Sense

When I touch, I am touched

I drip the Terro onto the paperboard square. “Bon appetit, motherfuckers!” I used to say, somewhat gleefully. This year, it’s just a quiet, “Here you go.” I don’t know why I talk to them.

Every year, it’s the same: a tiny invasion. It’s usually through a hole in the bathroom window trim, but this year the ants somehow gained ingress through the screen AND the locked window in the home office.

We’re on day two of the offensive. Most of the ants are gone

dead

but a few stragglers keep coming back to get food

poison

for the survivors. Two ants - one of them is just a wee thing - lie weakly on the windowsill, touching antennae, finding each other in death. I can’t stand to see them suffer. In one fell swoop I smush them both with my finger.

I really struggle spiritually with this annual murder. I’ve talked with the monks about it. They say that obviously it is more desirable to not take life, but if the ants are causing property damage, that puts you (eventually) into an unsafe situation. “Do your best,” they say. That’s all Buddhism is. Doing your best. Doing what seems like a good thing to do.

This doesn’t seem like a good thing to do. But I can’t let my house turn into an anthill, you know? So then…murder it is, I guess. And this will just have to be one of those things that I have to own and take my licks for when it’s time to decide whether I need to come back and do this whole thing over again in one form or another.

I watch the ants carry their dead away. The process is called necrophoresis. They carry their dead away from the nest as a means of sanitation. It makes sense. You don’t want a bunch of corpses lying around, being host to diseases and whatnot that could jeopardize those of you who have survived. Anyway.

We try to carry our dead away from the nest, too. We store them tidily in boxes and jars and phrases like “rest in peace” and “at least he isn’t suffering anymore.”

But I don’t stop carrying them, even once they’re put away. I tote them around in my body, like smooth river rocks and cold water rushing around me while I cling to a pair of stockinged legs. Tuna salad made with Miracle Whip. The crackling of dried eucalyptus leaves under my feet. A starburst pattern of light shining through the trees as a warm wind - THAT warm wind - blows over me, and maybe blows through me. Dust, ponderosa sap, alpine strawberries so ripe that I can smell them from the road.

I walk alone most days, until a tiny moment brings my dead back. A robin’s egg sky with a single contrail and suddenly it’s 10 years earlier and I am lying on the floor of my kitchen, making low sounds of grief and dry sobbing because I’ve run out of tears. I overhear a particular turn of phrase being spoken and there he is, the shyest guy in the world, so shy he died of shyness. And there is the ache. The ache of wanting him to be alive.

The monks would tell me to look at that ache and figure out why it comes back so that I can let go of the wanting. I think I’d rather just have the ache. That is basically all I have left of him.

+++

I sit with my cousin’s “new baby,” Dax, who is actually 3 years old now. Just, you know, pandemic. Quarantine. Those things. Sometimes it takes a sec to meet the new baby.

Dax is the best thing to ever happen to me. He is my new best friend. “Tucks?” Hell yeah I wanna play trucks, Dax. Let’s do it. I love you. I have always loved you, even before you were you.

Dax makes the absolutely flirtiest eyes at me, and I say as much to my cousin. “He’s a pandemic baby!” she explains, and holds a hand up over her nose and mouth. “He just spent the first three years of his life trying to make sense of people with only this to look at!”

My cousin’s puppy Rev comes bounding in. Some kind of poodle mix that starts with something I can’t remember but definitely ends in “oodle.” It’s a lot of chaos. Two toddlers in the house.

“Watch out, he gets a little hyper around company,” my cousin says as Rev takes my wrist in his jaws. Rev is so stoked to be here in this moment right now, and can’t contain his joy. Gnaw, gnaw, gnaw. I push his mouth away from my wrist as he leans his body against my legs, and I use both hands to perform long, slow pets all down the length of his body, starting at his pecs, moving over his traps and lats, all the way down. Slow. Slow and soft is the key. I speak to him in a quiet voice. “Sit. Sit. Good boy. You’re so good. I love you.” About 10 seconds of that and he is magically sitting, autonomically manipulated into a peaceful place.

“You’re the damned dog whisperer, Inger,” my cousin says.

“Learned it in massage school. Rev can’t help himself but chill out because I bypassed his consciousness and went straight for his autonomic nervous system. Works on people, too,” I smile.

I can feel my own nervous system slowing down, too, a funny little benefit of performing massage. When I touch, I am touched. Unbidden, the memory of the two ants touching antennae bubbles up. And I can feel myself tucking away the somatic sensation of Rev’s poodle-not-poodle fur under my hand, for future callback as I celebrate or grieve.