I walk with my head down, usually, and not up.

This has little to do with my inner self-esteem and more to do with the desire to keep chewed gum off of my shoes. If you look down while walking on the south sidewalk, nearing the corner of Rosser and 3rd heading west here in Bismarck, you’ll see a great scurry of activity. There is a very active ant hill, though due to the concrete sidewalk, the hill part remains below ground.

I took this photo while at an aquarium in Tennessee while on a trip just before I moved to Bismarck last year. I foolishly thought, at the time,  how neat and tidy the ant structures were, how it all seemed clear and understandable from my side of the glass. I neglected to acknowledge that this ant hill was completely encased in glass and there was little chance of the ants being disturbed or even having any building options beyond what was allowed. The ant hill emerging from the sidewalk is a different story.

Today, walking to get my mail at the post office, I stopped and watched the ants as I always do.

Someone had tossed a cigarette butt on the opening, so the ants were scurrying about, enlarging the hole and working around the cigarette butt. With  my shoe, I carefully kicked the butt away and watched in amazement how a large portion of the ants seemed extremely confused.

I had read somewhere that ants follow an established path or scent trail, and that when that trail was lost or obliterated by being disturbed, the ants had a difficult time knowing where they should go. Perhaps I should have left the cigarette butt where it was, as they had grown used to it and were learning to work around it.

I wished, in that moment, that the difficult things in my life that I was just trying to work around weren’t always being removed by Someone. It feels as if I finally found a path and then it suddenly is lost or obliterated and I don’t know where to go next. In a journal entry, I’d written that I very much understood how I was a jar of clay, and that I felt held together by tape. While I knew constant patching wasn’t the best way to keep going, being held together even just barely seemed better than the likely alternative: broken and rebuilt.

The ants scurried about, some of them seemingly unable to find their way back. But most eventually seemed to locate their home and it wasn’t long before it was as if the cigarette butt hadn’t even been there.

I still hold onto to the things that need to go, though. I guess I keep everything.