with EMILY MELTON
Lifestyles Editor

On a plane ride home from Austin, Texas, on Sunday, I took a long look out of my window – a look from many miles above the busy world below.

The cars looked like ants; a cliché statement, I know, but one that got me thinking back to a time when I was five years old.

It was after school and I was on the playground with a few kids in my Kindergarten class.

There was this big tree house with slides and ladders and a swing underneath, and several feet from the tree house, there was a mound of red sand and clay.

The teachers always told us to stay away from it.

They tried to spread grass seed over it, too.

But there was no stopping it; the mound of red sand and clay was host to a thriving colony of ants.

One afternoon, my classmates decided to wage war. 

They stomped on the mound, threw acorns on the mound, poked the mound with little sticks and covered it with the juice from their lunch boxes.

And the ants went wild.

Their home destroyed, their tiny, black bodies swarmed in a sea of chaos and confusion, and I thought of how angry and upset they must be to recognize the damage done to what they have worked so hard to build.

I came back the next day, hoping a few bread crumbs would ease their losses and expecting to find them in the same unfortunate state.

Instead, they were carrying sand, moving it around, rebuilding their mound.

I remember getting as close as I could, getting on my hands and knees and peering in on their life, watching them work.

And over 15 years later, from the plane ride many, many miles away, this is what the world looked like, too – the tiny cars on their playground, laboring to get their jobs done.

From above, I watched the cars, each with its own specific destination, move across the roads, streets, interstate and highways.

And then I looked at the Earth below, at all of the little blocks of land that the human race has worked so hard to build.
I saw tall towers, houses, farms, schools and parking lots.

The trees and waterways and lakes were interspersed within our “mound,” some trees and waterways and lakes altered to allow for more space, more towers, houses, farms, schools and parking lots, probably replacing the mounds of many ants.

And really, from far away, we looked just like them.

We both go to work and build our homes.

We eat, sleep and expand our population.

And if part of our “mound” is destroyed, we collaborate to rebuild it, hoping it won’t get stomped on, poked at or poured with the juice from a lunch-bunch, accepting the possibility that it very well could.

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