Ants in the House

The ants have come into my house before. Once during the hot summer months to eat my cat’s food. And they arrived again when grief did, called in by dishes long overdue. It happened again this past Valentine’s Day. My beloved made me a strawberry sugar body scrub. I was touched by her gift and used it that same evening. 

The next day, I noticed a trail of ants on the shower floor. I put two and two together, realizing they had been drawn in by the strawberry sweet residue of the body scrub. “How did they even get in here?” I thought, uneasy at the sight. I knelt and looked at them scurrying around. “You belong outside, you know.” As that thought settled, my brain began to envision a permeable membrane. Such membranes are borders that have intentional gaps of varying sizes to allow for movement through and across. Permeability is present in all cells, in our digestive tracts, and egg shells to name a handful of examples.  

The ants in my shower were showing me the permeability of a border I had imagined to be fixed! Walls that keep me warm inside create a boundary of safety. But these little ants found a way in. They found or created permeability. As far as they are concerned, my shower floor is simply part of the landscape, the same way the forest floor is. Borders we erect to keep things in and to keep things out are more permeable than we may like to believe. 

Eventually the ants left. They’d had their fill of sugar, I supposed. I got out my cleaning supplies and recalled the message they left with me: us humans are not separate or removed from nature no matter how many walls we erect. I cleaned my shower floor feeling grateful to my tiny visitors.