house again, into those rooms, down the stairs to the basement rec room, out to the tree I used to climb, gives me a hell of a rush. I can hardly wait.