| Here in the South we
are annually plagued by the migration of the army worm. Last summer while doing some yard work I observed one that had
succumbed to the downward pressure of my human foot. I
periodically looked in on him to see if the ants had discovered
him and to find out what they might do with him. |
| Soon the fire ants
arrived. It took them a while to free him from the
concrete but then slightly less than 20 minutes to carry him
away and disappear into the grass as a successfully scavenged
food source. |
| This was the first time
that I had ever seen the soldier ants. They never
participated in the carrying but only stood guard in case the
beast of their burden was still alive. |
| For this larger oil I
was entranced by the sunlight filtering thru the canopy of tall
pines and by the ordered formation which the ants made around
the worm
quite like a small piece of jewelry from the Indian subcontinent
with each small ant a dangling semiprecious stone. |
|
I entertained other possible titles appropriate to an observer's
perspective: |
| 1. Artsy - "Still Life-Army
Worm with Ants" |
| 2. Hemingway - "Death in the
Afternoon" |
| 3. Military - "The Battle of
Oriole Lane" |
| 4. Paranoid - "I Said That
They'd Come to Get Me" |
|
I settled on the humorous "Out to Lunch with the Guys"
in honor of my friends from the job who persevere thru my
endless jokes at our weekly lunches and keep me sane with that
weekly touching upon normal reality.
|
