The Problem With Ants...

When I was little, my sister and I would play games in our backyard. We’d experiment with the basic principles of physics, completely unaware of what we were doing. We would take a bucket of dirt, swing it over our heads, and not a speck of dirt would fall out. Our childhood brains could not comprehend any explanation, other than magic, that kept that dirt in the open bucket—upside-down. I knew, however, that I wanted more of an explanation than mere fantasy. At this age, my mind was closed to exploring more than one solution to a problem, and it took one horrifying experience with ants to change that.

I spent my elementary school years living in Monument, Colorado. We lived on an acre of land up the side of a hill. Our driveway up to our house was a quarter of a mile long. In the summers, my sister and I would play outside in the dirt. We would fill buckets with water from the hose and then add dirt and weeds until we created our own special “soup.” We’d map out spaces between the trees where our houses were, and we’d play neighbors. The yard around our house was natural. It wasn’t a perfectly cut lawn, or neatly manicured shrubbery, which made it an optimal playground for little kids. Anything could happen in that forest. One day we’d be mothers, the next explorers. On the weekends, we’d hear our dad working outside, cutting down dead trees or planting new ones.

One memorable morning, my sister and I were playing with our buckets. The bucket I was using was from the past Halloween. As I played, a smiling orange face would whiz over my head and laugh with me. Every swing, every successful attempt, filled me with an odd sense of accomplishment. We’d test our experiment out on different soils, we’d add grass and weeds, and (if we were feeling really daring) we’d even add water.

I found a cluster of small rocks up against the house, left over from one of my dad’s yard projects. I grabbed a handful and listened to the satisfying plunk, plunk, plunk as each pebble slipped through my fingers and hit the bottom of my bucket. “Erin, do you think these pebbles would stay in?” I asked my sister. I looked at Erin and she shrugged her shoulders. But before I could hold her attention, I had already lost it. As I was collecting the pebbles, she had noticed something up the hill behind me. My eyes followed her as she ran up the hill to what had diverted her interest. She stopped suddenly and called out, “Over here, Lindsey! What about this dirt? It’s practically sand. Do you think it will still stay in?”

I went up the hill to meet her, my bucket swinging loudly beside me. And she was right, a new type of soil to test! Would these heavier grains of sand stay in as well? Or would the magic not work for this shinier, more slippery dirt? I stood and pondered the ground before me, the bucket of pebbles forgotten at my side. My sister stooped over and scooped the sand into her Little Mermaid bucket. I held very still and I watched as my sister stood up straight, secured her grip on the handle, and gracefully swung the bucket in a perfect arc over her head. Not a grain of sand fell out. Another successful attempt! I was about to leap for joy, when I felt something crawling up my leg.

I looked down, and was frozen in horror. As I had stood still with anticipation and watched my sister, I’d been standing on an ant hill. These ants, angry at the intrusion, began crawling up my legs. I couldn’t even see my shoes, the swarm of ants covered them completely. But what was I to do? Thinking quickly, I realized I needed someone else to brush the ants off.

Regaining my sense of self, I helplessly looked to my sister. “Erin! I’m covered in ants! Please! Get them off, get them off, get them OFF!” I pleaded, and screamed.

My sister—my loving, beautiful, caring sister—was forever an indoor girl. It took hours of pleading some days just to get her out of the house with me. And here, in my moment of need, she clearly gave me a look the said “you want me to do what?!?”

Now all I felt was panic. The ants continued to crawl up and down my legs, and I couldn’t do anything about it. I certainly was not going to touch them. That meant I still needed someone else’s help. But who? My sister had already refused. Through my panic I remembered: my dad. He was outside planting trees today, he could help!

I took off running up the hill, in absolute terror. My dad heard me coming and turned around to see a very small, hysterical girl tearing through the woods to meet him. I had difficulty explaining to him what the situation was. Initially, I wasn’t even able to finish a whole sentence through my hysteria. But I finally calmed enough to exclaim, “Daddy, my legs are covered in ants. Please! Get them off of me! Erin wouldn’t help! Please!” Now understanding the problem, my father bent down to brush the insects of my legs.

But there were no ants left.

Ironically, the act of me running up the hill to my father knocked all the pesky ants off my legs. I had helped myself, completely unaware of it. In that moment, looking into the laughing eyes of my father, I realized that there was more than one way to solve a problem. My seven year old mind was opened to a completely different way of approaching a problem. In this situation, I saw ants on my legs, and my only solution was to have a third party brush them off. I didn’t see the other solution that had ended up working. With every conundrum I now face, I see a web of solutions beyond what is intrinsically obvious. Without the help of that ant community, and even my sister, I may have never learned to always keep an open, unbiased mind when faced with a problem. And, of course, I always avoid ant hills.