Notes from my Knapsack 7-23-20

Notes from my Knapsack 7-23-20

Jeff Gill

 

Ants, roots, and time

___

 

Many of you reading this have been where I am now. My father died in March, and we're working on a much delayed, extremely limited memorial service this month, over in Indiana where I'm from.

 

He died in Texas, and of course he was cremated; I drove his ashes back as my sister flew my mother home from where they had been used to spending almost half the year, down on the Rio Grande. Mom's with my sister and her family, and up nearer Chicago where we all grew up, we have a house.

 

This is the house my three siblings were brought back to from the hospital; I came to that town six weeks old, and my earliest memory is being not even three years old, and visiting the construction site where my dad worked weekends building that home.

 

So all six of us have had since 1963 to fill the house, and the addition Dad built some years later after the youngest was born, with stuff. And now we get to sort and sift and recycle and pitch that stuff. Mom is situated where she neither needs nor can have much more stuff than we brought back from Texas (and there was some hasty sifting and sacking down there), so this is it. We need to sell the house to give Mom some options moving forward, as well. She can't live on her own in it without Dad, and it's just too far from any of the four of us to make that work in any case.

 

I've been back three times so far, with the fourth ahead for Dad's memorial. I sit on the front stoop, and watch the sun set and the streetlight down on the corner come on, the time honored signal to be home. The front walk since 1963 curves from the front door to the intersection of the sidewalk and driveway, down a modest slope.

 

At the midpoint of that arc, there's a slab that's not quite true, and a patch of grass to the right that's a bit thin. For nearly sixty years, my dad fought a losing battle with ants. I think he used some of the insecticides you'd expect, but it was never a major issue, and he tended to try to low key his chemical use. He wasn't averse to them, but in this as in many things he was a moderate. But last summer he bemoaned to me as we stood on the front porch, leaving for what would be my next-to-last visit with him in residence, that the ants kept coming back, and their colony was slowly but steadily moving that cement panel in the sidewalk.

 

Ants live a few years at most, many only weeks. Dad was 85 at his passing, and had outlived many individual ants; the dang colony, though, was ticking along nicely. They'll be the next owner's problem. Dad also worried about the maples we'd planted years after moving in, and how their roots were infiltrating annually the drainpipes. He worried correctly, and now my sister and I are conferring on how we've moved from usual quick fix to needing to trench across the yard and replace the pipe entirely. Which might go right through that recurrent ant colony.

 

I watch the ants with less worry than my dad did, and think about the root problem with a level of resignation. The streetlight has come on, and it's time to go home. But it isn't here anymore.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's sorting out many things these days. Tell him how you keep your priorities sorted out at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.