I recall a period of about 2 weeks earlier on during summer when we had ants in our kitchen. I wasn’t too surprised. Whenever we brought in vegetables from our backyard garden, we would often put them on the counter or in the sink before we prepared them to be meal-ready, and I knew insects from outside were hiding in the leaves. Often I would see the occasional, little, black soldier as it meandered across the counter tops or struggled against the curved basin of the sink. My instinct was always to pick it up and quickly usher her outside the back door with the flick of my wrist. The ants never bothered me, and I never really saw them as a nuisance or an intruder. Not at first, that is.
Then the ants really started invading the kitchen, not just one by one. I would sometimes find over a dozen at a time, scurrying across our white-tiled floor. I watched their pattern. They entered through cracks in the back doorway, then gradually made their way to my son’s high chair. But of course. How do 12-month olds eat? You’re lucky if half of the food gets in their mouths, and the other half ends up on the floor. I found myself cleaning up the kitchen about 5 times a day but it would be just surface cleans, no deep-scrubbing with bleach or anything like that. And now it was ant haven.
My son would be intrigued, perched up on his plastic throne, peering down at the little critters making moving designs on the floor beneath him. I drew the line one day when I put him down on the floor after one particularly messy lunch and he crouched down and started putting discarded food in his mouth along with whatever ants he could catch. Ewwww. Even though I knew eating ants probably couldn’t harm him (probably just another source of protein, at least) it just seemed wrong. And even though there was no one present to judge this scrounging behaviour, I decided to put an end to it.
So previously when I had carefully extracted the ants from my kitchen one by one with delicate hand tosses (to ensure they remained intact), I now ended every meal-time with a barbaric clean-up with a broom. Large, sweeping motions snagged all the black pests in my bristly trap. And I would ruthlessly fling them out the back door, living creatures reduced to garbage. And even with this death trap routine a few times a day, they kept coming in droves. I resigned myself to the fact that my kitchen would never be totally ant-free. There would always be a handful of them scrambling about, looking for the traces of food that were promised by the previous visitors from their hive.
Based on my rudimentary knowledge of how hives function, I started the grisly practice of always leaving a few wounded ants lying on the floor. They would struggle to stand and move but injured thread-like legs were now useless after losing the battle with my cleaning stick. I did this specifically so that when the new arrivals would approach them, hopefully their injured sisters would communicate to them that, “It’s not worth it! Get out of here! Save yourself while you can! And for God’s sake, protect the Queen at all costs!”
Before I had been so careful to preserve life. Why annihilate these seemingly harmless, random visitors? Yes, they’re just ants but I didn’t think it was necessary to just kill them outright. And now I was killing dozens of them every day. It became part of my routine. There was no more ‘concern’ for life, just a drive to clean up my domain. And if that meant massacring a few hundred siblings, then so be it. It was what it was and nothing more.
The ants eventually stopped invading my kitchen. Maybe it was due to my relentless attacks on them. Or maybe it was because I started mopping my floors on a more regular basis (thereby removing the temptation of food). The point is soon the whole experience was now just a blip in my memory radar. I moved on to other things.
And then a few weeks later my 4 year-old daughter ran into the house all excited and yelling at me to “Come see this, Mommy!” I followed her out the back steps to her little outdoor play house. She showed me a cocoon tucked away in a high corner inside the house. She was so excited knowing there was a caterpillar inside becoming a butterfly. I told her it was very cool but as I went back into the house I reminded her to leave it alone and not disturb it no matter how tempting it was to poke at the brown, furry ball.
A couple of days later the family was getting ready for a walk. I was putting my sandals on while sitting on our front steps and my daughter ran up to me, all excited to show me something. I turned just as she thrust something into my face. My instinct was to recoil in slight horror. I realized she was showing me the exposed inside of the cocoon from her playhouse. Inside the cross-section of the coarse, fuzzy pod lay a motionless black caterpillar. Its multiple black legs seemed contorted and I could see graphic details of its head and jaws. I knew she had inadvertently killed it with her unstoppable curiousity. The outcome was grotesque in its innocence. Here was a butterfly that would never be.
She saw my troubled expression and asked me what was wrong. I gently told her that she shouldn’t have touched the cocoon because now the little creature was dead. Her mouth drooped down in a seemingly exaggerated but genuine frown (an expression that only a child can pull off). “No, he’s going to be a butterfly!” she insisted. I just sighed and told her to carefully put the cocoon back into the shelter of her playhouse and leave it alone, and maybe it would be okay. She did just that and checked on it every day for the next few days. But it just got more and more shriveled up as it was exposed to the elements. Before long it was just a little, brown husk on the concrete. And soon my daughter lost interest in it.
But every time I passed the dried-up cocoon on my way to the garage I couldn’t help stealing a glance. I was saddened by the fact that this little creature’s life ended prematurely. This is one butterfly effect that would never be felt around the world because it ended abruptly in my own backyard. And my daughter continued her play in the yard, unaffected by what she had done. Of course I didn’t hold it against her, but it still bothered me. The ant-killer was suddenly the sympathetic being once again.
Why would I lament the loss of just one butterfly in this world? It seemed unnecessary and hardly worth my efforts. However, looking at it another way, it was all I could do during this time of days. My mind reeled at the full comprehension of the impact of all the lives lost in recent disasters such as the earthquakes and floods in Japan, Thailand, Haiti, and Pakistan. The full impact of it would bring me to my knees and I would be unable to continue life as I know it if I comprehended every lost family member story. I would be rendered useless in my hopelessness and sadness so I choose to shield myself from the world realities, or ‘Mother Nature’s clean-up’ in some perverse sense (just like I swept those ants to their death with no regard for their lives). Some people might call my ostrich-reaction to be pathetic and ignorant, but I call it survival. There is only so much grief one person can absorb without going crazy.
So for now I stare at the lost cause in my daughter’s playhouse. Instead of the beating of wings, there is silence. And one ripple effect will never happen because it will never have the chance to start. And I am sad but then hopeful as my daughter runs up to show me her bug-catcher net full of bustling ladybugs and wood bugs and she promises me she will be more careful this time. There is life buzzing and crawling around in my backyard. There is destruction and loss of life every day on my planet but for now, in my little universe, there is sunshine and vibrancy. And I suppose that’s all I can really ask for, one day at a time.
